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  #11  
Unread 03-04-2021, 06:52 PM
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Kevin Rainbow Kevin Rainbow is offline
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Try listening to an audiobook edition of her poetry. I doubt you will care whether the recording is based on a text using this punctuation arrangement or that one, as long as what really matters - the poetry- comes through strongly and clearly.
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  #12  
Unread 03-04-2021, 10:49 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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By contrast, I think the entire poem, and not an amputated portion of it, is the poetry.
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  #13  
Unread 03-04-2021, 10:51 PM
Tim McGrath Tim McGrath is offline
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Good point, Kevin. What matters is the sound in the ear, not the appearance on the page. In the audiobook I have, read beautifully by Marianne Fraulo, all of Dickinson's tics and quirks are of little consequence.
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  #14  
Unread 03-04-2021, 11:09 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Very silly to suggest that Dickinson's "tics and quirks" (a strange choice of phrase to use to refer to her deliberate artistic choices, but then fear does strange things to people) play no role in determining how her poems should be read!
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  #15  
Unread 03-05-2021, 05:39 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Rainbow View Post
Try listening to an audiobook edition of her poetry. I doubt you will care whether the recording is based on a text using this punctuation arrangement or that one, as long as what really matters - the poetry- comes through strongly and clearly.

Yes, after which I'll listen to an audiobook of Apollinaire's caligrams, safe in the knowledge that I have missed nothing.

I'm going to have to side with the majority here, a critic once stated that how we view Dickinson depends on the age, from the editing (and yes, actually, the editing went further than punctuation, to actual word choice, and yes, actually, since punctuation dictates how a poem is to be read out loud, the changing of said punctuation would change the audible attributes of that poem) and dumbing-down of her brilliant modernist talents in the nineteenth to early twentieth century, to the great focus on visual experimentation lead by Sarah Howe and others in the late twentieth and twenty-first. Here, oddly, I am happy to be of my age, and would rather think much of an artist than try to denigrate her "tics" and "quirks" as accidental. In fact, they are far from that. That is why I think your choice of this poem is poor for Dickinson "at her finest", most half-decent nineteenth-century poets could manage a verse almost as good; she's at her finest with her half-rhymes, with her brilliantly strange inventiveness, as in the poems I posted above, she is greater, I think, even than Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his "tics and quirks", let alone Whitman. In fact, I find much of Whitman boringly positive, Dickinson is the opposite. She is boisterous, but boisterously negative, obsessed with death and decay. For me, she is even greater than Keats in that regard, for she is the much more restlessly experimental of the great poets. I might, on an ambitious day, compare her to Shakespeare; Bloom did it. So no, I'm not sure this is her "at her finest", though it is her at her "very good".
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  #16  
Unread 03-05-2021, 01:09 PM
conny conny is offline
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When I read her I hear John Clare.
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  #17  
Unread 03-05-2021, 03:05 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by conny View Post
When I read her I hear John Clare.
Really? Crikey. I can understand how there are loads of intersections/similarities in all kinds of dimensions, but they've always been two very distinct voices for me, for what it's worth.

I wonder what AI will bring to the debate (which for me replicates a different debate about biographical/ verging on hagiographical understandings of poetry).

Here's an animation of an Emily Dickinson photograph posted recently on social media
.

All those representations, and people wanting to relate to them in different ways. It's a bewilderbeast, growing more tentacular-spectacular by the day.

Sarah-Jane

Last edited by Sarah-Jane Crowson; 03-05-2021 at 03:24 PM.
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  #18  
Unread 03-05-2021, 04:57 PM
conny conny is offline
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I love JC. And EmilyD also. I don’t mean their voices are the same.
it’s as if there are echoes of others in the sounds. Maybe it’s a Victorian
Sensibility thing, not sure.

I know she was a big Shakespeare-holic, certainly writing at a time when you
could get away with much more metaphysics than you can today.

Hardy in Larkin also. Yeats within Heaney. Not the same voices,
but when you hear it you think, yep, that’s a subtle thing that the
Poet has trained into the voice, consciously or not.

Clare is bloody great though. Not infallible, but pretty awesome
a lot of the time, as is ED.
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  #19  
Unread 03-05-2021, 09:01 PM
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Kevin Rainbow Kevin Rainbow is offline
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Emily Brontë loved writing so much she came back to life as Emily Dickinson.
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  #20  
Unread 03-06-2021, 05:51 AM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by conny View Post
I love JC. And EmilyD also. I don’t mean their voices are the same.
it’s as if there are echoes of others in the sounds. Maybe it’s a Victorian
Sensibility thing, not sure.

I know she was a big Shakespeare-holic, certainly writing at a time when you
could get away with much more metaphysics than you can today.

Hardy in Larkin also. Yeats within Heaney. Not the same voices,
but when you hear it you think, yep, that’s a subtle thing that the
Poet has trained into the voice, consciously or not.

Clare is bloody great though. Not infallible, but pretty awesome
a lot of the time, as is ED.
I went back to both this morning - I think it's just people reading things differently. I can see what you mean, but although I like some of Clare's work, it always strikes me as a bit overblown, a bit 'easily' bucolic. A bit self-obsessed. I read ED as the opposite - precisely defined, external, observant/reflective. Having said that, Clare's 'I am' is amazing - the end of it the kind of writing that knocks you over.

I don't know anything about any of this, though - my knowledge very subjective. I'd like to see a surreal alt-classification of poetry which locates people through random themes, like how often they used the word 'moth', ate cake, wrote on a Tuesday or had an interest in map-making.

Sarah-Jane
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