Please Emily Dickinson

Please Emily Dickinson

I walked into the dollar store
With the feeling that I could afford most anything
I want nothing more
Then I reached into the pocket of my jeans
A pen exploded in
There are no words left
But I can still lift my eyes
While the hours fast collapse
In online dreams & photographs
Like a time lapse
How our lives pass

I’m like a bird broken by the screen
door, singing ‘so long’
I can’t find a face to face the doubt
I’m a lonely crowd

And don’t you wonder when you’ll leave this place
Or if you did enough with enough grace
All the fast faith
All these phantoms chased

So Please Emily Dickinson
Keep your hair parted and your black dress on
And may I stand
Where you were standing
Because we’re moving much too fast
I’m married somehow to the past
I try to laugh
But it always falls flat

I’m like a choir singing on a Sunday
While the phone rings
All I need is faith to face the doubt
I’m a peasant crowned
With holy flowers pressed against my chest
∞∞∞
I, like everyone else?, have a strong, strange affinity for Emily Dickinson. It’s obviously because of her poetry - the depths she reaches with such few words & her tongue in cheek humor. But it’s also the ghostly, romantic image of her engrained in my mind. There is only one photograph of her in existence (though it’s possible that a second was recently recovered.) In our current world of endless photographs, videos, selfies, shoots & otherwise incessant documentation of daily life, this is amazing to me. Whereas I can chart my own lines & greys & bodily changes from year to year through Guy’s voluminous iphone gallery, Emily Dickinson lives immortalized in our minds at 16 years old.

For me, it is this Emily who wrote 1,800 poems, who I love like a long lost sister, like a pen pal, like a fantasy past life vision of myself in Victorian-era America.

Emily Dickinson has sparked a number of poems & songs, like the above, because she has become something more than a poet to me; she’s become mythological.

I don’t think she would be pleased with this…all the projections & assumptions & stories generated from thin air about a solitary woman seeking a life of creative anonymity.

I live in a world that Emily Dickinson presumably would have hated. I have an instagram, a sub stack, a tik tok, an agent, a p.r. person, a radio team & my image has been splashed unabashedly across the internet. Some days it feels like I work more on trying to be heard, seen and loved than I do on the actual work that I’m trying to get heard, seen & loved. And this is when I call on phantom Emily. Emily the archetype; the Lone Writer. The one who answers the call to create as though it were a secret mission. Who is on a quiet hunt for deeper meaning through the process of making. The one who is trying to be Nobody! in a bog of Somebodys.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Dont tell! they’d banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
~Emily Dickinson

left-handed emilys

One way I crack out of the staleness of self-promotion is by switching from right to left-handed work. In my imagination I see this practice as taking a broom to the cobwebs collecting in the unused hallways of my brain. It almost always works to dislodge a dam up of words or to see something from a new perspective. Nothing “usable” ever really comes of it. The effect it has on making things isn’t linear & that’s the point.

left-handed poems

These pieces feel pure as they’re not meant to be shared (until now 🙃.) They are exploration for the sake of exploring, not to get somewhere impressive. I share in the hopes that it might inspire you to make something just for the sake of it. To be Nobody for a little while in a world that prods and pressures everyone to be Somebody.