LARB Digital Edition: Independence Day

By Los Angeles Review of Books

As National Poetry Month was just last April, it’s only fitting that we celebrate poetry this July. The poets in this collection represent the depth and breadth of contemporary American poetry: its independence, its drive to find new ways of making meaning, and its commitment to innovative ways of interrogating what we might consider foundational texts. In this new poetry ePub, we present two poets writing about Emily Dickinson, Stephen Burt’s groundbreaking essay on trans-poetry, Joshua Edwards's elegy to poetically seeing the landscapes around us, and original poetry by Douglas Kearney, Maurice Manning, and Lauren K Alleyne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660141

Book preview

Introduction

As National Poetry Month was just last April, it’s only fitting that we celebrate poetry this July. The poets in this collection represent the depth and breadth of contemporary American poetry: its independence, its drive to find new ways of making meaning, and its commitment to innovative ways of interrogating what we might consider foundational texts.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is committed — as am I personally as LARB’s Senior Poetry Editor — to creating a space that truly illustrates the range of the American poetic vision — how it manifests on the page, in the lives of the American public and in the lives of poets themselves. Sometimes this involves examining the craft of writing poems and the way poets perceive poetry; other times, simply the way poets walk through the world. And, of course, we remain committed to covering poets and poetics from around the globe.

In this new poetry ePub, we present two poets writing about Emily Dickinson. Alex Socarides, in the latest installment to her marvelous poetry series The Poems (We Think) We Know, delivers a personal and intimate discussion of Dickinson scholarship. Katie Peterson, one of the most important voices in American poetry, considers Dickinson as a lens through which to view the work of Jeff Griffin, proving that Dickinson also contains multitudes. Through their essays, these two writers channel the same intimate Dickinsonian space within the wall-less world of our virtual pages. Indeed, one could look at this whole ePub as a world without walls — or a world intent on considering what a wall is in the first place.

Stephen Burt’s groundbreaking essay on trans-poetry is both a rigorous critical interrogation of the essential new anthology, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and a personal discussion of his own identity and poetics. Joshua Edwards meanwhile tracks his walks through the world with an elegy to poetically seeing the landscapes around us.

We also feature original poetry by Douglas Kearney, Maurice Manning, and Lauren K Alleyne. Alleyne’s exploration of how it feels to be a person of color walking through the streets of Provincetown after the Trayvon Martin ruling is one of the most powerful poems on the subject that I have read.

Topping off the list is one of my favorite installments of Lisa Russ Spaar’s column, Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books in which she talks about the work of Amaud Jamaul Johnson and Robert Hayden, both poets who I think deserve more attention.

When I think of independence, I think of the widest field imaginable and an eye that can move unimpeded over and into every inch of it. Here are a group of American poets who do the same in their work. I’m proud to bring them to you.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Senior Poetry Editor

The Poems (We Think) We Know: Emily Dickinson

By Alexandra Socarides

LAST SPRING, I decided to sell my house. Thus began the endless months of walking strangers through my kitchen, of explaining how one could turn the downstairs office into a bedroom, of saying nice things about all those fraternity boys who live in the lot behind mine. I found it to be one of the more demoralizing experiences in recent memory. This house that I had loved — where my children took their first steps, where we had celebrated countless birthdays — was now open for scrutiny. And scrutinized it was. Not enough closet space! Looks like a leaky roof! How can anything grow in that weedy garden!

But every now and then potential buyers would, for a moment, stop imagining all the ways in which my house would or would not work for them, and, instead, make small talk. This is often when it came up that I had written a book about Emily Dickinson. I didn’t give up this information easily — it was only after they pushed me to name my specialization. Upon hearing I was an English professor, most people were sure to make a joke about being careful not to use bad grammar in my presence. By summer I had probably heard this line a dozen times.

But on two different occasions, right as we stood in the middle of my by-now-I-was-sure moldy basement, I got some curious folks, and so I told them, yes, in fact, Emily Dickinson. And what did they both do? They looked right at me, eyes wide, and said: I’m Nobody! Who are you?

In all my time reading, studying, researching, and teaching the poems of Emily Dickinson, I had never once given I’m Nobody! Who are you? a second thought. I knew it, but only because, I think, I had learned it in grade school, and it’s an easy one to memorize. Also, people say it (or its first line) enough that it’s hard not to let it seep in. Given this, you’d think I would jump at the chance to write about this poem for this column, but the truth is that I didn’t want to write about Dickinson.

Although I’m loath to assign genres to different kinds of writing, I think in the first year of writing this column I had imagined that what I was writing was essays. I like the essay because it is, at its best, deeply uncertain. Given that I mostly write academic articles, which are driven by arguments, I rarely get to be as uncertain as I feel. But here, I get to follow strange leads, tell a variety of different kinds of stories, and hope that by the time I am finished I will have somehow organically woven an alternative narrative rather than the one that normally circulates through our culture about a given poem. This, to my mind, is a particularly good way of thinking about poetry, given that most poems don’t make arguments; most poems are borne out of a wild and heart-piercing sense of uncertainty themselves.

Maybe because of this, though, I didn’t want to write about Dickinson. It’s one thing to say that Dickinson’s poems are uncertain, or complicated, or contradictory (all of which they are), but it’s an entirely other thing to compound that uncertainty with my own. In my basement, visitors wanted to connect with me by reciting the first line of a Dickinson poem that clearly summed something up for them. I was happy to let them do that, even if I was a little freaked out