My Emily Dickinson - Softcover

Howe, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216837 ISBN 13: 9780811216838

Publisher: New Directions, 2007

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," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontė, 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...."

About this title

About the Author:

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of “Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.

Review:

Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops. (The New York Sun, Eric Ormsby)

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0811216837
• ISBN 13: 9780811216838
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160