audre lorde's essay on emily dickinson, which i read at 7 am in the tub, made me think about her in a new way. i think about whitman and dickinson in equal measures, every day almost--the same images, the same poems, the same lines--they are part of my firmament. but i have written about whitman, qouted whitman, thot outloud about whitman, made whitman part of my public discourse more than dickinson.

lorde made me sort of realise why. (whitman is expansive, and the horror, the blackness of dickinson is interior, it is about the soul, the body, the house) there is a page in lorde's essay, where she talks about her domestic tasks, her knitting, her sewing, her canning jellies--and then talks about the sewing of the books, and how those two tasks were of the same stripe, but then talks about how little critics treat dickinson--how the internal, the mysticism of inside work of loss, of grief, of desire, of sex, of the xtc and instability of the body are impossible to contain, how microcosmic is vital (this is me: the microcosm of dickinson mirrors the macrocosm of whitman)

because she is so interior, dickinson does not invite us in, does not let us be as discursive as other people as other writers (and not nessc. female writers--in that time and place there were sermons, instruction books,poems and novels that were exterior.)

look at this:
After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

that is not an invitaiton for discussions.

(it reminds me of plath:

he Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

Sylvia Plath



it's attachment to plath, and introducing this first as an audre lord, reminds us(me) of the real reason why i feel like i cannot talk about dickinson--there is so much work left be done there--work uncovering the mess of male writers, editors, bowlderizers, deniers of her religious and sexual power, deniers of her as a writer, and a creator of texts--starting with family and moving outward.

the uncovering of the complexity of whitman, of his faults and his virtues, of his role as a prophet and a poet, is my work, as queer, as a man, as someone who is interested in the embodiment of the universal, plath is not in the same capacity.