Moment of Craft Fridays: Think Like a Dickinson

I just finished reading The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin and Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi. Franklin's book turned out to be interesting in detailing the problems in publishing a complete edition of Emily Dickinson poems: she created so many different variations of many of her poems, scraps left unfinished and alternate word choices expressed on many of her original papers. Defining a final "author's intent" proved impossible.

Gelpi's book attempted to place Dickinson's mindset and evolving philosophies in the context of her struggles with Puritanism and the major thought-leaders of the day, New England's writers Emerson and Thoreau. But Gelpi also had interesting things to say about how a poet-creator self-defines and he included a laundry list of craft-techniques he felt made Dickinson unique.

Gelpi believed a poet could identify as one of three kinds of a creator:

• a passive see-er
• an assertive genius
• a skilled craftsman

Gelpi's list of Dickinsonian craft, I feel, is useful to any poet who reads Dickinson or wants to add a flair of Emily to their work:

• Use unique, fresh language
• Use New England colloquialisms (or your local alternative)
• Drop the S from the third-person singular of the present tense
• Emphasize nouns by striking the articles
• Use singular nouns where plurals are expected
• Make parts of speech perform unorthodox functions
• Coin words
• Write in hymn stanzas (quatrains of short lines with 3-4 beats)
• Use dots and dashes as breathing points
• Use slant rhymes
• Use mostly monosyllable words

Gelphi also surmised that Dickinson liked to exist in a constantly yearning state, never to have her desires fulfilled because, as Gelphi said, "Fulfillment is static; desire is a process."

Interesting food for thought.