Hi, Everybody. I know it’s been a while. There was a wedding. A very beautiful wedding. And a new book. And a glitch in said new book’s distribution. There was also glamping and lobsters in Maine. A visit to France, which involved a lot of sculpture - Brancusi, Bourdelle, Goujon’s Fountain of the Innocents (with a connection to a poet I love, Joachim du Bellay), and the annual Festival of Gardens and Season of Art at the fairy-tale Chateau de Chaumont.

As for that new book, and the glitch… My wonderful publisher, Marsh Hawk Press, was one of around 300 small imprints left in the lurch by the sudden shuttering of S.P.D. (Small Press Distribution) in March. Sandy McIntosh, Marsh Hawk’s valiant editor, did an astounding job securing a berth with a new and improved distributor, IPG, while juggling a full cart of his own deadlines and obligations.

IPG has its own online storefront where you are now able to order the book directly (!) if you don’t have a local bookstore you support who can order it for you.

Oh. It’s called The Flaws in the Story. The poems have to do with the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell ourselves as we go about making and unmaking and remaking the story of our lives. You can read more about it here.

Now, without further delay…

A Poem Is a Feeling

Because for most of our lives, death is nothing but a metaphor.

Morning Sun — Edward Hopper, 1952

“I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” (340) by Emily Dickinson

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

Like Raymond, and Armour Hot Dogs, everybody loves Emily Dickinson. In principle. Or, at least, we all love our Emily Dickinson. And according to our idea of love. Probably according to our ideas about a lot of things. Which is to say that, maybe even more than most, Emily Dickinson invites projection.

Not all projection is defensive, of course. “In its benign and mature forms, it is the basis for empathy.”[1]So it doesn’t really matter that there’s probably as much, and as little, truth in what biographer Lyndall Gordon describes as the “sad-sweet image: a ‘shy’, ‘chaste', ‘frightened’ poet [who] hardly knows what she says, so keeps busy with baking,” represented by William Luce’s Belle of Amherst, as in the feminist warrior of Alena Smith’s Dickinson, and indeed Gordon’s own “forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface… unafraid of her own passions and talent.”

Like them, we all fashion our own Emily Dickinsons out of scraps of history, hagiography and hearsay. And depending on what we ourselves, whatever our reasons, desire in and from her, we can pick and choose from a long, contradictory list. She was “a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life” or “sane and brave… wonderfully and terribly unprotected psychologically so that each life occurrence, small to most of us, was easily tremendous to her.” In her own lifetime, in her own hometown, she was already referred to as “the Myth.”[2]

We quote her like we know her: “Tell the truth but tell it slant - ”;[3] “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”; “Forever - is composed of Nows - ”; “I dwell in Possibility - ”; “The Brain - is wider than the Sky - ”; “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed”; “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun”; “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”; “Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell”; “Because I could not stop for Death - .” But lines of poetry taken out of their context as if they were intended to be proverbial are of limited value. Like even the most expressive eyebrow, it’s hard to know what it really means without the rest of the face.

Apart from those who choose to take her work for their academic subject or are specialist devotees,[4] we rarely read Dickinson’s poems whole. It’s not only that we prefer our idea of them, the way we do our idea of her. It’s also because of the way in which they’re difficult, as if they’re doing their utmost to confound us. We can work with, or around, the inscrutable dashes and the weird use of capital letters. It’s more the way the poems challenge our sense of, well, Sense.

Partly this is because they don’t make the kind of sense we want poems in general, and our Emily Dickinson’s poems, in particular, to make. We want poems to sum something up. Beautifully. To give us a pocketable solution to one of life’s insoluble problems. To have a message we can repeat. To bring us confirmation of our own powers of discernment and assure us of our ultimate goodness. To make us feel cultured and sensitive and smart.

Mainly, though, the poems undermine our expectations of how words make meaning by being legitimately hard to construe. One of my grad school professors chalked this difficultness up to what he called their “inferential structure.” At the time, I took him to mean that Dickinson’s poems skipped steps or suppressed evidence, leaving the reader with the compacted end result of intricately but privately argued discoveries. In high-school math terminology, she doesn’t “show her work.” Another professor described reading her poems as being pecked to death.

Maybe that professor was being uncharitable. Maybe he was projecting. Or maybe, like Emily Dickinson herself, her poems are simply better screens than most. They’re so private, or personal, so interior, that they’re, ironically, easy to project onto. Maybe what’s hard, or even trying, about them is the degree to which they leave us to our own inferential devices.

“I dwell in Possibility - ” sounds great, until you try it for a couple of days. Personally I tend to gravitate toward probability, a bedrock of definites and the likelihood of resolution. These Dickinson’s poems resist with a blithe single-mindedness. They positively dwell in irresolution. You can hear it in the dissonance of the slant rhymes that are her trademark.[5] You can see it in those dastardly indefinite dashes. You can feel it in the way words like Immortality and Eternity stand at the exits, blocking the door to closure and, in their absence, how the poems step off resolutely into mist - inconclusive, provisional, speculative, open-ended: “And Finished knowing - then - ”

Poems commemorating the death of a loved one or a public personage are common enough to justify an entire category of poetry: elegy. But “I felt a Funeral” doesn’t appear to commemorate anyone in particular. The funeral it describes takes place in the speaker’s Brain: the death it contemplates is metaphoric. It’s essentially metaphoric even if it’s the imagined death of the speaker, who would not literally be able to write the poem from beyond the grave.[6] So in addition to the big one, the mystery we confront at the start has shades of Noam Chomsky: What does it mean to feel a funeral, and even more precisely, to feel a funeral - or anything for that matter - in your Brain?

I guess, first of all, as opposed to "mind” or “Soul,” the Brain is matter, a tangible, physical place. Immediately we get the sense that the poem thinks about feelings as having some kind of material reality. The Brain is also mortal in a way that “mind” and “Soul” may not be. It has something invested in the thoughts and feelings about death it harbors.

By placing funeral feelings inside the Brain, the poem reminds us that the funerals we attend in chapels and graveyards also, in a sense, take place inside us. Funerals are more than the outward form of grieving. They are our form, how we, humans, imagine expressing and performing our feelings of loss. The externalizations of our mourning, the sanctuaries, cemeteries and rituals we have established, are put in place as much to help us to organize and contain our feelings as our dead.

By the same token, the speaker also conveys something of that strange detachment we feel in mourning. Feeling a Funeral in your Brain is, you might say, opposed to Being fully, body and Soul, in your grief. It reminds me of that sense we have, when we are Mourners, of just surreally going through the motions.

That first line also evokes what funerals feel like. We say “heavy heart” but when I think about, it’s my brain that’s felt heavy when I’ve been grieving, like it’s trudging through mud in “Boots of Lead.” To me, the line is an arresting thumbnail sketch of depression, so often accompanied by a preoccupation with death and dying.

It’s worth noting that we’re not, in this poem about a Funeral, grappling with feeling-in-action. It’s “I felt,” past tense, and the past tense, wherever it appears, serves as a kind of memorial. It’s the marker of the death of the present. “I feel” only becomes “I felt” when the feeling is gone.

We feel the significance of that “felt” rhythmically, in the way the “I” falls, hard, onto it. “Felt” is the first downbeat of the poem, the word that, like a springboard, gives the poem its energy and momentum, such as it is. (Compare “I feel”: It’s a softer opening, more open, more groping, unfinished; it’s less emphatic, less definitive, even in the ear, and so less urgent in the mind. I’ll get back to this idea.) Maybe feeling a funeral is something about what it feels like not to feel anymore.

When I think about death, it’s the feeling of separation that haunts me, the thought of being cut off - from the people, and the buzzing, brilliant world of life and sensation that I love. It feels like being encased in a crate surrounded by styrofoam peanuts, aware of the world “out there,” inaccessible to me, out of reach. In other words, it’s also a feeling of separation from myself. That is, from my own world of feelings.

From the initial distancing effect of the indefinite “a” in “a Funeral,” the pain of separation and the feeling of being severed from the flow of life are played out everywhere in the poem.

The progression of what belongs to the speaker, from “my Brain” to “my mind” to “my Soul,” is one of increasing abstraction, as if what she still possesses becomes less substantial every time she turns around.[7]

The narrative progression, too, implied in “till…And when… till… And then… Then… And then… then,” is at odds with the standstill of the (in)action: “to and fro… Kept treading - treading… Kept beating - beating.”

The feeling of separation is only intensified by the Service, bereft of the sense of belonging that a congregation of people and a chorus of voices are meant to provide, its only music that of the ominous Drum whose “beating, beating” is redolent of dead horses and mind-numbing headaches.

Even the anonymous Mourners prove little more than the outward show of grief, disconnected from actual feelings[8] and quickly disappearing into their “Boots of Lead.”[9]

Maybe it’s the imagery of the fourth stanza that gives me the idea of the poem as an archipelago hanging in deep waters far from the coast of the continent from which it drifted millennia ago, but I feel vindicated when I spot exactly one Robinson Crusoe of an “I” in each island-stanza, and when I note that “Silence,” who joins her in that fourth stanza, seems only to leave her feeling more isolated from the world out or over there. Together they form “some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here - ”. Thanks to Silence, she may not be alone… alone, but the desert island they inhabit is implicitly empty of sound: no hum of insects, no birdsong, no crash of the surf, no rustle of the wind.

Even explicit sound is silent. In the first two lines of that stanza, “Then Space - began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell,” my eye follows as the Bell of Heavens swings back and forth: “toll… all… Bell,” but it’s a bell without a clapper. Even the act of hearing “here” has become purely metaphorical, a silent film. It’s only the idea of sound, an inference of its absence.

So, in the midst of so much distance and isolation, how do we find our sense of connection to the poem?

What I do when I find myself stranded in a poem, unable to break through, is go back to the beginning and reread till the patterns start to emerge. And when I notice, here, all the words beginning with a “B”: Brain, breaking, beating, beating, Box, Boots, began, Bell, Being, broke, I know I’m onto something. And then I spot the ones starting with “S”: Seemed, Sense, seated, Service, Soul, Space, Silence, some, strong, solitary. Then, it’s the vowel digraph “ea” that leaps out at me: Treading, treading, breaking, seated, beating, beating, heard, creak, Lead, Heavens, Ear, Reason. Then, the inventory of all the words containing the short E sound (ĕ): Felt, Kept, treading, treading, Sense, when, Kept, then, Lead, again, Then, Heavens, Bell, Silence, Wrecked, then, then. And then I wade into the “W”s: was, when, were, was, With, were, Wrecked, World and, in the last stanza, down, down, knowing.

That’s enough for me to start to get my bearings.

But then I see that “Funeral” in the first line and “Finished” in the final one are the only words in the poem that begin with a capital “F.” And that there are only four other words with an “f” in them at all: besides that fundamental felt at the top of the poem, fro, of, and lift.

Apart from the form (the shape and rhythm of the poem), these are the most prominent patterns we see and hear as we read through the poem and start to see and feel it whole. Even if we don’t read the poem aloud—although, give it a try, it’s more fun if you do—seeing and, let’s call it “hearing,” even if it’s just in your head, are still the two main arteries by which poems try to reach us. All the others ride in on their coattails. That is to say these two serve as metaphors for all the others, the way all the senses serve as a metaphor for feeling.

Tuning into these patterns is like rotating one of those double images on its axis just enough for the other to come into focus. This way, words organized into an archipelago of island-stanzas on the page. This way, letters and sounds arranged into constellations. They’re both in there. The way words are both their visual and their aural selves, their dictionary meanings and their connotations.

One of the things I love about poems is how they remind us that our encounters with words aren’t only about sense, they’re also sensual - that they are based in our senses, that they begin with our senses. We tend to think words go straight into thoughts, but of course they don’t. First, we feel words. (Told you we’d get back to this.) Even before they coalesce into images that appeal to our senses, even before they make Sense, and long before they get wrangled into positions we take up and marshaled into ideas we embrace, words have tone. As in: Pitch. Color. Intensity. Character. Muscle. Attitude.

Before we know what words “mean,” or even that they mean, back when our “Being [is] but an Ear,” we understand and respond to the nuances of tone with every fiber of our bodies, all our senses open and set to maximum, with a sophistication that is daunting, a precision we may never be able to fully duplicate.

We think we become more sophisticated as we get older, once we actually know things. We think that back when we were unformed we merely felt all our experiences, without comprehension. What if it’s the other way around? What if the assumptions we sometimes call “knowing” and “thinking," when they aren’t actively getting in the way of our working out our understanding, are, best-case scenario, ancillary to feeling? “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”[10]

It’s hard not to step forward to read the curation before stepping back to look at the art.[11] But, sometimes, in our eagerness to make sense, we can end up preventing Sense from breaking through. If we bypass our senses, not only do we miss out on the primary appeal of what’s in front of us, as chaotic as it may at first feel, but we get stuck in an intellectualized response where the closest we get to what the piece means to us (if we even get that far) is what we think about it, and all the reasons why.

But reasons rarely account for our attachments and affinities, and can reduce the most full-bodied encounters to their courtroom transcript version, where the most persuasive argument wins. Like logic, reasons depend on their premises; they can always be dragooned into arguing either toss of the coin. That’s the purview of debate and dogma, rhetoric and power struggles.

It’s our Sense, from common to moral, that shows us how to construct our Reason, to hold it to account and keep it responsive, so that Reason can, in turn, help us to weigh the reasonableness of those feelings. It’s our engagement with our feelings that brings us to our Senses - of beauty, of justice, of self - and that lets them keep evolving, so they remain works in progress, so we remember that they don’t exist outside process. We can’t be Finished knowing them.

Poems too are a process, for both writer and reader. They invite, or sometimes even oblige, projection. A poem’s meanings start with what the poet has put down, but they are brought to life by what the reader brings - of themselves, their life, their Brain, their mind, their Soul - to their reading of that poem.

Looking back, I think my grad school professor meant something much less intimidating than what I heard at the time - something to do with grad school-level Mathematics. The poems’ “inferential structure” is just a place where we can hang our own thoughts and feelings. It’s what leaves room for us to imagine ourselves in(to) them, to bridge the distance between them and us, and to infer how we would feel if we were the “I” in or behind them. He was saying, We are all our own Emily Dickinsons. Which is as it should be.

That would be a great ending, but I can hear what you’re thinking: Sure. Great. But what about that Plank? (Or am I just projecting?)

In the final stanza of “I felt a Funeral,” “a Plank in Reason” breaks.

One way to look at it is this: The last stronghold keeping the speaker in this life falls. Unable to feel, she can’t make Sense of anything that’s happening to her and she falls through her own ability to Reason as if it were nothing but a rotting Plank.

Or you can look at it this way: Reason, in its primary definition of “cause, explanation or justification,” may be the reason she hasn’t been able to feel all along.

Either way, what happens next, as baffling as it is, makes concrete, tangible sense: the thing she was standing on gone, down she goes. On one hand, we are as startled and alarmed by the velocity and the endlessness of “dropped down and down” and the impact of “hit a World, at every plunge” as she is. On the other hand, for the first time in the poem she seems actually to be feeling things.

“Finished knowing” is a metaphor for death; “I dropped down and down,” an image of a body descending into the grave; and the final, disconnected and disconnecting “ - then - ,” the not-knowing what happens next.

But the death at the end of the poem is also the end of the Funeral, which was always a metaphor. What’s come to an end is an experience of death-in-life, heart simply “beating - beating,” days a pointless “treading - treading” “to and fro” in a kind of limbo.

That means that the terrifying free fall into not-knowing is also a kind of release, a metaphor for coming back to life. Maybe that’s what gives the lines their sense of breathless wonder, why “Finished knowing” feels like the opposite of “felt a Funeral.” The experience of the infinite is not just terrifying, it’s exhilarating. “Finished knowing” doesn’t cut things off or shut them down - it’s freeing.

Breaking free of feeling a Funeral, the “I” is hit by so much sensation, so many feelings pouring in from all sides and senses, that it knocks her out. Metaphorically. After all, the poem ends not on an ending, but an awe-filled return. Finished knowing means venturing back out into the unknown, finding her way back into feeling, feeling her way forward into what happens “ - then - ”.