Emily Dickinson: "It was not death, for I stood up," Music and adolescent angst in the (18)80s. Like hair, power ballads were big in my day (the '80s), and Emily Dickinson 's were a lot more memorable than Mtley Cre's. We thumbed our noses at our English teachers by singing "I heard a fly buzz when I died" to the tune of "Gilligan's Island," repeating "between the heaves of storm" in place of "a three-hour tour." This trick works because Dickinson adopted her meter largely from hymns and ballads -- the pop songs of her time -- with their simple stressed lines and repeating rhymes. As a child, Dickinson may have sung hymns at the church she regularly attended, but her relationship to organized religion soon became conflicted. She dropped out of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before the end of her first year. "Instead of tolling the Bell, for Church," Dickinson wrote, "Our little Sexton -- sings." Her nonconformist poetic stance appealed to the fledgling goth-girl in me: somewhat shy, slyly irreverent, introspective, and imaginatively dark. Like many teenagers testing their new-wave wings, I had Cyndi Lauper in one ear, singing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," and Dickinson in the other, insisting that Girls Just Wanna Think about Their Mortality . . . and Immortality. It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down -- It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on