Dickinson Week!

An uncannily clever professor once told me that Dickinson and Whitman are the key to all the complicated locks of modern American poetry.

I don’t know about that, but Dickinson is baller and this week will prove it to you. Pastan puts it best:

Emily Dickinson
by Linda Pastan
We think of hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain.

~ by genghiskuhn on July 8, 2008.