#18: Where the wild things are
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. (They’re all combined together this month.) This is the eighteenth one.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. Reading my daughter books that I loved when I was a child gives me an indescribable feeling. It’s like I can touch the edge of the edge of what a world every book was to me as a child. Even every poem. I had a book of Emily Dickinson poems that I connected with in ways I can only dream of doing now, as many times as I reread those poems, as much as I love them. I had an intimacy with them that I don’t now. “…that enthralling gallop / That only childhood knows”
A couple years ago I wrote an article about three contemporary poetry books that riff on Dickinson—The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems, by Paul Legault, The ms of m y kin, by Janet Holmes, and Fair Copy, by Rebecca Hazelton. I said that everyone has a different “translations” of Dickinson, that even in reading her we remake or rewrite her. As the way we read and write become more digital and the material book becomes more of a fetish object, Dickinson gets more immediate and more distant. I called the article “Unauthorized Editions” because of this gorgeous quotation from Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, by the wonderful Dickinson scholar Marta Werner:
There can never be an authorized edition of Dickinson’s writings. The gold imprimatur—emblem or face of Harvard’s authority stamped across the blue binding of Johnson’s Letters (1985)*—is a false witness: like displaced enunciations, the drafts and fragments escape from the plot of “pure scholarship” to reappear always outside the text proper and the law of the censor.
*Thomas H. Johnson was the big Emily Dickinson scholar/editor of the mid-20th c.
This passage itself is like a poem to me, the way it stands up for Dickinson’s outsiderhood with what feels almost like rage. It stands up for the secrecy, wonder, unreadability, and mysteriousness of Dickinson. Many of her poems are riddles, but the riddle of Dickinson herself has no solution. I think children can understand that better than adults.
I was musing on the Dickinson of my childhood as I read Where the Wild Things Are for the first time in a few decades. I had forgotten the part about how Max’s bedroom turns into a forest before he sails off to the land where the wild things are. I thought that was something I made up on my own: a room that is partially a forest. I remember describing it in detail to my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Wilson. When the door was closed, you wouldn’t know, but as soon as you opened it, the bright primary colors of the jungle burst out—giant green leaves, the red faces of flowers opening toward you; vines hanging from the ceiling. I drew pictures of this room. After a lot of thinking about it, I decided that it would be even more magical if the foliage was plastic, not real. A fully made world, inside but outside, too—outside the text proper and the law of the censor. In a room of my mind, where, I see in little glimpses sometimes, the wild things still are.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson ed. T.H. Johnson; Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. T.H. Johnson; Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, Marta Werner; Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak