| My Emily Dickinson Contributor(s): Howe, Susan (Author), Weinberger, Eliot (Introduction by) |
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ISBN: 0811216837 ISBN-13: 9780811216838 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2007 Annotation: Finally, "My Emily Dickinson," Susan Howe's singular and unforgettable 1985 creative study, is available as a New Directions paperbook. With exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. "Her" Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry--no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, "Wuthering Heights," the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun." A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, "My Emily Dickinson" frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." "My Emily Dickinson" won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Poetry |
| Dewey: 811.4 |
| LCCN: 2007034673 |
| Physical Information: 0.41" H x 6.16" W x 8.94" (0.51 lbs) 160 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: For Wallace Stevens, Poetry is the scholar's art. Susan Howe--taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides--embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun, Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontė, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text.... |
Contributor Bio(s): Weinberger, Eliot: - Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.Howe, Susan: - Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of "Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions. |