"Wild Nights!" for Emily Dickinson

Is poetry still culturally relevant? Sadly, I'm not so sure. I don't think it's quite carved out it's place in overpopulated media space.

But I do have a news peg for poetry!:

Slate published a piece about how Emily Dickinson might not have been an old maid, but rather a passionate woman whose first love was broken, you know, Rom-&-Jul style. Of course, examining E.D.'s sexual secrets is nothing new. (I thought the latest was that she was a lesbian, but I've been out of it for a while -- maybe someone realized our homophobic culture just didn't understand women friendships in the 1800s.) However, the author of the Slate piece (a professor at Emily's former college, Mount Holyoke) is right that no matter what emerges about the affairs of Emily Dickinson, her spinster persona still wins out.

Now that I know how the East Coast still is, E.D's contradictions make more sense. The atmosphere reeks of repression (at least when I leave Queens every day and travel to Connecticut), but then, also revolution, evidenced by the region's leading role in everything from the Revolutionary War to gay marriage rights. I can only imagine how much worse the contradictions in New England might have been closer to its Puritan settlement days, especially for forlorn poetesses scribbling about alabaster chambers.

It's somewhat disappointing to remember that Emily Dickinson was a part of the elitist New England system, and was probably only made famous -- like so many other writers of her generation -- because of her situation in life. No one looked for poems in the attics of the lower class, who also hadn't received the education to write them. Her upper-class style of writing might very well have served as a barrier to future styles of writing not from the Amherst elite.

I would prefer to think of her as a victim rather than a perpetrator of classism and female oppression. She was barred from being as passionate in real life as in poetry. She is a mother to poetry's fluidity rather than its rigidity. She had a certain rebellion beneath that black-buttoned garb and spinster-spun poetry. After all, she was writing about "Wild Nights" long before the age of the Beatnik and the blogger.