Their Conceptual Dickinson: Emily Dickinson in the Work of Tan Lin and a.j. carruthers

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Notes

¹ See Paul Legault’s The Emily Dickinson Reader and select poems from Michael Farrell’s books ode ode, roughly proofed, and Cocky’s Joy.

² Howe’s publisher, New Directions, refers to My Emily Dickinson as a “creative study” on their website.

³ As Domnhall Mitchell has argued, neither the actual death of the author, Emily Dickinson, which materially finalized her oeuvre in 1886, nor the theoretical death of the Author, Roland Barthes’s emancipation of “the scriptable, open text” (emphasis in original), entirely accounts for the unusual status of the author in Dickinson studies. This otherwise ordinary heuristic split between those who, on the one hand, have taken up “the assumption of a moral prerogative to act on behalf of the historical person with regard to her textual transmission,” and on the other, those who have claimed “the interpretive right to liberate the meaning of those texts from the Writer in a generalized sense”, is in part collapsed by the idiosyncratic material circumstances of Dickinson’s poetic production (Mitchell, 271). In Dickinson’s case, that is, certain manuscript-based strands of scholarship suggest that “the author’s death (in the sense of the surrender of the right to control meaning) is something that the author willed while still alive” (271). This authorial ambivalence with regard to intention has propelled Dickinson scholars to scrutinize with especial attention the assumptions that their work makes regarding what constitutes textuality, authorship, and readership. This manifests itself in matters such as the field’s attention to the disputed significance of Dickinson’s privately kept fascicles and textual fragments, and the related, thorny question of the correlation between Dickinson’s epistolary circulation of poems and theories of publication.

For further reading about Dickinson’s fascicles and textual fragments, see the following book-length studies: the fabulous array of essays collected within Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (Ohio State UP, 2014) edited by Paul Crumbley and Eleanor Heginbotham; Alexandra Socarides’s Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (Oxford UP, 2013); select chapters in Cristanne Miller’s Reading In Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (U of Massachusetts P, 2012); select chapters within Domhnall Mitchell’s Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts (U of Massachusetts P, 2005); Eleanor Elson Heginbotham’s Dwelling in Possibilities: Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson (Ohio State UP, 2003); Marta Werner’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (U of Michigan P, 1995); and Sharon Cameron’s Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). Others have also taken on this topic in articles and essays, most prominently Shira Wolosky, Mary Loeffelholz, Melanie Hubbard, Jerome McGann, and Ralph Franklin.

For more extensive commentary about Dickinson’s epistolary circulation of poems, see the following book-length studies: select chapters in Miller’s Reading In Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (U of Massachusetts P, 2012); Reading Emily Dickinson’s letters: critical essays (U of Massachusetts P, 2009) edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie; select chapters within Domhnall Mitchell’s Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts (U of Massachusetts P, 2005); Marietta Messmer’s A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (U of Massachusetts P, 2001); Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith’s introduction to Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris P, 1998), among others. Instructive shorter works also exist by Judith Scholes, Melissa White, and others.

⁴ The following definition has been pieced together from Conceptual writing’s many, often repetitive manifestos, including Craig Dworkin’s “The Fate of Echo”; Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing,” “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?,” his conversation with Katherine Elaine Sanders in Bomb Magazine “So What Exactly Is Conceptual Writing” and his week of blogs “On Conceptual Writing” (Poetry Foundation, 2007); and Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009).

⁵ Goldsmith cribs extensively from Le Witt’s “Paragraph on Conceptual Art” in the composition of his own “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing,” for example.

⁶ See, for example, Vanessa Place, Craig Dworkin, and Robert Fitterman.

⁷ Howe’s inclusion in the 2012 anthology, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Presse), is a good indication of this positioning.

⁸ Lowell puts this down to Dickinson’s way of “describing … a thing by its appearance only, without regard to its entity in any other way” (107).

⁹ Deppman and Ladin’s issue was a follow-up to Cristanne Miller’s 2006 special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal, which featured contributions from poets about Dickinson.

¹⁰ Conceptual poetry does not typically require a computer to be read. It usually exists as a printable text-object, or with the option of becoming one. Digital poetry, on the other hand, often involves hyperlinks or other programmed effects that readers interact with or experience through a computer.

¹¹ See, for instance, Scholes (226) and Jackson’s (99) analyses. Dickinson had twice attached a real dead cricket when sending this poem to friends and relatives—one to Frances and Louise Norcross, and the other to Mabel Loomis Todd.

¹² See footnote 3.