EMILY DICKINSON AND THE PRESENCE OF POETRY
Because the moment of our reading inflects what we notice, to read Emily Dickinson today is to read her differently than in the past. Not long ago, with global warming in the headlines, I noticed (as if for the first time, though I had seen it before) a line in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland in 1873: “Science will not trust us with another world” (L 395).1 Dickinson was responding to a different moment, a different crisis, but the words reach across the centuries to amaze, to beckon. When my father died: “Gimblets—among the nerve—/Mangle daintier—terribler” (Fr 242).2 Today, connecting with each other as best we can while giving each other a wide berth, something else comes into focus, something about intimacy and presence in the face of distance.
I like to think of poetry as the oldest way known to humans (short of walking) to overcome distance: presence-making language. Dickinson’s isolation is often exaggerated—her house bustled with people, 3 and her life was rich in “conversations” of many kinds—but it is fair to say that she spent much of her adult life nurturing relationships with friends she might not see for years, if at all. Letters were her lifeline, especially later in life. But already in her teens and twenties—years when she can be found joining sledding parties, playing charades in the woods, and picking wildflowers with friends—her letters work to create presence.
