Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 39th one.
This isn’t going to be one of those newsletters that just fade away without a word, I promise. I just took a break. Why do I feel like I need to apologize? Like, what is there to apologize for, I just took a break! It’s fine to take a break. Right, right? am I bad?!?!?! There’s a book called How to Say It For Women that tells you how to stop apologizing. It’s life-changing if you can follow it. I have, for brief periods of time. It tries to imbue you with the courage to say, “time will not permit me to meet with you this week” rather than “I’m so sorry, I’m a mess, I’m so disorganized and I forgot that I have so much shit to do and I haven’t done any of it and I actually can’t meet this week like I halfway suggested I could when we bumped into each other—and btw it was so awesome to see you!!!!” The author uses that word, courage, to describe what it takes to talk the first way, when everything you know and have experienced is pushing you to talk the second way.
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Publication—is the Auction
Of the mind of man
This is the only Dickinson poem with the word publication in it. Its first two lines are vintage Dickinson in their combination of metrical obedience and metrical swagger; this combination tattoos the lines into your memory.
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Last spring Bea and I were in a really nice food co-op buying apples and stuff and she kept getting in peoples’ way. I kept saying sorry, sorry. When we left, she ran out in front of a woman’s cart and I said sorry. “I have three children. Never apologize for them,” the woman said. She was about my mom’s age. “Thank you,” I said.
I tried not apologizing for Bea for a while after that. But it was hard, because that meant just absorbing peoples’ angry looks without saying anything. And then I started to get kind of mad. What, she’s just a toddler, what is she supposed to do, adjust herself for your comfort? Why don’t YOU move, because she can’t, since she’s not a member of society yet, okay? So I went back to apologizing, and then I didn’t feel angry anymore.
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Publication is the auction of the mind of man! I don’t owe you an explanation or an apology for the missing newsletters, I know. But if I don’t give them to you, I feel like I’m not being honest.
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When I went to the Emily Dickinson International Society Meeting in Amherst, MA several years ago, I almost got arrested even though I did absolutely nothing wrong and my brother Sam and I got into the biggest fight we’ve ever had, after which he took a Greyhound bus back to New York in the middle of the night. Most of the people there had every Dickinson poem memorized, having devoted years to studying her work. But during the discussions and lectures, I found that even I remembered enough of her first lines to keep up. They are designed to do that. Publication is the auction of the mind of man. It’s the lines after those first two (sometimes four) that present the problem.
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Paul Legault has an awesome book called The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems. Every “translation” is really short. He reduces the twelve lines of “Some keep the Sabbath going to church” to
I don’t go to church. I am the church.
This one is so good because it gets at the almost violent force—swagger, like I said—of Dickinson. But what Legault’s short and beautiful blips can’t convey is how her poems fall apart, like tumbling awkwardly forward after the force of their openings. The last lines are very often at odds with the first one. They end on what is called a slant, or near, rhyme: almost a rhyme but not quite, like DEGREES and CAUTERIZE, or TEETH and DEATH, or ONCE and ECLIPSE. But the words slant and near don’t convey the clashing feeling these kinds of rhyme give. It’s more like a flat or a sharp than a slant or a near—it makes your ear go, ew.
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It’s easy—seductive, even—to apologize when you feel in your heart you have done nothing wrong, like how extremely polite I was to the Amherst College police. It’s hard when you suspect there’s a possibility you might have done something not entirely right. Like the fight with Sam, the details of which I can’t remember.
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Here is the last stanza of Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man:
In the Parcel—Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price
This doesn’t sound nice at all. Grace is sort of, but not quite, rhymed with grace, because the word dis-grace appears in that final line, and you land on it, before you realize price is the end-rhyme, which also doesn’t sound right. And the word Heavenly is so metrically bumpy, smushed into that line, jammed behind grace.
The awkward sound of this poem’s ending invites us to doubt the insistence of its first lines. This is the way Dickinson’s poems work: they call you to attention then wander away.
I think this poem is pretending to be about opposition to publication when it’s really about the anxiety of publication. And like many of Dickinson’s poems, it’s not just about what it’s about, it enacts what it’s about. What if I have nothing to say, what if I have these great first lines and people get all excited and read it and then the whole thing just unravels?
I guess that’s why I took a break from my newsletter.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Happy thanksgiving! Do you want a holiday card from me, Brian, and Bea? If you do, send me your address if you didn’t give it to me last year or if it has changed since last year. You don’t have to know me in real life to get one. If it hasn’t changed, I will send it to the same address I sent it to last year.