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Mary Karr gave the following remarks at our "Tribute to Emily Dickinson," introduced by Allen Grossman, December 9, 1997. The PSA sponsors an annual tribute to Dickinson at the Folger Shakspeare Library in Washington, D.C.


As a young woman, I winced against Dickinson's poetry. She was the one poet, besides Tennyson and Longfellow, we were force-fed at my school--easily one of the worst schools on the planet. The woman in charge of the English curriculum was a prissy, wizened anorectic whose name also happened to be Emily, and in one of those terrible misprisions young readers are capable of, I dovetailed the two Emilys and decided to rebel against Dickinson long before I had bothered to read her. To me, her Victorian idiom felt like an awful form of coyness. I decided at fifteen that I was a rabid feminist, and though I grew up among some cowgirls (like my mother), there were more than a few swooning magnolia types whom I feared becoming. Dickinson struck me that way, initially. That's because critics and biographers such as Thomas Johnson have made an unfortunate industry of celebrating her 1700-and-some-odd poems as if all reward study. They do not.

But we have a lifetime to educate ourselves as poets. By the time I was thirty, I had fallen in love with about three dozen poems by Dickinson. Her ability to draw me into the cramped, puzzling interior space of her greatest work--then wring me through changes at a lightning pace--continues to amaze me. Most recently, I've been trying to steal her blend of Latinate and Germanic diction. Rather, how she takes the pounding Germanic beats of plain speech and then peppers them with odd, polysyllabic words derived from Latin--in a way that challenges the predicted formal turn and works alchemy on both dictions. Note, in my favorite Dickinson poem, "After Great Pain," how she lowers words like "ceremonious" and "contentment" and "recollect" so as to alter completely the psychological lens through which we peer. I set this poem forward as a personal expression of grief at the absence of the poet James Laughlin, my publisher and friend, who died last November.

After Great Pain After great pain, a formal feeling comes-- The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs-- The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore-- And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round-- Of Ground, or Air, or Ought-- A wooden way Regardless grown, A quartz contentment, like a stone-- This is the Hour of Lead-- Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons recollect the Snow-- First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go-- --Emily Dickinson

--Mary Karr

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