As in recorded history, what gets left out may be the most important part. Because Emily Dickinson published almost nothing in her lifetime, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand her final intentions for each poem's printed form. There are political implications here. A reader drawn into the process of her unremitting spontaneity will find in Contradiction's originary ebullience an end to passive consumerism. One hundred years after her death if I quote from her poems or letters in a book, and I use either the Johnson edition of the Complete Poems or Franklin's edited Manuscript Books as the source, I must obtain permission from and pay a fee to The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Trustees of Amherst College.
Poetry is never a personal possession.
The text was a vision and gesture before it became sign and coded exchange in a political economy of value. Susan Howe is the author of My Emily Dickinson, North Atlantic Books, and several volumes of poetry, including Pythagorean Silence, Montemora, and Defenestration of Prague, The Kulchur Foundation. In that way, I am working so that the convulsive habit of initiating girls to the male as in a contemporary practice of lobotomy will be lost. I want to see in fact the form of women organizing in the trajectory of the species. It's night in the sentence.