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Paul: I kept listening to hear if there were any rotational movements happening underground. Here was her grave, but she wasn’t turning in it.Either she’s not offended or she’s not dead and buried there. If the latter, if you’re out there, Emily, reading this, send me an e-mail.Do you think E.D. would like what you did with her poems? Does that matter?
It matters to me that I think she’d like them—though the version of her that would like them would have to be conscious in 2012. And that version is my imaginary friend, Emily Dickinson, who told me she likes them. So, yes.Technically, the IRL E.D. didn’t want her poems to exist at all: 788. All published poets are whores. But I’m sure her family members thought they were doing (and actually were doing) a good thing when they published Dickinson’s posthumous verse, instead of burning everything (as she’d requested). Either way, the judge is dead and gone and the work isn’t; so neither get harmed.I’ll claim innocence, because I’m in love with her. Love absolves most radical acts.How much of yourself, your life, what you get into, etc. do you see in what E.D.'s body of work came out through you as?
I think we’ve got a lot in common—I too enjoy flowers, Bobolinks, time machines, Massachusetts—though we differ on the matter of how much we enjoy hanging out with the personified version of Death.
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I carried around my copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson until it fell apart, at which point I carried around my new copy of The Complete Poems until it also fell apart, reading ten or so each day at lunch and jotting my “translations” in the margins.More than a few totally stopped me —my “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” (#764) reads:“See My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe (pp. 76 - 120).”And I translated #725 as:“I don't know.”Restating eloquence often seemed futile, but then something ordinary would happen to me that had happened to Dickinson—fear of death, sexual desire, food allergies, etc.—and I’d “get” the feeling that she was working from and write it down.Though sometimes Dickinson didn’t know what she was up to either.How would you respond to someone asking, “Who are you to reconsider the work of Emily Dickinson?”
Me? I’m a fanboy—in an age of translation: between languages, media, and otherwise—who’s as eager to send the world to the vast realm that is Dickinson’s brain and poetry as the next E.D. lover ready to defend her honor.
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But then -
Eternity enable the endeavoring
Again.Addition doesn’t endanger the original—the more you reconsider the thing you considered loving the better. As Emily Dickinson writes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have - A Something overtakes the Mind -She overtook me. Not the other way around. And as I/she/we put it in #1768:“Sometimes I just want to be bossed around.”Also by Blake Butler:Pimp C and Raisin Brain Are Inextricable Parts of RealityThe Putrid Voyerisms of Peter SotosThe Juggalo Summer Reading List@blakebutler
