Billy Collins on Emily Dickinson

this is fresh air i'm terry gross in a new book about emily dickinson lindell gordon writes dickinson is now recognized as one of the greatest poets who ever lived yet her life remains a mystery we invited former u.s poet laureate billy collins to read some dickinson poems he wrote the introduction to the modern library collection of her poems he's a distinguished professor of english at lehman college of the city university of new york his latest collection of poems is called ballistics billy collins welcome back to fresh air i'm going to ask you to start by reading a favorite emily dickinson poem and introduce it to us tell us why you love this poem well the poem of course she didn't have titles in her poems i think she would think titles are immodest so she just uh jumps in at the beginning so the first line is a narrow fellow in the grass it's basically a poem about a snake and about our kind of fear of snakes she never uses the word snake or serpent but she is talking about really literally a snake in the grass but she wants to avoid all those negative connotations and i must say her poems read very well but there's the one thing you miss when you hear an emily dickinson poem on some occasions is the visual shock of seeing some of her words and i think at the very last line of this poem contains one of those unexpected verbal surprises a narrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides you may have met him did you not his notice sudden is the grass divides as with a comb a spotted shaft is seen and then it closes at your feet and opens further on he likes a boggy acre a floor to cool for corn yet when a child and barefoot i more than once at mourn have passed i thought a whiplash unbraiding in the sun when stooping to secure it it wrinkled and was gone several of nature's people i know and they know me i feel for them a transport of cordiality but never met this fellow attended or alone without a tighter breathing and zero at the bone yeah you mentioned that last line zero at the bone i just think it's i mean she's really she's trying to get at the idea of a shiver of fear a freeze on you know when you see a snake but the word zero actually it seems to create a shiver in the reader it's a very unexpected and imaginative way to say that would you read another poem that that you think really gets to what makes her distinctive for her period and still important today sure um i think one feature of her upper poems is a uh a kind of combination of a very cordial polite tone these poems are are small they're well dressed they're nicely organized they run according to this lovely meter but the content is often frightening and this poem call is called i died for beauty i died for beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one who died for truth was lain in an adjoining room he questioned softly why i failed for beauty i replied and i for truth the two are one we brethren are he said and so as kinsmen met a night we talked between our rooms until the moths had reached our lips and covered up our names what does this say to you well um she she's fascinated with i mean death is the subject matter of poetry i tell college students if they're majoring in english they're basically majoring in death that's that's what you're getting um for your tuition but emily dickinson is particularly fascinated with not just death but the circumstances of death the funerals and tombstones and graves and she often kind of domesticates the grave and in one poem she is kind of preparing the grave for a guest and as if to serve tea but here um you know the poem is kind of conventional in the beginning you know one person died for beauty and another died for truth so you have the aesthetic quest for beauty and the kind of philosophical quest for truth and then they agree as they lie in adjoining rooms under the ground that they're both the same so there you just have the keysian equivalent of you know beauty is truth truth beauty but the last four lines are a shocker i mean she as she says she's just the way kinsmen might meet on a night we talked between the rooms until the moss had reached our lips and covered up our name so there it ends with the grim realities of suffocation and oblivion when the mosque not only shuts them up by reaching their lips but it even covers up their names on the tombstones and obliterates their earthly renown um okay i want to make a confession here um when i started reading emily dickinson it was at a time when modern poetry for the most part was not rhyming but greeting cards were and so i kind of made the equation since modern poetry isn't rhyming and greeting cards are and emily dickinson is rhyming she's shallow and it's kind of like a greeting card how arrogant was that but putting that aside well you know i was really i was really kind of put off by by the rhymes and everything so i'm going to ask you to talk about her rhymes and where you think they fit in in american poetry well your reaction is understandable and probably not uncommon um i mean it was whitman who was the you know he's the second pillar that holds up uh 19th century american poetry and he was the really the first poet in english to abandon both end rhyme and regular meter and for me and you probably reading poetry in school he became more popular because he was more of a radical in terms of form and but emily dickinson seems rather tame because she uses this pretty much the same meter every time it's called common meter it's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats so a typical one would be because i could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me and there's actually kind of a pause at the end of the first line a sort of silent fifth beat this is the meter of a lot of ballads it's the meter of protestant hymns amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me it's the rhythm of many nursery rhymes old king cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he so you have a very conventional cadence in most of these poems it's widely known that almost every one of her poems can be sung whether you like it or not to the tune of a yellow rose of texas i'm going to stop you right there i read that in the introduction to you yeah that you wrote for the uh modern library edition of emily dickinson poems and that just kind of shattered me i know i'm sorry well i mean i grew up with that mitch miller the horrible mitch miller recording of the yellow rose of texas and sadly i'm going to play that now so our listeners will hear [Laughter] i i feel guilty doing this i'm going to do it anyway so here's mitch miller leading the sing-along for the yellow rose of texas okay bear with [Music] that i me gonna see nobody else could miss her not have as much as me she cried so when i left her it'd like to broke my heart and if i ever find that's exactly what you don't want going through your mind when you read another thing thanks a lot jerry and i can't help myself here asking you to now read poem that shows that meter but at the same time is so um reflective and um touching on very extreme issues or states of mind i mean this poem is uh i not quite an extreme state of mind but it's certainly um kind of in terms of conventional religious belief very radical uh and will try to get i'm trying to get mitch miller out of my mind i see i'm sorry thousands of your listeners will be walking around all day with that song in their heads um this is a poem um which is quite radical in its uh uh abandonment or disdain for conventional religious behavior on sundays she says the word surplus which is here spelled s-u-r-p-l-i-c-e like a religious garment not the not u.s some keep the sabbath going to church i keep it staying at home with a bubble link for a chorister and an orchard for a dome some keep the sabbath in surplus i just wear my wings and instead of towing the belfor church our little sexton sings god preaches a noted clergyman and the sermon is never long so instead of getting to heaven at last i'm going all along and the poem ends with an exclamation point as if she's surprised herself with that ending billy what does this poem say about emily dickinson's sense of spirituality well it's very radical i mean considering that she lived in a small new england mid-19th century town uh it's a rejection of traditional uh religious behavior and substituting that for the natural surroundings of her backyard the bubbling is a songbird and so it provides the music the orchard is her dome so the word the trees replace the church instead of wearing a surplus or a religious garment she just wears wings it's interesting that she just invests herself with wings and instead of the bell tolling for church he listens to the bird and then the declaration at the end is is very radical i think uh instead of getting to heaven at last i'm going all along so what does it say to you that that poem and many of her poems basically have the same meter that basically she's singing the same song with different lyrics each time she does she's she sings the same little song over and over again and we but we don't want her to change you know we wanted to keep singing that song well i think it's it creates a tension in the poem because there's the familiarity of the song you know the reliable dependability of this that just goes on and on but then there within that there are these counter rhythms that are created by you know her obsessive dashes and these sudden jumps of thought and talk about those obsessive dashes well you find these in her letters too i i think she she just liked that form of punctuation i mean to me there are dashes often between a subject and a verb you know there are kind of interruptive and strange dashes that don't seem to do anything more than just reveal her love of the dash but then there are other dashes to me that are indications of a leap of thought you know whereas a comma or a semicolon just doesn't get the sudden transition that as she's moving from one word to another so sort of zigzag type of logic so i the tension in her poems is i think that there's a feeling of reliability about the meter which is that common meter there's a kind of polite vocabulary that's going on and then there's very radical audacious and daring content and a completely original use of language her metaphors are quite amazing and they often stop us on our tracks she did draw on so many areas of things like sailing and geography and chemistry in the bible to create what i call a kind of i called in this introduction a kind of new england surrealism i mean just to give you a few examples in her poems the son is all dressed up in a satin vest uh thought wears a hood the alps wear bonnets uh a book is called a frigate angels have hats made out of snow the bottom of the mind is lined with stones i mean these are rather bedazzling amazing metaphors but they're all packed into this little song she's singing as you said this little song that she's singing over and over again

Channel: Carlos Barrera

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Keywords: Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Fresh, Air, American, Literature, poetry, narrow, fellow, in, the, grass, died, for, beauty, yellow, rose, of, texas

Id: fdH5u0yEJVk

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2011