Somebodies, Nobodies – Emily Dickinson and I

I first fell in love with poetry probably at the age of fourteen or fifteen, when I was introduced to the work of Emily Dickinson in an English lesson. I read and re-read I’m Nobody! Who are you? and found its unconventional style both pleasing and intriguing. This was no polished poetic form. Here was a poet from another century, another continent, another culture, whose fragmented syntax opened up all kinds of possibilities – and moved me. I fell in love with the concision and minimalism of these words on the page, which, magically, made up a ‘poem’ – something most of my classmates would complain they ‘couldn’t understand’. ‘But what does it mean?’ The question would go round the class in baffled whispers. ‘What does it really mean?’

What does any poem really mean?

It took me a long time to return to the bare language and intense subjectivity of Emily Dickinson as a starting point for both understanding and writing poetry. Nobody taught us in school that poetry didn’t always need to have a distinct form, or traditional rhythm and rhyme, or flowery language, in order to work. Nor did it have to be fully understood. It was only after reading hundreds of other poems that I came to the realisation that a poem only meant something if it touched the reader’s humanity in some way, if it resonated long after being read. Is ‘meaning’ resonance, then? Did Dickinson’s dashes stand in the place of everything she didn’t need in order for the poem to have an effect on the reader, to affect the reader, to make the reader return to the poem again and again? Here was a poet who did not write in superfluous language, austerity a hallmark of her style, and had an uncanny ability to create multilayered meaning with such sparseness. Her famous dashes operated as interruptions, hesitations or trails into silence. They alluded. They suggested continuation beyond the thought, beyond the line, beyond the end of the poem.

Are you – Nobody – too?

Dickinson’s idiosyncratic punctuation, unconventional capitalisation and elliptical syntax were considered eccentric, even unintelligible, by editors and critics of her day. During her lifetime, much of her work was deemed unsuitable for publication without ‘correction’. But how can the radical strangeness of a poet’s voice be altered or corrected?

When one reads through Emily Dickinson’s large body of work, there are certainly many poems which are conventional in form, but what strikes us, centuries later, is her unmistakable voice. It was both intensely private and boldly experimental, and it was the voice of a woman.

And I dropped down, and down – 
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then – 

By leaving her poems ‘unresolved’, as she does in the final lines of the poem I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, she created a distinctive style that resisted the polished, authoritative tones of her (male) contemporaries. Instead of projecting certainty, Dickinson’s voice was intimate and questioning, pulling the reader into a private interior world. The content of her work – shockingly personal and challenging – and the poet’s unique ability to juxtapose the sacred with the commonplace, the metaphysical with the mundane, gave later generations permission to break the rules, to subvert the reader’s expectations. I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain is a superb example of a poem where the speaker’s psychological turmoil is reflected in the internal rhymes and haunting repetition. The last line of the poem I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – (I could not see to see –) is nothing short of genius.

There were other women poets in the past — including Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew, H.D. – who were treated as secondary, suspect or invisible. They experienced similar silencing as the ‘nobodies’, with their poetry largely overshadowed by the celebrated work of their male peers. Mew’s explorations of sexuality and mental illness were confined to a small literary circle. H.D.’s innovations were minimised in a movement dominated by male literary giants like Pound and Eliot. Dickinson’s forthrightness and authenticity influenced generations of later female poets, including Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Jane Hirschfield. Their confessional or intensely subjective poetry gave voice to their struggles with identity and mortality. Two more recent poets whose work has been cited as directly influenced by Dickinson are Louise Glück and Lucie Brock-Broido. Critics note that Glück shares Dickinson’s ‘lyric compression’ and economy of language. Like Dickinson’s, her poetry confronts mortality, personal history and the inner life, while Lucie Brock-Broido’s collection The Master Letters echoes the mystery, intimacy and yearning in Dickinson’s letters and poems.

How public – like a Frog –

The frogs, the frogs, the frogs… Another of Dickinson’s techniques which drew me into her world as a fifteen-year-old student was her use of surprise. She often begins a poem with familiar images (flora, fauna, daily routines) then pivots unexpectedly into reflections on mortality, desire or human consciousness. Her metaphors are often startling, and her abrupt line breaks expand the possibilities of poetic voice, making readers pause, reconsider and embrace ambiguity.

She hears a fly buzz – when she dies. Hope is the thing with feathers.

The croaking frog is a ‘Somebody’. Its public croaking, its repetitiveness, devoid of any meaning, croaking just for the sake of being noticed, is a metaphor which resonates with me to this day. And another thing I discovered, to my delight, back then: a playful tone and subversive humour were also acceptable in poetry! It didn’t need to be all serious. You could make readers smile, if you wanted to. Because shouldn’t the poet also smile with self-knowledge or, better yet, at the self-importance of those lauded and applauded by the Bog? (‘How public – like a Frog –/ To tell one’s name – the livelong June –/To an admiring Bog!’)

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

I have, on occasion, come across writing prompts which ask you to write a letter to your younger self. What would you say to your fifteen-year-old poet self? If you could, what would you say? If? What?

I would probably, elliptically, say this: we do not enter the full picture at once. We enter the truth piece by piece.

You do not become a poet at once.

It sometimes takes years for a poem to be written. For the truth to be told, for it to be told slant. For the truth to come out the way you want it – but indirectly. For the truth and nothing but the truth to hit the reader with its originality, its sheer authenticity. True poetry will unsettle, startle and transform:

The Truth’s superb surprise

Poets leave gaps, employ paradox, resist neat conclusions, and in doing so, they acknowledge that some truths are too profound, too subtle, or too emotionally charged to be stated directly, and that the very act of interpretation becomes part of the truth-making process. Some truths, when written, are simply mind-blowing.

In 1850, Dickinson wrote in a letter to a friend that she sometimes felt a kind of intense mental state, describing it as feeling ‘physically as if the top of my head were taken off’. She was referring to the emotional intensity that she associated with poetic insight. This intensity, so often reflected in her imagery – the loaded gun, the fly at death, the carriage of mortality – transcends literal meaning.

Decades after first reading I’m Nobody! Who are you? and having written poems on countless subjects close to my heart, a year or two ago I decided to write a sequence of poems about the writing process. Like anyone who has been on that long, winding road for years, I can look back and reflect on the rejections, the acceptances, the publications, the truths and untruths I’ve been telling myself and others, and that little thing with feathers sometimes chirps in my ear: ‘Yes, but. Yes, but. Not slant enough. Not truth enough.’ And on other occasions it says: ‘Yes, there is still hope.’ And on other occasions it asks: ‘Are you – Nobody – too?’

And what would you say to your fifteen-year-old self who thought she was a poet?

These are the first lines of my poem Emily, I never wrote a poem about butterflies. It was written as a mysterious letter to – Emily Dickinson? My fifteen-year-old self? An imaginary friend? A Nobody? It was published in Perverse (October, 2023) and in my accompanying note to the poem I wrote: ‘At the time, I was thinking quite a lot about how a poem comes into being. How easily is it shaped and how important is the role of language? I wanted the ambiguity in the run-on title (Is Emily an invented character? Is it Emily Dickinson?) to unsettle the reader. I wanted throughout a push/pull in a dialogue which could be internal, or not.’

It is not a comfortable poem. It does not speak clearly. It encourages multiple interpretations. It ends with the line We sit and study our hands, these terrible, terrified hands, because we can’t look each other in the eye. I had not used dashes in the poem but, subconsciously, I’d invited the reader to fill in the gaps of emotional resonance. The ambiguity of the unsaid had, paradoxically, brought the poem to life.

Paradoxically again, the poem was read. The poem travelled to another country, travelled into another language. It was recently translated into Spanish and published in an anthology by the Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.

My fifteen-year-old self may owe something to Emily Dickinson for Emily, nunca escribí un poema sobre mariposas.

My fifteen-year-old self would be smiling now at those long-ago classroom whispers: but what does it mean? What does it really mean?