Peregrinations

I'm headed away tomorrow for a pilgrimage—to Emily Dickinson’s home, to witness the grounds that once supported her footsteps. It’s such a fangirl thing to do—I’m a little sheepish about it and am trying not to be—to travel so far to honor and think on a poet who has brought such joy to my inner life. But in truth, I’m excited, and a bit in awe, that I will actually be treading the same floors that once held space for her brilliant writing to come to life.

Pilgrimages are a liminal break from the ordinary routine—out of place, out of time, out of the everyday. A compulsion to visit a place that holds significance is common throughout so many histories and cultures—to pay homage to a place and a life that once existed long before our own, to sense that there is something powerful about the places where saints or artists or other spirits of admiration were rooted. It’s a way to create a between-time, a threshold in life to create and cross. I’m curious about how traveling there, walking there will feel.

So it’s unsurprising, I’m sure, to tell you that I recently re-read Susan Howe’s brilliant book My Emily Dickinson, and was reminded again of how—like a pilgrimage—liminality is such a core aspect of Dickinson’s poetry. How her work deconstructs language, chooses opposites to smash ideas of an easy duality, refuses ideas of what “should” be done to claim the title “Poetry.” Of how seeking the spaces between and out of order are where the truth lives for her poetry.

Maybe spending a few days out of time, suspended in place, is how paying homage to Dickinson should be, ironically. To seek something outside of the noise of everyday. 

Howe writes, on Dickinson’s use of language:

She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history…a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking….Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. The Civil War had split America in two. He might pause, She hesitated….What voice when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us?¹

What voice when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us? That line kind of stopped me. We are so often told to act, do—what do we miss when we don’t make space for something that is moving towards us? How to make room outside of the noise and hurry of how we’re told to live our lives, to find what is actually moving to meet us—and to have space to decide whether to meet it in welcome or refusal. A hesitation that allows for choice, agency—or simply a widening sky.

Yesterday, I came across a commercial for Grammarly AI, where an actor excitedly tells you how easy it is to have it re-write text into a “confident tone.” Use the active voice, remove all aspects of passive voice. I just groaned— how many voices are crowded out while insisting on a homogenous language of confidence, doing, action? No room for what might be moving to meet us. We’ve been following those rules forever, and now we don’t even need to follow the rules, so much as program them.

Action is present tense—it makes no room for past or future. It’s linear, the vertical I of the individual that never looks around, to make space for something wider, a we. It sounds corny to say it like that, but it’s a lazy language. It’s the noise and hurry that keeps us from hearing other voices, sounds. And worse, it becomes a test of what is considered “correct,” a reason to ignore language that deviates from its norm. Confident noise over silence.

I’ve grown suspicious of confidence, real or feigned, of action always being preferable to any hint of passivity. Why should we trust those who believe in their own authority—or would have AI feign it for them?

Howe also writes of Dickinson’s language:

Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property.…The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.²

Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. Language is not property, it’s a commons³, grown and shaped by millions. Why cede language to the domain of a confident tone, instead of a commons that brings forward different shades, experiences of truth? How to refuse the ease of all that a social world would have us follow that constricts and owns.

Howe goes on to write:

Trust absence, allegory, mystery—the setting not the rising sun is Beauty. No titles or numbers for the poems. That would force order. No titles…no manufactured print. No outside editor/“robber.” Conventional punctuation was abolished not to add “soigné stitchery” but to subtract arbitrary authority. Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem. Hush of hesitation for breath and breathing. Empirical domain of revolution and revaluation where words are in danger, dissolving…only Mutability certain.⁴

Dickinson’s poetry is asking what’s behind the con (fidences) she was surrounded by—the train compressing time and space that her father ushered into town, the need for women to marry, the why of publishing when editors titled and changed her original language into something trite and compressed that bore no relation to her creative intent. Her poetry seeks—invites—expansiveness. 

Who really has authority over others—and why do we accept it so quickly? That’s what Dickinson’s refusal to publish, to use conventional punctuation, titles, etc., questions so brilliantly. She was refusing the dance of action, confidence, order, and authority to welcome something wider, eternal, infinite. 

In a letter, Dickinson asks her cousin if she too reads poems backward as well as forwards—that she loved to find the hidden meanings among the juxtaposition of words. I love that idea—the unexpected clashes of words that don’t flow in an expected sense, but create something new. It reminds me of the need to read backward in time to move forward. To accept space for an inclination to hesitate, stammer, stick in place and time. To move forward tentatively, to enjoy being passive for what is moving to meet us. How radical an act of refusal can be in a world of confidence, order, and authority. Radical—meaning of the root. To remember the need for roots. To not accept all that we get handed and rushed into—instead to make space for something more expansive that might exist along the edges.

She staked Her Feathers—
Gained an Arc—
Debated—Rose again—
This time—beyond the
estimate*
Of Envy, or of Men—

And now, among
Circumference—
Her steady Boat be
seen—
At home**—among the
Billows—As
The Bough where she
was born—
                             (F853A)
*inference
**ease

1. Howe, Susan. 2007. My Emily Dickinson. New Directions Publishing. p. 22

2. Ibid. p. 13

3. thought of you Antonia Malchik !

4. Howe, Susan. p. 23