Synopses & Reviews
With exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry--no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, , the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun." A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award.
Synopsis
A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award.
Synopsis
For Wallace Stevens, -Poetry is the scholar's art.- Susan Howe--taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides--embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, -My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun, - Home tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Bronte, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. -Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text....-
Synopsis
"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."--
About the Author
Poet Susan Howe's books include My Emily Dickinson, The Nonconformist's Memorial, Souls of the Labadie Tract, Pierce-Arrow, That This, and many others. She is a professor of English at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and a 1998 Guggenheim fellow.Eliot Weinberger (b. NYC, 1949), is an essayist and translator. He won PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for promoting Hispanic literature in the US, and he is America's first literary writer to receive Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle. He lives in New York City.