When I visited Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst this summer, I was browsing in the bookstore of the gift-shop and spied a book that I had never heard of before. It was Face to Face, by Martha Dickinson. The book is an account of growing up with Emily Dickinson, written by her niece, Mattie (Martha) Dickinson. Mattie was the daughter of Emily's brother Austin and her best friend, Sue, and lived next door to Emily in the house known as The Evergreens. Reading this memoir gave me an unexpectedly rare and intimate view of Emily, straight from the eyes of a child whom she adored, and that adored her. One reason I hadn't heard of this book before is because it was long out of print. It's only because a new edition was printed recently by McNally Editions, and was displayed on the shelf at the Dickinson Homestead, that I was made aware of it.
One of the things I loved about the book was the introduction by Anthony Madrid. It wasn't the usual stuffy academic introduction. It was idiosyncratic and fun, like the book itself.
I reached out to Anthony and asked if he would be interested in being a guest blogger on Prowling Bee. He said yes, to my pleasant surprise. I told him to pick any poem after Fr850 and he surprised me further by picking four. He wrote them and sent them in short order, each one concisely incisive. I present the first one to you here.
It's fitting to have Anthony comment on this particular poem because, for me, it hearkens back to Mattie's book and her delight in her Aunt's mischievous quality. That whole book's a riot of childhood conspiracy. You can see that in this poem too. After all, it's pretty cheeky to practice fraud on butterflies. But if anyone would do it, for the sake of love of course, it would be Emily. The legalese, the language of her lawyer father and brother, lends the heresy herein a sly wink.
You can find Anthony's inimitable poetry and criticism online and in bookstores near you.
Here's Anthony's gloss on the poem:
The above was probably a note, accompanying a flower, for Sue or somebody close-by enough to send flowers to. The humor turns on using lawyer language in this context.
Another example of humorous use of legalese: Franklin 1174 (“Alone and in a Circumstance / Reluctant to be told”).
The seesaw rhyme within the first line [Defrauded I / a Butterfly] makes me wish for a concordance of all such internal rhymes in Dickinson. It would be pleasant to be in a position to venture a general statement regarding the thematic content that makes this “move” attractive to Emily Elizabeth.
Of its Voice — to affirm — when the Wind is within —
Can the Dumb — define the Divine?
The Definition of Melody — is —
That Definition is none —
It — suggests to our Faith —
They — suggest to our Sight —
When the latter — is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met
That Immortality —
Was the Pine at my Window a "Fellow
Of the Royal" Infinity?
Apprehensions — are God's introductions —
To be hallowed — accordingly —
-Fr849, J797, Fascicle 38, 1864
Nate B Hardy and Connor O'neill contacted the blog to let us know that they had referenced the Prowling Bee in their podcast, "Old Poems For New People." I listened to that podcast, which was on poem Fr654, and loved it and wrote them back to tell them so. The podcast was funny, insightful, and it featured a terrific song treatment of the poem by Nate. We corresponded and they asked me if I wanted to be on the podcast. I suggested we do it as a crossover with a Prowling Bee post. They would interview me to discuss a poem, and I would use a transcript of the interview as the commentary for the poem on Prowling Bee. I told them to pick out a poem and they chose the one at hand. We set a Zoom date to record the podcast.
Then something strange happened. About a half hour after we set the date I got a text from Susan Kornfeld telling me she had just heard a podcast on her car radio as she was driving through a rural part of Northern California, near Ukiah. She said she had hit scan on her car radio and it had landed at the beginning of the podcast. She got pulled in and listened to the whole thing. Then she went into great detail about the podcast, and how much she enjoyed it. The podcast she heard was Nate and Connor's.
I thought that was a pretty strange coincidence, but it got stranger. Nate had mentioned to me that their podcast was very small, mostly just listened to by their friends and family. Were they being modest? Was this podcast some nationally syndicated show? It turned out though that they were telling the truth. When I told them it was on the radio they were flabbergasted. They said there was no way it could be on the radio.
We figured some rogue college radio DJ must have heard the podcast, liked it, and decided to air it. That's odd enough, but the fact that Susan just happened to hear it on her rental car radio while driving through rural California, dig it, and text me about it a few minutes after I had set a date to be on their podcast seemed beyond. I told Susan about it and she said it must have been "the long white fingers of Emily Dickinson."
We talked a little about that in the interview after we talked about the poem. It was a lot of fun to try to unpack the poem with those guys and I think we got somewhere pretty interesting with it.
I cleaned up some of the "ums" and "you knows" and "likes" when I transcribed it, but I left some of it too, because it's natural speech and I like the rhythms it creates. I didn't include laughter in the transcript, but there was a lot of it. Here is a link to the podcast containing fragments of the interview and Nate's song version of the poem. And here is the transcript of the interview:
Nate: Shall we jump into the poem?
Adam: Yeah, sure. Okay. It's not that easy actually to enter into that poem.
Nate: No, it's easy to enter. I think the entry point is the easy act.
Adam: I guess so. But it took me a while to just figure out that the tree was supposed to be a sea with a stem. Then I was like, what does that mean? A sea with a stem? At first I thought she was looking out the window and seeing the ocean in the background and the tree itself was the stem in the foreground. But it took me a while to figure out that the tree is the sea.
Nate: The tree is the sea.
Adam: The tree is, yeah.
Nate: What do you mean? So what do you mean the tree is a sea? You mean it’s just this embodiment of the infinite and it just branches off into everything.
Adam: Yeah, that'd be one way of seeing it. I think the Sea is meant to be a representation of the infinite, deep and mysterious. And the stem is interesting because the stem actually grounds it, grounds the infinite, you know?
Nate: Hold on. Let's slow down, Adam. Yeah. Okay. Let's have somebody read the first stanza.
Adam: All right.
Nate: Connor, do you have the poem in front of you?
Connor: I do.
Nate: Connor, would you please read us the first stanza of this poem?
Connor: All right.
By my window, have I for scenery just a Sea with a stem. If the bird and the farmer deem it a pine, the opinion will serve for them.
Nate: So Adam, you're telling us the tree is a sea.
Adam: Yeah. With a stem.
Nate: Right. With a stem. Mm-hmm. And so it's kind of localized, but from that location, you can access pretty much anything you wanna access.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: One thing I picked up on too, after like a million readings, is that I think, at least at this stage of the poem, it's pretty light.
Adam: Mm-hmm.
Nate: Like, she was just kinda like, oh, that old thing. You know, like, it's silly. Like my silly neighbors, the bird and the farmer, which are silly neighbors to have, right? Like if you’re watching some kids show, you know, you’re neighbors with the bird and the farmer.
Adam: Mm-hmm.
Nate: But I think it, like at this stage the stakes are pretty low.
Connor: Well, I don't know.
Nate: You don't think so?
Connor: Maybe it's not quite a provocation, but she's saying like, yeah, call it a pine tree if you want. And be blind to the world.
Nate: You know, she's, yeah, well, fine. Yeah. But still, it's kind of like, alright.
Connor: She's talking about the naming of things. She says, so if you do that, you won't see it for what it is.
Nate: So you read this stanza and you guys are thinking we're already heavy ass.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think you can go there. Like one question is, why does a bird call it a pine? You wouldn't think a bird would name the tree.
Nate: Yeah, because it's silly, because it's a kid show. It's like, “Hey Biiird! Hey, bird, hey farmer."
Adam: I think it’s meant to be light and fun, but I think she's going deeper too, in the sense that a farmer calls it a pine because we tend to want to name and categorize everything, which is part of what this poem is getting at. But the bird is interesting because for a bird it's all about the practicality of the tree. The pine is a home. It's the thing to perch on. It's a practical thing, but the bird doesn't quite have the imagination Emily does to turn it into a Sea, right? I’ve just noticed that with Dickinson every detail stands for some deeper idea, so I question the bird.
But I like what you're saying too about the childlike aspect of it. I can see that in there.
Nate: Fine, every detail is laden with decision and possibility, but another thing that happens in a lot of Emily Dickinson poems is this kind of like a bigger through-the-stanzas arc. Right? She kind of sets you up sometimes.
Adam: For sure.
Nate: Just to really get you at the end.
Adam: Yeah!
Nate: My read is, okay, we're kind of beginning to broach, approach, questions about categories or who's got a bigger imagination, but at this point I'm not troubled.
Adam: Gotcha.
Nate: Not anything that's happening in the poem at this point.
Adam: Yeah. It’s light, and there's some nice word play in here between Sea and scenery and pine and opinion. So there is something pretty playful about that first scene.
Nate: Yeah. Yeah. I missed the pine and opinion thing. That's good. Okay. Second stanza. We ready for the second stanza?
Connor: It has no port nor a line, but the Jays that split their route to the Sky or squirrel whose Giddy Peninsula may be easier reached this way.
Adam: So the jays are splitting their route to the sky. Why does she use that word “split?”
Nate: The sentiment to me seems like, my take, right? for the first stanza. Uh huh, it's just a tree, huh? Like, you call this thing a pine tree, right? Like, is that what we call the pit stop of sky travelers? Or so many dizzying peninsulas for squirrels. Like a tree. Like that's all you got. Is there more to it than that?
Adam: You mean like you're talking about splitting, like there are different routes you can take?
Nate: I mean the Jays are splitting their route, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: And so you can imagine dividing point A to point B in these segments. They're breaking the trip up.
Adam: Through landing on the tree.
Nate: Yeah. Landing on the tree.
Adam: Landing on the tree. Split's a heavy word. It's got an almost violent sound to it. The idea of violently splitting the sky is in there.
Nate: mm-hmm. Sure.
Adam: These word choices are so interesting. I really like that idea of the split being part of what this poem is about, looking at things a couple different ways, or going different directions, or on the way to the sky, on the way to the sun, the sky on the way up to some kind of transcendence or something.
Like, we all have different routes. We all have different ways of getting there or something along those lines. It's evocative of that for me.
Nate: So you say split is this a violent word?
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: Is there a word you would drop in there if you were trying to not make it seem like you're smashing the sky into pieces? If I was thinking, all right, split's too hard. Like, are you gonna “break” your route through the sky? Like, is that any easier? Are you gonna like “chop” your route through the sky?
Adam: You could certainly go a lot softer with your word choice, in a number of ways. But split is so good because you get the idea of splitting something apart, but also splitting off in a different direction.
There's a poem she has that starts off with a line, “Split the lark and you'll find the music.”
Nate: Yikes.
Adam: You know, you're actually cutting the lark open to find the music inside. And it's an angry poem in a way, but it's beautiful. Oh my God. It's a great poem. But you see that she starts with that word and it's very violent. It’s a bloody poem. And it is trochaic, starting on the down beat, so it’s like “SPLIT the lark” so it's like she's spitting out the word almost. So I think that's why I'm tuned into that word having that kind of quality, because of that particular poem.
Nate: Yeah. That's pretty interesting. It’s so compact, right? It's just miniaturized ideas. And it seems like you often are able to kind of prize out some meaning through the context, basically, like referring to the poems that it's surrounded by. We've already split the lark, right? So if now we're splitting the sky, like there's no ambiguity here.
Adam: I wouldn't see it as negative here necessarily though. I would just see it as…forceful. But the multiplicity of meanings between splitting something apart but also splitting off in different directions, to me that's just awesome because it fits the meaning of this poem in a couple different ways. But the context, that's one of the cool things about writing about the poems in order, especially when you look at the fascicles, because in the fascicles I personally think that she ordered the poems like they're little books. I think that they've got purposeful order to them sometimes, like she arranged them. And so then, yeah, you start seeing a greater context. Like the poem that I'm actually writing about now. [Fr844] Oh my gosh, I don't even really want to get into this on the podcast because it's disturbing. But you'll see it if you do. It’s like this poem hits me in a whole crazy different way because it follows from another poem that disturbed me. It's only when you put them together that you really understand what the second poem is about, which turns out to be something very intense. So yeah, the context helps. Also, when you know her lexicon that helps too. You guys know about that, that online site called, uh, the Dickinson Lexicon?
Connor: No,
Adam: It's a really helpful resource because they go through nearly every word she uses in her poems and tell you what the words would've meant in the 1800s. Sometimes those definitions are very different from the definitions we have today.
How about this word, “Giddy.” There's your back to the fun.
Nate: Yeah. Giddy.
Adam: A squirrel. Giddy.
Nate: See, I read giddy as just kind of ecstatic vertigo, right? Like squirrel life. Uh huh. What do you do besides just get really excited about being high up in a tree.
Adam: Yeah. And it also makes the poem a little bit giddy. It's a little drunken.
Nate: Yeah. Should we do the next stanza?
Adam: Yeah.
Connor: For Inlands, the earth is the underside and the upper side is the sun and that commerce it has of spice I infer from the odors born.
Nate: This one rips.
Adam: Why, what is it about this stanza?
Nate: This one is where I was like, this poem is the best poem.
Adam: Why?
Nate: I mean, well, so no, the first couple of stanzas I thought yeah, this is silly. She's kind of playing around, like, obviously there's a lot more to a pine tree right? Now, I feel like we're entering into this kind of edgy delirium, right?
Adam: Hmm.
Connor: Mm-hmm. Well, if she splits the sky in the last stanza. She turns the world upside down in this one.
Nate: It's like a pine, right, like a territory so vast it’s got the whole world, everything underneath and nothing but the sun on top, right?
Adam: That’s cool.
Nate: An economy so enigmatic that even if it exists at all, it's the spice trade, which we can only guess at because it smells so good. Oh yeah. I just feel like this is like one of these, I don't know, my poetic space is pretty small, but I’m thinking, oh, this is a Dylanesque kind of silly moment. Like this could have been a scene from Isis.
Connor: Oh, nice. Yeah.
Nate: I just love the whole spice trade thing.
Adam: Yeah. And that's fun too, right? It's cute.
Nate: I don't know if it's cute anymore. I think right now it's starting to get like more than cute.
Adam: Yeah, I see what you mean. I meant that it's kind of cute to think of a spice trade happening inside of a tree. I'm not gonna say it doesn't have extra portent, but it's fun.
Connor: Yeah. At the same time. You can almost see it like, well, all right, I'm playing out this conceit. Like, what else? What else? Oh, well, I guess, you know, what does a pine do? I guess there’s a trade, you know, let's see how far we can push this.
Nate: I think right now she's starting to kind of push it to the point where it's extra fun, right? It was one thing when we were talking about birds flying from pine tree to pine tree. Or you could start off with a heavy barrage of metaphor, like the pine tree is this metaphor for everything. And actually not just the metaphor. You could pretty much access a huge part of the universe just by contemplating this pine tree. It's kind of like, alright, like fine. Well, yeah, but once you start trading spices, right? Mm-hmm. Then I'm invested in a way that I might not have been before.
Adam: Yeah. And then thinking of that as commerce, to think about it like the thing that it has to offer you or offer the world, you know, is this spice, the smell that’s so amazing. That deep fragrant smell. Spicy.
But also, I like what you said about the whole earth being the underside and the sun being the upper side as somehow the tree, the living thing is like us, we stand between the earth and sun, we have our stems too, in a way, we're a mediary between the heavens and the earth. The tree is a living being. I get a little bit of that vibe too from that, which takes it into more serious, existential territory.
Nate: I get that. Like, it’s big. It's big in a lot of ways, right? And either we're just talking about the vastness of earth, or we're talking about the vastness of just trying to understand your space on earth and, you know, between God and whatever is on the other side of that.
Adam: Yeah. I think what you said about it when we started, the arc, it's starting to open up into a different territory, because when you look at the next stanza, which maybe we should read now, it definitely goes somewhere deeper. It departs a bit from the playful in the next stanza.
Nate: Connor.
Connor: That's my cue.
To affirm when the wind is within, can the dumb define the divine? The definition of melody is that definition is none.
Nate: Yeah. So now, now I think she's got a kind of crazy look in her eyes. Yeah. Like, you know, pine trees, like do pine trees speak? Right. 'cause now, when wind is blowing through its branches, it is whispering the name of the divine, right? It is speaking the unpronounceable words that capture melody, and then make melody crumple up and fall into the void.
Adam: Well said! And it's great. The word affirm. It affirms, right? It's like a beautiful word right there.
Nate: Yeah. So now I think it's not like she's just playing around, she's saying bullshit. Like pines don't do that. Like pines don't speak revelations.
Adam: Well, the wind within, to me, I think of it as breath. It's like somehow now the pine has become Emily. The wind within is the poem being spoken, the song being sung, That's what's affirming. It ties in like that for me, but then I don't know. What's your thought about that line, Could the dumb define the divine?
Nate: Well, because, so the pine is supposed to be this inert thing, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: Like you were talking about like, who's got more imagination, right? Like a bird or a farmer, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: And so I think that she's kind of playing with that. You know, not necessarily. That was something that I've been asking myself. A pine tree, it's not supposed to converse, right? It's certainly not supposed to dish in the way that this pine tree is dishing, right? It's not supposed to tell you the secrets of divinity or of melody. And yet, you hear that wind through the branches of a pine tree, it's doing it. And you're there. Yeah. You're there.
Connor: I like the word you used a minute ago, Adam, of being a mediary, like the tree is a medium for breath and breath that has these connotations of the divine, of life, of the spirit. It's like the divine, it's ineffable, but as it moves through the tree you can't see it, but you can see the branches move. You can't hear it, but you can hear it sort of move through the tree. It becomes the tree. The tree is the mediary for our ability to discern or affirm, I guess, the divine.
Nate: Divine.
Adam: Yeah. That's beautiful.
Nate: You know what's crazy, Adam, is that you're saying that at this point, maybe the pine's voice is Emily's voice.
Connor: Yeah.
Nate: Like my notes, like for the next stanza, are Emily is now speaking in pine voice.
Adam: She smells like pine too. She's pining.
I wonder too about that “Can the dumb define the divine” line. On one hand she's saying the dumb can't define the divine, unless it has the inspiration of wind going through it. But I actually wonder if she's maybe also saying that only the dumb can define the divine, 'cause as soon as you speak and start naming things, you lose definition.
Connor: Sure. Right.
Adam: Which is why I think that the definition of melody is that definition is none.
Only the dumb tree can define the divine.
Connor: yeah.
Adam: I think this poem is also playing with the idea that you have to be dumb to definition to speak divinely, and blind to normal sight to truly to see with the imagination.
Nate: Yeah. This is where we're headed, right? Resolution is like, just stop playing. Just be like a dumb pine tree.
Adam: It's funny 'cause how do you define a good melody? It is pretty hard to do.
Connor: Well, it's become a mantra of mine. This has a flavor of the chase it not and it abides, you know. [Fr654] Yeah. Just kind of let the stuff act on you. If the dumb defines the divine, you know, don’t chase it...
Nate: It’s not going to be there, it's gonna happen. Right. As soon as you try and define it, it's gonna,
Connor: it's gonna vanish.
Adam: Chase what?
Connor: Oh, maybe I'm getting the line wrong.
Nate: Uh, yeah, we're referring back to…
Adam: oh, that awesome poem where it's like the wind going through…
Nate: yeah, through
Adam: the grass. And you're trying to chase the creases...
Nate: Uh huh.
Adam: Oh yeah, yeah. God, that poem is so good.
Nate: Oh, beauty. Beauty is not caused. It is.
Adam: Yes. That poem. Yeah.
Nate: Yeah.
Adam: Oh yeah. You guys, you did a podcast about that one, right?
Adam: Okay. That's right. Yeah. Oh God. You know, and she's got another poem where she uses this exact construction, but instead of melody, it's beauty. “The definition of beauty is, the definition is none.” [Fr797] Yeah. And that's just a four liner. I have it here. But the first two lines are word for word what we've just heard with the melody line. We've just switched the word melody out with beauty, as if they were one in the same. What I like about this earlier poem is that the final couple says that since there is no definition of beauty, it "eases analysis since heaven and He are one.” So at one level it's about getting beyond analysis, about, like you said, being the tree. Heaven and tree are one.
Being the pine. She sets you up for a definition, but then negates definition, right? The definition is that there is no definition. And then you get that sense of, well okay, if the definition of beauty is the definition is none, then if you can get rid of definition altogether, are you always in beauty?
Nate: Do we like that? Come on.
Adam: Uh, I mean, I don't know, as a human, I mean, it's pretty hard to do, but I know that there are times when I can get outside of thought, and when I do things are pretty blissful there, you know? And music can do that. When you're in Melody, sometimes you're doing that.
You're just like, I'm in this melody and it's so good. I'm not analyzing, I'm not defining anything. I'm just in it. I'm inside.
Nate: But it's so weird though, because it seems like it's not that the definition is none, it's the definition is easy. It's like what you enjoy about it, you know.
Adam: For what? Is it melody you're talking about?
Nate: Well, for the melody or for beauty, it sounds like any kind of good feeling, you're not having to think too hard about it.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: And I guess that what you're saying is that since you didn't have to think too hard about it, there was no definition, but it seems like you could observe somebody else's happiness. And you could just decide, okay, I'm not feeling happy, but I recognize that what's so happy about this person is that they're in this effortless stream where pleasant things are just washing over them, right? And I think you could define it. It's just there's just this very cheerful resonance, like what's happening in the world, it's very agreeable to them because they're not working too hard at it. It doesn't mean you can't define it. It just means that you don't want to be defining it when it's happening to you,
Connor: Or that it resists a final definition. Or a tidy definition.
Nate: Well, yeah, without resorting to all kinds of evolutionary psychology, which is not very poetic.
Connor: Well, let me ask you guys this. 'cause now I've noticed something, In the transcription of this poem, it has the definition of melody dash is dash that definition is none Dash. Melody - is - none -. I just pulled it up on the Amherst site and there are no dashes.
Adam: You mean the original manuscript?
Connor: Well, the metadata says this is a transcription, but it's handwritten.
Adam: Oh. That transcription was done after Emily died by Mabel Loomis Todd. Do you know her? Her story's crazy too. She was the one who was having an affair with Austin and she was obsessed with Emily. But anyway, her whole story is interesting. I love her too. She and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who both worked on her first posthumous book of poems both thought that the poems needed more conventional punctuation. They wanted to get rid of the dashes.
Connor: Oh, interesting.
Adam: Just because they wanted 'em to get published, I think. They thought with the dashes it made the poems too far out there. So they put periods and commas, and they put titles on the poems too, which is totally, totally wrong.
Connor: Yeah. There it is. I see at the bottom, they put a title in brackets. The Pine.
Adam: See, yeah. Mabel put a title on it.
Connor: For this? Come on.
Nate: Totally missed the point.
Connor: Yeah.
Nate: She was like looking at a tree. Okay. So the official version has the dashes here.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, it is cool that that “is” is like just sitting there by itself between those dashes.
Connor: It's almost like a pictogram, you know, like the definition of melody is just like a dash, like a line, you know?
Connor: Yeah. Blank Space might do a similar thing, but just to kind of, you know, it “is.”
Nate: I was just reading a bunch of Roberto Bolano books.
Adam: Love Him. Which one?
Nate: Uh, well I read Savage Detectives and then that one, 2666. Yeah. Anyway, but you know what I'm talking about, like the one poem of the poet they're seeking in Savage Detectives. It's like a flat line.
Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. So that's getting into letting go of definition. I think it is interesting because a definition does come out of order. There is something hierarchical about it. It sets up comparison.
I think that that's the whole point of this poem in some ways. It's like the tree can be a Sea. Don't get caught up in defining it. It can be free of definition, because there's more, there's more there.
Connor: Right. It's limited, you call it a pine and it sort of foreshortens the depth of what you can see in it.
Adam: Well put. Yeah. She can see so much more in that dang pine.
Nate: I don't know. I still keep, and maybe it’s because I'm into this arc from the start to the finish where it's not just like she is elaborating on all the ways this pine is more than, you know, what it seems.
It feels to me like there's this transition from playful, like, Hey, this pine is extra, and it’s escalating, right? Like, you thought she was joking, right? Or she was just having some fun, and then you look over at her and she's like, shaking, right?
Apprehensions. At the end of it, all right, it's getting heavier. We're not even at the heaviest part yet. Right. I don't know if it's just that categories are heuristics, which inevitably separate us from the nuance and depth of life. I think we use heuristics so that we can kind of like move on to the next topic, right? And we're not just stuck on this time, not for the rest of our days.
Adam: Yeah. But could you?
Nate: I think that she's basically saying, look, I think there's some kind of, well, there's like a dark kind of anti here, right? Where it's like, no, you're gonna look at this pine, right? Like, you need to look at this pine. And she's right about the pine and it's kind of scary that she's right about the pine, right? Like, so I think she goes from silly to delirious, to crazy, to like, scary. Like she's gonna break your world in half and oh, split the sky and you're gonna be left with pretty epic doubt. And I'm kind of spilling the beans here. But she's basically saying the doubts that you're gonna be left with, that's as close to God as you're ever gonna get.
Adam: I don't see the doubt. Where do you see it?
Nate: Apprehension.
Adam: Apprehension, yeah, maybe. But apprehension also can just mean to understand something. Right. You're afraid though maybe, because it can be scary.
Nate: So you know the lexicon. Is apprehension synonymous with understanding?
Adam: It can mean both. Yeah. So it can merely mean understanding, but it can also mean being anxious. It's interesting the tie-in between those two definitions though, like to truly understand God’s voice could be pretty terrifying for sure. But I don't get much doubt in this. The pine is a living part of infinity. It’s pretty comforting.
I'm not saying it's not in there. I'm just saying I don't see it that much.
Nate: I think I inadvertently teleported us past the whole stanza. I think it'll help. Let's keep going.
Connor: All right.
“It suggests to our faith. They suggest to our sight. When the latter is put away, I shall meet with conviction I somewhere met that immortality.”
Nate: This one she's speaking in pine-voice for me. Okay, so the first line, that's easy, right? That's the pine. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's like activating some kind of latent faith now that we are appreciating its depth. Then the “they” in the second line is also the pine because we've undergone this kind of like multiplicative deepening process. We’re appreciating the pine in new ways and I think this whole kind of suggesting to our sight thing, I read that just as a parallel to like activation of latent faith. Here we're getting this kind of activation of some more rational understanding of how the world works or how, like it's all put together.
Adam: Is that how you see it, Connor?
Connor: Yeah, somewhat. Say the last part that you said again, Nate.
Nate: Well, so first is that we've gotta agree that “they” is still the same pine.
Adam: I don't think so. I think the “they” is all the people that are just seeing with their eye sight. They're not seeing with their inner sight, their faith. They're just seeing the tree as a pine.
Nate: but then, so how do they “suggest to our sight.” If it's all vapid, like bungled dinguses out there, who can't appreciate the depth of a pine. How do “they” have any sway whatsoever over what our sight does?
Like, we've already dismissed them.
Connor: But she's coming back to it, right? Like if the top of this stanza picks up on the last part of the last stanza. Speaking of definitions, it's taking us back to the top of the poem then too, by extension.
Adam: Yeah. It's coming back to the top.
Nate: Oh back to the bird of the farmer.
Adam: I think so. Or just to everybody who defines, like the royal society below. The poem talks about the fellow of the royal Infinity, but she's making a joke on the acclaimed scientists, the esteemed fellows of the royal society.
Nate: Right. But you're jumping ahead.
Adam: I am, I am. Yeah. But that's the “they” I think, the farmers and the scientists.
Nate: You guys are both with the “they” are the dinguses who don't see the pine for what it is?
Adam: Well look at the next line, when the latter is put away. So the former is faith. That's what the tree suggests. Now we're gonna put the latter, what sight suggests, away, And once we put that away, then, once we get rid of ordinary sight, once we can get rid of the definition, then you can more easily feel the conviction that there's Immortality there, You can feel it inside. You can't see it with your eyes.
Nate: So my read is almost completely compatible. It's just that, that second line to me, we're acknowledging the multi, like the whole poem has basically developed the fact that this pine is more than is seen.
Adam: I see it, yeah. It suggests something more.
Nate: But the only way we get back to that kind of immortality that we had met with and then lost is to basically get rid of our sight. Right? Like, we've done the work, we've unpacked pineness and this new way, but now that we've unpacked it, we've gotta forget about it, if we're actually gonna get back to some kind of authentic and satisfying faith in the universe. See?
Connor: Well, I think it's proof, it's like proof of concept in a way. If you don't call it a pine and you just look at it in, even in just, its material forms or, I know it’s also metaphorical, but just based on what you can see.
If you don't call it a pine, you start to see birds differently. You start to hear the wind differently. You start to think about melody differently, but it's all terrestrial still. But now she says okay, if you're with me, if you can blow up your definition for a second, or you can forget about categories for a second and just look and listen.
Now let what you're looking at and what you're hearing, it’s sort of a loaded word to use, I guess, but to transcend that and get to immortality. Yeah. It's a patient sort of development of the idea, I guess.
Adam: When you put away sight, you're actually closer to faith, right?
Connor: Absolutely. You're closer to something that you feel inside, that you apprehend from inside.
Nate: I'm with you with that. I think, I guess, and maybe our points of departure are trivial, right? It's just, it's the same, it's almost irrelevant.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, I, I see what you're saying and it's pretty interesting because it's like the tree is suggesting something to your sight as well, you know? That works just as well.
Nate: It was also a very intellectual kind of exercise, right? You encountered the pine, you considered the pine, and as part of your deep consideration, you dispensed with all the ideas, right? Like the kind of easy ways to dismiss the pine and to pretend like you understand the pine, you kind of go back to zero and well, I think zero is this very potent place, right?
And so, I don't know. I guess whether the “they” is some other or not, I think it's still this kind of conflict between faith and rational understanding, right? Or kind of like the need to explain, right, and unpack or justify whatever it is that you might have otherwise been faithful in.
I don't know if it matters if it's the pine or the other things that interact with the pine. It's just that there is some other, right? And so maybe the “they” in a generic kind of way just establishes otherness.
Connor: Yeah, yeah. Or if your faith is immortality, it’s a mysterious thing and resistant to definition. It's almost like your eyes are too literal. It is too literal a thing because you'll see it and you'll name it.
Nate: Or, or is “they” your eyeballs? Like, “These dumb eyeballs!” With every object, my mind's eye is clouded by my eyeballs.
Adam: And there's that word dumb again. Because I do think that there's a tie in between blindness and dumbness in this poem. So “These dumb eyeballs!” is perfect.
Nate: But it's like both ways though. The pine is dumb, but you know, it somehow knows the divine.
Adam: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Nate: And then there's the dumbness of thinking that you know better, that you could define.
Adam: Yeah. Right, right. It's hard to know where she's going with that particular line. Read that last stanza.
Connor: All right. Was the pine at my window a fellow of the Royal Infinity? Apprehensions are God's introductions, to be hallowed accordingly.
Nate: So Adam, you were getting us at this whole Royal Society Fellow thing, like she's taking the piss out of like some kind of, you know, intellectual brotherhood.
Adam: Yeah. 'cause it was famous at that time. If you were a fellow of the Royal Society in England, you know, that's an elite brotherhood of scientists. So then she makes a pun out of it and she switches up society for infinity.
Nate: But so without making the connection to the royal society, to intellectuals, I thought it was just a super fun way of saying like, oh shit, the pine is an angel.
Adam: Yeah. No, I think that's there too.
Nate: And like, you know, just thinking about like the whole big arc of what Dickinson is exploring with her poetry. That seems like a kind of a panicky thought, right? It seems like she's gone so far to try to connect with heaven, looking out your window and being like, oh shit. Like it's right the fuck there?
Adam: Yeah. Do you guys know that band The Silver Jews?
Connor: Yeah, David Berman’s band.
Adam: Yeah. He's a great poet, David Berman. There’s one song where he talks about how he was hospitalized for approaching perfection.
Adam: So I get what you mean there. She has suddenly left the planet. The tree has taken her to this place of infinity and immortality. And I think you are right, there is meant to be some fear in the word apprehensions there. It’s like holy moly. It's like you're on acid trip, or whatever, and you're just like, whoa, this tree is Infinite. Like this is part of infinity. Like we're in infinity, we're somehow alive inside infinity. So yeah, there is something a little terrifying about it.
Nate: Well also, one of the things that we were touching on earlier was this whole definition problem, right? Where the way that you get to divinity or the way you get to some kind of happy place is to not just not try, but to somehow undefine it, right?
And so I think that this is just a kind of reformulation of that, right? Where the way that you do that is to like pause, right? I still wanna read apprehensions as not just a hesitation.
Like in the learning process leaves you with profound doubt, right? As like panicky levels of the undoing of whatever framework that you've built to try to make sense of life in a productive way. I mean, how else, how else do you get introduced to God? I don't think you get introduced by God by understanding what the pine tree's all about.
I think the only way you meet God is through panic.. It's through burning the framework and being left without definitions.
Adam: Yeah, you're unmoored.
Connor: Yeah. And it's an exhausting to apprehend, you know, apprehension. To understand something suggests the end of a process. But if the apprehension is only an introduction, it's like, whoa, you know, it's vertigo.
Nate: That's true. That's true. Right? 'cause it's three stages. Number one, before the poet was ready to give up everything they understood about a pine tree, they had to understand that pine tree in a pretty deep way, right?
So first they have to define it, basically as richly as possible, pineness, right? And then they had to give up on their rich definition of pines. And then that's God's introduction, right? It's like, oh crap. Like now what?
Adam: Yeah, stage three. Even though there may be a little bit of that sense of fear or, you know, being apprehensive, the poem maintains its lightness. Even in that clever line, “Can the dumb define the devine,” in its sound, there is something fun. Can the dumb define the divine? And then the joke about the fellow of the royal society is in there at the end. So that's funny, to turn society into Infinity. It upends all the science. And then, I don't know if you guys will go for this, this may be a stretch, but I think that hallowed at the end is like the introduction. Apprehensions are God's introductions, to be hallowed, or helloed, accordingly.
Nate: Oh, see, I didn't, I didn't, that almost seems corny.
Adam: It does, but it's funny in the seriousness of the poem. And I love the link between helloed and hallowed, the hallowedness of the hello, of the introduction.
Nate: See, I don't know. I get, so I get that corny. You know how, I think a lot of people do this, I certainly do this, you respond to like a raw deal by making a dumb joke, right? You know, she's feeling big feelings here, right? And maybe is a little panicky, but you know, she's not a jerk. She doesn't wanna ruin your day.
Adam: She's still gonna give you some light. She's still gonna give you some fun.
Nate: It’s like, no, it's cool. Like, I'm struggling here, but it's just about like this fellow, this royal society of infinity stuff. Like what do I know?
Adam: Yeah. I do get often with her a sense of a trembling, a quivering, but I don't feel it as much in this poem, except for that word apprehension there. I mostly feel just delight, and a message of getting beyond definition and sight and what we think we know about things so that we can apprehend them with our imagination and actually enter into something deeper, which is hallowed ground.
Which is what it’s like at the end. It's like when you truly apprehend something from inside, when you really feel that tree, when you're hugging that tree. That's hallowed, that's real. That's a real thing. We're not
Nate: We’re not hugging the tree anymore. Like we are in the tree.
Adam: The tree, yeah.
Nate: More than hugging. Yeah. Like a little bit more intense than a hug.
Adam: Yeah. I mean you're feeling the tree. I guess that’s what I mean. You're not just seeing it. You're apprehending it from inside. I was being cute with the hugging.
Nate: You're doubting it, you're not just feeling it. You're not just taking a beat, kind of questioning what kind of relationship you have with the tree. I think if you wanna be introduced to God, you have to acknowledge your doubt. You don't just acknowledge your doubts, you hallow those doubts. Like the worship of your doubt. That's your access point to divinity.
Adam: That's perfect for Emily Dickinson. I just have a hard time seeing that in this particular poem.
Nate: Yeah.
Adam: Except for that word apprehension. And maybe that word Split.
Nate: I will acknowledge that I might be imposing something here because on my first read I was definitely thinking, oh, this is just a fun poem. I like it.
Adam: Right.
Nate: I like the spice trade. I like this whole dumb defining divine stuff. I like how it kind of gets a little bit denser and knottier at the end. But definitely, when I was first reading the poem, I wasn't troubled by anything in those knots. I was just like, okay.
I don't know what's happening at the end of the poem. Right? That was my resolution and I was very happy with it. There's fun stuff here. It gets dense at the end. I don't know what, what, what's happening. And I was kind of like sold on that. That's kind of everything I want out of an Emily Dickinson poem.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, it's enough, but it's pretty rare that that's where it stops. There's usually a whole philosophical thing going on and there's often psychological stuff that's happening. And I think you're getting at that a little bit with the apprehension, because if you're apprehensive, and that's God's introduction, then you're right to call out the hint of menace in that. I do think you can read fear there, and fear that points, perhaps, to doubt. Like, you can't quite, you're freaking out a little bit. I can see how doubt enters into the poem through that word apprehension.
Nate: Well, you know what, I think. Go ahead, Connor.
Connor: I was gonna say, you know, one might want to be able to look out the window and not see God.
Nate: Yeah, for real.
Connor: I mean, how amazing to be able to look out the window and see God.
Nate: Yeah. But then you come back tomorrow, God's still there.
Connor: Like, come on, I’m just trying to, you know, zone out.
Nate: Get lost dude.
Adam: Yeah.
Connor: A lot of this poem reminds me of this idea of defamiliarization. Do you guys know this? It's was was coined by a Russian, a literary critic, Victor Shklovsky.
Nate: Mm-hmm.
Connor: I'm just mentioning it, because I wanted to say the name Shklovsky. But he has this idea that this is, this what, what Dickinson is doing here.
He identifies, I think he does, this is like the early 1900s, it's a little bit after Dickinson, but maybe it's informed by it. Um, but he has this theory that the role of art is to defamiliarize the world.
Adam: Sure.
Connor: He says “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war…
Nate: laughs
Connor: …Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life. It exists to make one feel things to make this stone stony.
Nate: Are you reading this Connor. Do you have this in your head?
Connor: No, no, I'm reading it. Okay. “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they're known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar.”
Adam: Mm.
Connor: And so you know, I think that that's very much the same project here, but the thing is, we need to defamiliarize ourselves, because almost as just a biological necessity, we have to be able to look out, just to get through our day. We have to be able to look out the window and not see God, you know?
So I feel like the more I look at this poem, the more sympathy I feel for Dickinson to just be like, well, no, I can't. It's not a tree, it's not a pine. It's the medium.
I need to make myself and the tree into these vessels of mediums by which, you know, the divine might flow through. It's like, well, you know, but you also gotta go make breakfast.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. You're stuck. That's what I mean by like the drug trip thing, right? You’re like, I'm caught in this. I'm ready for infinity to go away now for, for a little while. I'm gonna come back to it. But the poem is rooted with that “stem.” It does have that grounding with the stem. I love that stem, you know.
Nate: Well, we forget about the stem, the stems where we start.
Adam: Yeah, we started there, but it's still there. It's still holding the whole thing down, the whole poem.
Nate: Yeah. You know, but you gotta go back to the start. You gotta like, you know, go reverse right back to the stem.
Adam: Yeah. But you always do that with Emily Dickinson poems, don't you? You gotta go backwards. You gotta go back to the beginning.
Nate: Go backwards? I, I didn't even know you were supposed to go backwards.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: So this is funny. Like, it’s so dense, right? Miniature.
Adam: Mm-hmm.
Nate: I was like thinking about poetry and viral genomes. Like, so you've got so little space that every gene is basically transcribed in both directions. And then every gene product’s spliced in a million different ways. You've basically fit it all into a few words. Right? And so, of course you've gotta read a poem backwards. I've been missing it the whole time.
Adam: Oh, she's got a poem that she wrote, which is, I should find it. It's an awesome poem. She's says in the poem, have you ever read a poem and you get to the end and you're so overturned by it that you have to go back and read the poem backwards?
(Here's that poem, which was found written on the back of a piece of wallpaper:
"Did you ever read one of her Poems back — ward, because the plunge from the front over — turned you? I sometimes often have many times have — A something overtakes the Mind")
Nate: So she knows exactly what she's doing.
Adam: Well, I mean, it's interesting because who knows what poem she's talking about? I mean, she loved Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That was her favorite poet, so maybe it’s her. But you know, I don't know too many poets that do that to me except for Emily Dickinson. So it's almost like she's writing about herself. Yeah, sometimes you're just like, I gotta, I gotta go backwards on this one.
Nate: Like, this is like freak... I mean, this is blowing my mind.
Adam: And then you go backwards and you end up with a stem, you know, it's great. You're grounded again. You are like okay, I've had enough of infinity now I want to be grounded. I want this Sea to be ground. And it is grounded. That tree is grounded. You know, take it on backwards. The squirrels and the birds, and yeah, it's all good. You had your little trip, you had your trip out and you got to the defamiliarization thing. I think that's a good way to do it.
[This pretty much ends the discussion of Fr849. We do touch on it a few times in the rest of the conversation, but mostly we veer off into other realms of Dickinsonia.]
When you originally proposed talking about this poem in your e-mail, you were talking about comparing this poem to the one about bulletins from immortality. (Fr820)
Nate: Yeah. You wanna do it?
Adam: It might be a bit much to go through it now, but I like the comparison because if you're talking about bulletins from immortality all day, that could be a bit much! But that's what she was interested in. She was going all the way. It would be cool to hear the song you put together for the Scenery poem though.
Connor: Nate, it seems like in your song you’re languid. There are these songs that float in a way. I don't know if that's something you buy into.
Nate: I think that maybe part of what I was going for was to sound close but with an uncomfortable disassociation thing, like you were talking about, or no, you weren't saying dissociation. Defamiliarization.
And actually it's kind of interesting, talk about defamiliarizing, when I recorded that song, I kind of stumbled on this technique to kind of just make it feel like a little bit, like, other. I wrote the song in G and then I basically recorded all the instrument parts in B flat, and then I down-tuned them to like F sharp.
Adam: Huh.
Nate: So that it kind of had more tension on the strings and then the pitch-shifting algorithm kind of added a little gross noisiness.
Connor: Oh, cool.
Nate: And then also, like, it's, it's all, it's mostly acoustic, right? And like, you know, I'm not any like wizz with like engineering sounds. And so it's kind of boomy and every now and then you get this aggressive summation between what's going on with the bass and the acoustic guitar.
Adam: Mm.
Nate: And I just kind of felt like a poem, you know?
Nate: It get us back almost to zero, actually just like a little south of zero.
Adam: But did it by defamiliarizing, by weirding.
Nate: Yeah. It was just basically, I'm just gonna Weird it. Yeah. And I have the hardest time making an acoustic guitar sound good. I felt like it made some of that boomy, woody resonance thing, like pop in a way that it wouldn't without the weirding process. And then this inadvertent side effect was just a really uneven frequency response, which are just like hot spots, which are not great, but at least in headphones I'm like, yeah, I'm into this.
Connor: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. There was almost like a kind of trembling to it.
Nate: Absolutely. Yeah. I think because of all this tonal stuff, like the pitch-shifting play. Then I think it has that kind of not quite substantial feel to it. That gives it that feel of floatiness that you’re referring to. Yeah, because it's, it's not real anymore.
But it's not completely contrived. Right. It's not a synth, it's not a electric guitar that's going through all kinds of processing. It's just an acoustic guitar that's been messed with just enough to feel a little uncomfortable.
Adam: I love those kinds of musical insights. I didn't feel tension when I was listening to it. But when I go back and listen to it, I bet you I hear it. Just like I glossed over “Apprehension” in the poem. I think that maybe the tension ties into the apprehension a little bit too.
The poem lends itself to that idea that there's something slightly uncomfortable about all this. As cute as this poem can be and funny and full of puns like Pine and Opinion and God's hellos and all that, there is still something in this poem that is on the edge, you know, always with Emily. I think with Dickinson there's always that shadows peeking through the branches.
Nate: I think I just loved it. And I think the song was a way for me to express my love, a rambling expression, you know. I've been making some stuff up right now, which is kind of a losing proposition.
Adam: Well, sometimes what you love about it too is like the melodies, where you can’t quite define it. You can't always quite define what it is about this that's hitting you so perfectly. When you're writing a good song? This is just hitting me perfect.
And it feels like it's not exactly coming from you. Sometimes it's that wind in the branches, you know? That feeling is pretty amazing. I mean, yeah, the defamiliarization thing too, like, just going back to the weird melodies that Emily would play at the piano, right?
It's one of the things I love the most about her is just, she's just constantly making language itself unfamiliar and weird. And it's so great. Oh, I just love it so much. Every time I come across some weird little phrase, you know.
Connor: This is not the can worms to open right now, but if, if there's a way to touch on this in brief, is that part of what you read is what the dashes are doing?
Adam: Oh boy. So they just kind of disrupt it for a second. Like, whatever's gonna follow that dash or whatever precedes the dash. It's just like
Connor: It’s just for sure you can't take it like you would if it weren't there.
Adam: Yeah. They definitely make the poem open up in all kinds of interesting ways. Like as far as the grammar goes, you’re like, oh, do I put a period there? Or is that a comma? Is it the end of a thought, or an the extension of a thought? Is it an ellipsis? And I think it does something similar to the lack of titles. Having no title opens the poems up. I think the dashes do the same. She's always opening 'em up through so many different ways. And yet they couldn't be more specific, you know.
Nate: I gotta confess guys. I don't even see the dashes anymore.
Adam: Mm. Even if you're trying to follow the syntax?
Nate: I understand how you do it, and I think it makes sense. I just don’t have the foundation to even try to take apart the poem at that level of detail. And so I think a lot of that stuff is going over my head that I just very happily ignore.
Adam: Yeah. I think you could let it just wash over you, and it would still be a good bath. Her arguments are so rich. There’s such richness in the argument that I feel like the only way I can follow it is through very close reading. I'm invested in what she's saying because it so often has this exponential profundity to it. But if I was reading her more casually, I would still enjoy it. I would still really enjoy the idea of the spice trade or the dumb defining the divine. I mean, that stuff is great. She makes me smile constantly when I'm reading her poetry. But when I start reading the depth, that’s when I start becoming apprehensive. I’m on edge. Something penetrates. Sometimes she's pure delight and sometimes she's like a terror, you know? And I love that she can get me to both places. But yeah what she's trying to say in the argument, what she's trying to say in end, is sometimes so hard to follow.
Nate: But I feel like every little syntactical thing, you know, I dismiss most of it.
Adam: Like, oh, this could have a double meaning, but I don't think this extra meaning is actually getting me anywhere. It’s exhausting. Right. Like, this is actually detracting me from the main point, all this work.
It's hard, but if you're into the puzzle that helps. There is a puzzle quality, or a riddle quality that you get into. I gotta put this puzzle together and no one's gonna put this puzzle together exactly like I'm gonna put it together. And we all put the puzzle together differently. And yet Emily meant it in a very specific way. And you want to understand her. So you're getting this constant back and forth, like, you're in this dance, this constant dance with her, which is pretty intimate.
Nate: So Emily meant it in a specific way, but you don't think that part of what she meant was to open up, leave something open?
Adam: I think that's well said. I do think that there's something to that, but at the same time, it's a dance. It's meant to be interpreted inside yourself, right? You have to apprehend it. But at the same time the deeper you go with it, the better you apprehend it. And it's exponential.
She is making some very sophisticated moves. And I think she was also writing a lot of these poems for Susan who was an extremely adept reader. Emily Dickinson told Susan in a letter that she had learned more from her than anyone else except Shakespeare. And then she added, “and that's strange praise.” She can't even believe that she's got this friend that can understand her at her own level, you know, and that she's learning from her at the level of a Shakespeare, right? So for all her sophistication Emily’s got the perfect reader, and sister, and maybe lover, living next door to her.
Nate: Yeah, I hear what you're saying. You know, like it's open ended, but it doesn't mean you're to just slide through, decide something on the fly and walk away from it.
Adam: You could, I mean, if you’re still getting something out of it. But if you want what she's actually putting into it, then you're down for the count.
Nate: Right.
Adam: But you know, for me it's just like pure joy, like going into those details. But you know, not everybody's got that amount of time. Have you ever tried to read Proust?
Nate: I've got through like the first 200 pages.
Adam: Yeah, well that's a good example, right? Proust, I read through it so slowly. I could take one paragraph and read it 10 times, and every time I'm getting something more out of it, like, not just a little more, sometimes it's a lot more on the 10th read through than it was on the 9th. But who's got time to do that with all of Proust, you know? And with Dickinson it is that way too. She gave us so much that you could spend your life trying to get to the bottom of it.
Nate: You’re in luck man, because it turns out you're spending your life that way.
Adam: Oh God. But what else is there to do? I mean, I love it. It's a joy. It's almost a little too enjoyable for me because sometimes I'm supposed to be grading papers or doing the dishes, but instead and I'm diving into the infinite tree. I’m getting these bulletins all day from Emily.
Nate: Yeah. Sounds unhealthy. Sounds like you got a problem.
Adam: Yeah, it is.
Nate: It is interfering with your grading, man.
Adam: I know! These poor kids, they're getting a raw deal.
Nate: So is that your day gig?
Adam: Yeah, high school teacher. And in fact, I just finished up a unit on Whitman today. And so we'll start with Emily Dickinson next week. And the thing I always do with them, which I love doing, is I always take a poem that I've never read before, and say, okay let's do this together.
Nate: You're going to run out of poems here, man.
Adam: Well, I mean, eventually, yeah, but there's a lot of them! I mean, I've still only read probably half of her poems.
Nate: Wow. Well you're, you're up to like, you're in the what, late 800s?
Adam: Yeah, but there's almost 1800 of them.
Nate: Wow. Alright, so you're still in the prime.
Adam: I'm not gonna run out anytime soon.
Nate: Not even over the hump.
Adam: I'm not even over the hump. Yeah, it's insane, there's still so much left, but it’s like a good book, you don’t want it to end. And it’s fine if I don't get through it too. I'm not gonna hurry through it. One poem at a time. But it’s great, and it leads to these kind of opportunities, like talking to you guys. There's not much I'd rather do than what we've just done, you know?
Nate: Well, I'm glad to hear that. Because, you know, I’ve said before just how much I appreciate what you do, what your dream is telling me. And I'm glad that you wanted to talk to us and that we got to do it.
Adam: Well, I really dig this. I like those songs a lot too. I mean, it's my cuppa tea. I would enjoy the music even if it wasn't graced with Dickinson lyrics.
Nate: So, can I ask you something?
Adam: Sure.
Nate: The first time I reached out, you said you had been reading something that Emily Dickinson's niece had written. And you basically shared that the niece remembers her aunt doing some weird stuff at the piano. I'm trying to remember.
Adam: Oh, weird melodies? Yeah, that was Mattie Dickinson, Sue and Austin’s daughter. She wrote that her Aunt Emily played weird melodies on the piano. How amazing would it be to have a recording of those? Oh, man.
Nate: So I've been thinking about this a lot. One of my questions is, what do we know about this niece? Like, how much of the world did she put in the weird bin? Like was Emily Dickinson actually doing something totally crazy on the piano or was it just?
Adam: Well, I'll tell you two things. First, that there’s also an account by a friend of Emily’s that Dickinson would play her own compositions at parties and that one of them was called, “The Devil.”
Nate: Yes.
Adam: The other thing is to say a little bit more about this niece, Mattie.
Nate: Yes. Yeah. Okay. Tell me more.
Adam: So, I don't know how much you guys know the story of Susan Gilbert living next door, but Susan was Emily’s sister-in-law, married to her brother Austin, but also there was a very, uh, intense relationship between Emily and Susan. Maybe it was romantic. Certainly there are a lot of letters written from Emily to Susan, from when they were in college together, before Austin, that are extremely beautiful and very romantic. And they remained in a close, but fraught, relationship until the end. Susan was there at the end to arrange Emily in the casket.
So, Susan and Austin’s daughter is Martha, nicknamed Mattie. She wrote a short book which I highly recommend called Face to Face. It's a very charming book about growing up with aunt Emily. The best thing about that book is that it goes into great detail about Emily’s relationship with the kids in the house and neighborhood, and how much Emily colluded with the youngsters.
She loved their energy. She loved keeping secrets with them. She was really into the idea of secrets as you can see in her poetry. So she would have all these secrets with these kids. The way Mattie portrays her is that she loved kids, and the kids all adored her above anyone else. They couldn't wait to see her. They just desperately loved her. For some reason she could just capture these very young kids. The entire book seems to take place in a secret realm or something.
Nate: Yeah.
Adam: But “weird.” Yeah. I don't know what that means exactly?
Nate: Yeah. What about Emily Dickinson's piano chops? Like, do we know how good she was?
Adam: She was reportedly good.
Nate: She was good at piano.
Adam: Yeah.
Connor: What kind of repertoire would she or a typical person at that time be playing?
Adam: Well, back then, everybody sat around the piano and sang and they had the sheet music and they had the top hits of the day. No radio back then. And they would all sing these, you know, and then of course there was the church music, which is kind of interesting too, because much of her poetry has that hymn meter, 4/3, 4/3.
And she weirds that too, right? She takes that 4/3 hymn meter and she does all kinds of little twists to it. And, you know, she's constantly messing with that formula. So I imagine the weird melodies are probably similar. It would be amazing to find some of those.
Nate: Can I ask, have you ever heard Aaron Copeland's thing, the Cycle?
Adam: I don't think so.
Nate: Oh, well, he does some of her poems, right, like a dozen, I think it's a dozen, of Emily Dickinson's poems and it's experimental, like 12 tone jazz.
Connor: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Nate: I hate it.
Connor: Okay.
Adam: All right. It doesn't work for you. I tend not to like most settings of her songs, especially if they have a classical or opera style. I mean, I love yours! And I love that Andrew Bird and Phoebe Bridgers one. Have you heard that one?
Nate: No.
Adam: It's terrific
Nate: I know that there's this whole space. Yeah, I know that Emily Dickinson is one of the more sung poets.
Adam: I think there's like infinite room to interpret the songs. One of the things I'm struck by is how well they lend themselves to the song. I feel like sometimes she would come up with a melody first and then fit the poem to that melody. You know, hard to say, but it just feels that way to me when I'm playing with them.
Nate: It's already so…I feel like it's already so hard what she's doing.
Connor: Yeah.
Nate: Without the additional constraint of bending it to a melody. Or maybe that's not how it works. I don't know. Or maybe it's just so easy for Emily Dickinson to do.
Adam: I think she has a supernatural facility. Yeah, for sure. But I think starting with a melody actually makes it easier for the subconscious to do its work. In this poem that I just wrote about (Fr842) she does this very complex trochaic scansion, where certain lines mirror a complex rhythm in a corresponding line, a very complex internal pattern. Basically she's got this intricate rhythmic play that seems to me like it might derive from a melody.
Nate: You’re talking about all rhythm though, right? I mean, how much of that is just her responding, right? Like line by line, like one rhythmic phrase, right. And then just echoing it, whatever, rhyming it, that kind of like impulse.
Adam: Yeah. Just make that symmetry.
Nate: She just realizes it. She's like, well, this is what it takes now. Not only that, but I am gonna pile so much meaning into like four words.
Adam: Right?
Nate: But I'm also gonna ensure that rhythmically it's on point.
Adam: Yeah, but if you have the scaffolding of a melody though, a unique rhythm is something you don't worry about. It frees your mind up. Now you just gotta worry about how do I fit what I wanna say onto that scaffolding.
Connor: Yeah, yeah.
Nate: So you are saying it makes it easier?
Adam: I think it makes it easier.
Nate: Parameters, you're just like, okay, good.
Adam: Well, yeah, constraints. I think it makes it easier, frees up creativity, and it also helps me account for the variation in her forms. So often I wonder, why did she do that there? And I think it might be because she was sitting at the piano, or working in the garden, and she had a melody and she was humming. It's a song structure, you know, her poems.
It's just a hunch. I don't know if she's doing that, but I do know that it certainly goes the other way, as you know, very easily. Her poems lend themselves to melody. You know, whatever this little extra thing she does in some specific poem, it lends itself to some extra melodic thing, right? So when you're putting a melody to the poems it's like, oh, this rhythmic tic is actually helping me make a better melody.
I always try to reverse engineer her poems. It's interesting to try to do it like, okay, in this particular poem she's clearly linking this line to this line through this sound play and then this stanza to that stanza, or whatever. It's fascinating.
Nate: Yeah. That's one of the things that I've really enjoyed reading the prowling Bee for is, you know, like I wouldn't have picked up on any of it. Right. At least not at a conscious kind of analytical, like appreciation level.
Connor: Yeah.
Nate: Just be like, oh wait, what? Anyway, I've enjoyed that.
Adam: Oh, yeah, I mean I love that too. I always wish more people would comment because I want to see more of it. I used to read the blog when Susan wrote it, for the first 686 poems and I loved seeing these things from her that I just wouldn't have picked up on.
And now that I'm writing them, I'm like, wait, I wanna hear what other people have to say. I do get some comments, but I would love to have way more, 'cause it's so interesting.
Nate: I tell you what, I'll tell you what Adam, I'm gonna comment.
Adam: Oh, thank you.
Nate: I'm very reluctant to be interactive online. But I love the Prowling Bee so much. It's like my favorite thing on the internet. Ah. And so if you're telling me you need some commenters, I'm gonna, I'm gonna comment.
Adam: That would be awesome. All right.
Nate: I’m going to say some dumb stuff about poems.
Adam: Yeah, no, I mean, you can't really, it's all gonna be fodder. I mean, that's what I was nervous about when I first started too. 'cause like Susan was so good, I thought I'm not gonna be able to live up to her level of insight. But it doesn't matter. You get the conversation going, you know? That’s the main thing.
Nate: Well, I wouldn't sell yourself short, Adam, because I didn't even notice that there was like a switch. 'Cause I started, you know, kind of like late. So I was playing catch up and you know, I think I probably read 20 of your commentaries before I realized you weren't Susan.
Adam: Oh, wow. Because I feel like I'm so much more long-winded and she's so elegant and concise.
Nate: In any of your commentaries have you ever basically just written off a poem?
Adam: I can't write any off because I'm committed to doing every one. And then I'm also kind of committing to Emily. I trust her as an artist. Harold Bloom said this about Shakespeare, that he was always intellectually ahead of him and he could never catch up. That's how I feel about her. I can never catch up. But I'm at least gonna try. And that means that I assume every poem is gonna have something to it, even if I have trouble seeing it. But what I find is that when I'm writing about it, there's always something. I always find something. Sometimes I think, at first, this is a silly poem, or I dismiss it for whatever reason, but with further reflection I see it's always because I'm missing her. I'm just not seeing it. I haven't gotten it yet. And then all of a sudden something will crack open and I'm in deep. I'm like, alright, now I can write 10 pages on this poem. It’s crazy.
Connor: Well, I'm just curious about that process. Like how, how do you get inside a poem or, before that crack comes, what are the tools that you use to get inside of it? Are you taking notes and starting to draft a post early on? Are you just kind of sitting and reading and rereading? Are you going to other texts? What's your process like?
Adam: I do all that. Sometimes I'll read a poem and I'll just be so, so clueless. Sometimes with the first reading I think I'm never gonna get underneath this poem. And then you keep reading and it's…I equate it to watching a Polaroid picture slowly develop. I don't know how she achieved this over and over again. I just think she loved riddles and so she had that mindset. It goes back to that secret thing with kids, right?
Nate: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Adam: The other thing is that writing about it makes the picture develop even more clearly. When I started writing about it, I was like, oh, I'm getting these poems at a whole new level now. Just through the process of writing. That was interesting, you know, that that starts happening. It's just like singing the poems as songs gives you a new level of understanding. If you repeat this line 50 times, it's gonna just automatically start developing and blossoming and you're gonna see it in a way that you haven’t before. You could read that same line two different ways, but you wouldn't know that if you didn't sing that line 50 times first.
But I do check if there's anything about the poems in the books I have, or online. Sometimes there's literally nothing, so you're kind of flying blind on them. So yeah, those I just have to kind of struggle through.
Connor: Well, at the risk of sounding too much like a podcaster, what you mentioned, the little bit about the backstory about the Prowling Bee. So you come in at poem 600 something, but before that the Prowling Bee existed for you as a thing that you read for a while. Susan did 600 some posts, and then you take over. How did it start? When did it start and then how did you come into it?
Adam: Okay. So basically I just decided at one point, because I love Emily Dickinson, I wanted to read every one of her poems. So I thought I should just start at the beginning. So I got this book of her complete poems, Poems as she Preserved Them, edited by Christanne Miller, which is the most up-to-date, complete book of her poems.
Then I started going through 'em, and then I would get to one, I'd be like, I don't know, I can't figure this one out. So I'd go online, and Prowling Bee is one of few resources online where you can find commentary on some of these poems. And then I just fell in love with Susan's writing, and so then I would just go to the blog after every poem. And then I started commenting on the posts. I became a frequent commenter.
Connor: What year is this? When, when, where are we in time?
Adam: Uh, this is three, four years ago.
Connor: Okay.
Adam: Maybe it was even five years ago when I first started reading the blog. And then, I mean, when I started reading her she'd already pretty much finished commenting, but I didn't know that because I was back at the beginning, so I didn't realize. It’s like a star that’s light takes a million years to get to the earth. Eventually I noticed that she had stopped. And I thought what am I gonna do when I get to the 687th poem?
You know? I guess I'm just gonna be on my own. It's fine. It's time to fly by myself.
And then Susan actually reached out to me out of the blue and asked if I would take over the blog. It sort of felt like a tap straight from Emily’s long white fingers.
I was like, oh, this is something I gotta do. Right? This is gonna be a big undertaking. This is gonna take me like 10 years, maybe a dozen years to get through the rest of these poems. And it's gonna be an obsession. But I like doing it so much. It's a labor of love, you know? I like the fact that there's no money involved too.
Nate: You like that.
Adam: It's pure, you know? 'cause Emily was like that. She never sold a poem in her life. I don't think she ever received a penny for anything in her life. Her father supported her of course, so she was fortunate that way. But it meant that the poetry was unsullied by any market place demands, like, this poetry is for you… For who? Did she write it for the people? I think she did. That's my personal feeling. Some people think she just wrote it for herself or her friends, but so many poems have that aphoristic quality that I honestly feel like she was writing it for posterity. That's open to debate, but I think so.
Nate: It's hard to know.
Adam: And speaking of hard to know, can we just talk for a minute about Susan finding your podcast on the radio?
Nate: Okay. God, I have no, I cannot make any sense of that. It's like some…
Adam: Susan said it was “the long white Fingers of Emily Dickinson.”
Connor: Oh yeah. Wow.
Adam: That was her term for it. And I was like, well, well, the long white fingers.
Connor: The long white fingers. I mean, how in the world, like, it doesn't make any sense. It would have to hit escape velocity to reach anyone who's not one of our friends. Right? Much less someone who wrote the Prowling Bee, who we've talked about.
Adam: So yeah, when you guys told me that it couldn’t be on the radio, and I realized this was some rogue DJ who just found this podcast somehow. Maybe he or she was an Emily Dickinson fan and found this just looking around.
Nate: It is not easy to find. No, it's not. If you had just Googled, like even if you knew the name of the show, like it might not come up.
Adam: Right because it's that small.
Nate: That small.
Adam: Because somehow this DJ found your podcast, put it on the air, and Susan was driving past a small town in California. Ukiah, California, was the closest town to her. And that's maybe got a couple radio stations? Maybe they've got a college station or something. And so she's picking up the station probably from Ukiah and she hits the scanner on her radio and not only does it stop on your show, but it's right at the beginning and she's driving and she listens to the whole thing. And then not only that, but she reaches out to me. And she points out, well, basically the reason she reached out to me is because she knew, I think she just understood that we were kindred spirits in the sense that she knew that I made songs out of Dickinson's poetry too. She liked what you did, and she also liked what you had to say about the poem, which coming from her is high praise, because I think she's very astute. So not only does she write me about it, but she writes this whole review of the show. Meanwhile, I get this on my phone and my mind glitches because I had just texted you guys like a half hour before I saw her text to set up this podcast. I thought what in the hell is going on? Those guys told me this was a small podcast? But it was on the radio??? I'm like, what? This is beyond mere coincidence. I never know what to do with coincidences because sometimes they just seem so uncanny.
Nate: And you're like, how could that be? This one is a little beyond the normal. Uncanny. It's true. Because this is like, this is like modernity. This is like hundreds of millions of people in America, right? This is like concentration of media. Like there's no way with how many are out there that somebody in California that gives a shit about Dickinson put it on the radio.
Connor: And it's an email newsletter podcast, you know, sort of the most kind of modern, ridiculous way of distributing media that then ends up on terrestrial radio? I think I want to… I'm always on the hunt for a low stakes mystery. I think we should track the DJ down.
Nate: You’re going to figure it out?
Connor: Don't you think we should try?
Nate: I think you should definitely try.
Connor: I think it'd be cool. I'm gonna try.
Adam: No, you should definitely try. I don't think it would be probably that hard. But, you know, I think it would be worth finding the DJ just to find the story. Like what's the story? Like, how did they find this podcast? And also don't you think this DJ would love to hear this story?
Nate: Yeah, well, maybe you should. I get it, because of the improbability of the whole thing. Yeah. You wanna hear something crazy that happened? That you're a part of?
Adam: I also have this deep-rooted conviction that there's magic in radio. It's not something I could ever prove. I just know if you turn on random Spotify, it doesn't have the same magic. But if you have a human DJ in there, there's something extra-sensory happening and the DJ will sometimes, without knowing what they're doing, play the song that somebody needs to hear. I used to drive cab in San Francisco and I listened to a lot of radio and I just have this feeling that because it's human run, there's this mysterious thing that happens on radio.
Nate: Adam, Connor is a radio DJ.
Adam: Okay.
Nate: Connor, have you ever had the experience of like magically giving somebody just what they need?
Connor: Well, yeah, so I'm totally with you and I do. I'm not doing a radio show right now, but I did one for a long time. When I was living in Auburn, and you know, I've done one basically everywhere I lived before that. And when I used to live at Poughkeepsie I would do a late night show, and yeah, this one cab driver who called himself Space would call in during a 2 to 4 AM show in the middle of the night.
Adam: Mm.
Connor: Uh and he would call in every week just to chat. He requested the same Wu-Tang clan song. You just have these moments.
Adam: I think it's just because you're putting it out there.
Connor: Yeah, you're broadcasting, someone is receiving. It's just that this portal is there and, and interesting things are gonna happen inevitably.
Adam: Yeah. I've seen enough strange things like with Susan finding this podcast, I just have to, you know, I don't have any religious convictions or anything, but I do feel like there's just like these mysterious things that happen in the universe that we can't quite fathom. And in this case, it does feel like there's some hanky panky happening in the universe here.
Nate: Well, what I'm thinking of is all the universal hanky pany that I missed out on, right? I feel like I'm due, like every now and then, certainly I'm gonna get some action from the universe.
Adam: Well, you know, but by making the podcast, you put yourself out there. The universe is going to meet that. I mean, it's the same with starting to write this blog, right? I mean, starting to take that on. It's like, okay, you're gonna make these connections.
So you set yourself up just by following what it is that is so interesting to you, right? Like, it's so local for you. You know, some of Susan Kornfeld’s early blog posts have gotten like 25,000 visits, but she's a school teacher and gardener who just decided, I'm gonna start writing about one Emily Dickinson poem at a time, on Blogger, the Google blog, the easiest blog to use.
Nate: Because it's beautiful.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: And it's unpainted, right? It's blogger.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: Obviously, whoever is making this happen isn't in it for the slick technology. They weren't beguiled by the Blogger. No. There's some other motivation.
Adam: Here. She's got a gift. And she probably didn't even know she had it to the extent she does, you know. I think she was kind of just doing it for herself, honestly.
Nate: Sure
Adam: Like, I'm just gonna.
Nate: Well, what's more attractive than somebody actually giving a shit about something.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: They love it.
Adam: Yeah. And then look what that has spawned. It’s very inspiring. I think what you guys are doing has some of that kind of potential too. It’s actually already reached its potential by reaching Susan on rural California radio. This is because not that many people are just actually sitting around talking about poetry, and making music out of it. But I actually think there's a lot of people that would like to listen to that. I think that there's an audience for that.
Nate: It's just funny. How do you get it out there?
Adam: Like, well, somehow, the old fashioned way, a DJ played it on the radio. There you go.
Nate: One small town DJ at a time. That's right. You gotta find this guy. See if he's got any friends.
Adam: Well, that DJ was a conduit to Susan, against all odds, as she was driving,
Nate: As she was driving, not at home, not at the time, no. It was like a rental car or something. Like Yeah, she was just passing through. She was driving. As to the improbability, yeah, she's in a weird place.
Adam: And doesn't that whole incident kind of take you out of your reason? It takes you outta sight. You know it puts you more into that freaky state of apprehension. And you almost want to shut it down. You're like, I gotta shut that down, down.
Nate: I immediately shut it down. I'm not gonna like, you know, look a gift horse in the mouth. It's like you, I was thinking about, you know, while you were talking, I was remembering last summer. I was at the Jersey store and I was sitting with my dad and we were under an umbrella. We just kept looking at the beach. We're having one of these like slow motion, like non-conversations where we're just looking at the horizon. Mm-hmm. He was walking me through the whole audience situation, right. Like, who's listening to the podcast? Do you wanna have more people listening to it? And I was just kind of like, yeah, I don’t know. And then he is like, well, certainly, and he was, you know, because my dad's a creative guy too. He could refer to his own projects and what actually was fulfilling for him about that. And he was basically trying to sell me on, well probably what you're looking for here, what might be satisfying, what you should think about is just connecting to some people that you wanna connect with, right?
Like, you're not, you don't, obviously, we don't care about millions of randos. Who cares about millions of randos, right. So maybe the best case scenario is you actually establish some kind of relationship with somebody who either cares about Emily Dickinson poems or, you know, poetry in general.
Or somebody who's trying to figure out songwriting and, and you know, how you could use poetry as a way to access some new grounds in that way. Anyway, I think he was right. And Adam, I'm really glad we got to have this kind of conversation and start a relationship because I think he was right.
Although what Connor and I have always been saying, is that this is about us.
Adam: That’s where you start.
Nate: This is just a good way for us to hang out and that's all that it needs to be.
Adam: But you're doing it in this medium. The medium that you're hanging out through is rich, right. Because it's poetry. With poets like Emily Dickinson and Whitman, it's hard to find a richer medium, except maybe straight up music. That's got an equal richness to it, but maybe it’s a little harder to talk about, but it's still you, and you talked about it beautifully earlier.
So the music’s there too. It sounds like you guys both have that love as well. You know, and you're kind, I mean, and that's a good way into the poetry too, through the musicality of the poems, you know, because they're extremely musical in all kinds of ways.
But that thing you were saying about making it for yourself and your friends. You know that Emily Dickinson poem, the Soul Selects her own society and then Shuts the Door?
Nate: Yeah, that's a good one.
Adam: Yeah. That's the same kind of thing, right?
Nate: Yeah. So the soul shuts the door? To shut the door is kind of harsh, don't you think?
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. It's a little harsh. But she was so like that though. She had her friends, she had her family. That's good enough for her. And the true wonder is that we got to see the poems at all. She left them for us. She didn’t shut the door. She left it ajar. For at this point, you know, millions of people have read and love her poetry. So she might have shut the door to the pressures of fame and acclaim, but her mind and heart are wide open in her poems.
Well, I shouldn't say it's wide open 'cause the poems are hard to penetrate, but considering how many people love them, they're pretty open.
Nate: Well this makes me kind of think about, you know, you're just talking about coincidence and like the craziness of the stuff in California. It also just makes me realize there's so many unrealized connections, right? I just wonder how many. Are we living in a world where Emily Dickinson, despite everything that might have prevented her poetry from becoming easy to access, it just seems like, are there others? Okay, so one scenario is there's like hundreds of Emily Dickinson poems right. She wrote every one of 'em, right? There were other artists, and their whole body of work has been obliterated by time. Right. Or like, this poetry is the best of all possible worlds. But there was only one Emily Dickinson. And even though everything was in the way, you know, here we are.
Adam: Because she was that good, so good that her work was going to make it out into the world somehow, be taken care of by the universe somehow. You have to have that sort of kind of faithless faith, you know, which I think she did in a strange way. Like she struggled with religious doubts, but I think she had a kind of deeper faith that she could write these poems, which she carefully sewed into fascicles, to leave for us. She didn't tell anybody about them when she was alive, as far as we know, not her sister, nor her friend Sue, which is interesting. They found 'em after she died, these hundreds and hundreds of poems.
I mean, we know that 250 of them or so were given to Susan. But for the most part nobody knew about the sheer volume.
I do think she went through some trauma and she used the poetry as a way of dealing with the trauma, but I think the poems were written for posterity and she just had some faith that the universe would make that happen, and it did. Now, are there other people like that, that have that same faith, and it doesn't pay off? Yeah, maybe, but I don't know.
Nate: Have to be, of course there are. That's most people. Most people that are good at what they do.
Adam: I mean, but are they that good?
Nate: Well, yeah, that's, yeah.
Adam: Are they that good? Probably not, you know. I mean, there's a guy in our neighborhood in Queens who died a few years ago, this guy named Stuart Chalem, and the woman who was helping clean out the house said to my buddy, Quinn, you should come over and look at this guy’s art, because he left a lot of art. So we went over and there was probably 300 sketchbooks full of remarkable art, and hundreds of paintings too. And I'm thinking this stuff is great, this belongs in a museum. This guy's amazing, you know? And it ended up just all getting scattered. They took most of it down to like a free library. We each kept a few pieces.
It was kind of sad, because it was this guy's life work, and it was especially sad because the work was so good, right? It had something. But we gave some of it to good homes. There’s a couple masterpieces of his that are quietly hanging at Flynn’s, our local dive bar. We put one up at QUIP this year, an international music festival that Quinn and I put together every year. So it's up, it's around, more than it probably was up and around in his life.
So I guess in a strange way, even his work is getting out there, beyond his ken, maybe more than he probably thought it was gonna be, but maybe less than he hoped.
A really interesting thing about Emily Dickinson, she never sold a poem and yet we're still all reading them. That's a crazy cool thing. It's so pure. It's so pure. No commerce there except for maybe the scent of the pine in the poem.
Nate: Yeah, Well, you know, you know, that's what you call a bundle of pine needles, a fascicle.
Adam: A bundle of pine needles?
Nate: Serious. Yeah. That's like if you're keying out pine species, it's gonna ask you how many needles are in a fascicle.
Adam: That's a good try. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. [Later: What!!! This was for real? How did Nate pull this fact out of his ass with such perfect timing?]
Nate: I love it though.
Adam: And then there was the woman that named them fascicles, Mabel Loomis Todd. Her whole story is a crazy story too, starting with the fact that she was Emily’s brother Austin’s much younger mistress, and Sue’s nemesis. But she was obsessed with Emily too. She's a big part of the reason we have her poems today, because she obsessively worked to get them published after Emily died.
She never got to lay her eyes on Emily. She played piano once in their house, though, and Emily sent her down a note with a glass of sherry, just to say thank you for playing the piano. Mabel dined out on that story for years. She actually went on a lecture circuit years later to talk about Emily’s poetry. So Mabel is the one that named them fascicles. So that was her own addition.
Nate: That's not Emily Dickson?
Adam: No, Emily just left us her poems in little sewed together books, put them in a drawer, or maybe under her bed, and then people found them and it's like, what the hell are these?
They just found these hundreds and hundreds of poems and oh goodness. And now we have them all. They're all good too. And sometimes they're beyond, like, often they're beyond. It's like, holy wowsers. I don't know. Her life is endlessly interesting. Her whole connection with Susan. The fact that she only wore white for the last 10 to 15 years of her life. She just started wearing white. But she also sewed pockets into her white dress so she could carry pencil and paper.
All these things about her are fascinating. So I'm glad you guys entered into the fray a little bit.
Connor: No, I'm not gonna be able to get out. I think I'm
Adam: You're stuck now. You're stuck in Infinity.
Connor: I'm gonna wind up walking there, wearing all white, walking to rural central California.
Adam: Wait, did you guys start with Yeats? You started with Yeats, right?
Nate: Yeah. So we did Yeats first, and then Whitman, like a mini Whitman thing. Yeah. And then Dickinson, and, you know, after the first one I was gonna move on.
I was thinking, can I capture some Moby Dick? Mix it up. Right. But anyway, then I had to do something with this, so now I'm back on the Dickinson train.
Adam: Oh, okay. Well, yeah, the fact that you're writing songs is key because she lends herself so well to the music. But I'm sure Yeats does too. But I'm sure Whitman is hard!
Nate: Whitman's hard.
Adam: With Whitman you gotta play jazz.
Nate: Well, you have to enter in excerpts.
Adam: Right.
Nate: And occasionally I got away with creative arranging for a short poem.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: It's hard to make it easy pop.
Adam: Right.
Nate: Very tough. But anyway, yeah, I think the prospect of trying to do a whole long poem of Whitman would be a lot.
Adam: Yeah, with Dickinson, the song structure gives you an easy way to memorize the poem. And Dickinson poems gives you something to endlessly chew on. You love lyrics that are like, okay, every time I sing this song, I'm gonna see a new angle. Have you read Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Nate: Is that a poet? No. I read so slowly. In the last like four years I've read Yeats, Whitman and Dickinson.
Adam: Yeah, that’s good. You could just stop there and you would still have so much to read. I mean, I definitely haven't read everything Yeats wrote either. I've only scratched the surface with that guy. And Whitman, I've read a lot of Whitman and I'm still like…
Nate: A lot of Whitman…
Adam: Yeah, it's crazy that all of these writers gave us an almost bottomless reservoir. You could just keep going back to it and dipping your bucket forever.
But yeah, I mean I'm happy you guys got such a foray into Dickinson because I like to listen to you talk about it. I love hearing the arrangements.
And so Connor, you’re a DJ?
Connor: Oh, no, that's just like a, a side project thing. I'm a journalist.
Adam: Okay.
Connor: Um, so I, I think that's part of why the mystery, the mysterious DJ in Central California appeals to me.
Adam: The mystery. You like that.
Connor: It's alluring to me. You gotta follow the story. I'm looking for any excuse to call random strangers.
Adam: Yeah. Oh, good. Well, let me know. I can't wait to hear what happens with that. I mean, a good story would be cool, but maybe even more cool would be if you can't find one, there is no answer. You know?
Connor: Just eternity on the other line, you know?
Adam: Yeah. What's that great song about the guy that's working on the phone line?
Connor: Wichita lineman.
Adam: Wichita Lineman. Yeah. Yeah.
Nate: Oh, I know that song. A great song. Who wrote that? That's, uh, Glen Campbell.
Connor: Glen Campbell, yeah.
Adam: There’s a great story behind that song because the guy that wrote it, I can't remember his name now, but he sent the song, as an unfinished sketch, to Glen Campbell. He wasn't finished with the song, but Glen Campbell didn't realize it was only a sketch and then recorded the song. The writer checked in later and said, well, what do you think about doing that song? Glen Campbell's like, oh, we already recorded it. The writer said, what are you talking about? I wasn't finished with it. I just sent it to you as an idea. But it's perfect unfinished, you know? It's like the song is perfect.
But anyway, that song has a little bit of that I'm-gonna-tap-into-eternity type of type of thing.
I love the idea. But I'm sure there's a real DJ out there who played the podcast, and they could tell us the story. I bet you it's not that hard to track down that story.
Nate: Yeah. Well, so those are fighting words, Connor. Like if you were any kind of journalist at all, you'd be able to find the DJ tomorrow. Yeah. We’ll trash talk Connor, now.
Connor: It’s too neat. I think there's something, I don't know. Yeah, we'll see.
Adam: It's too what?
Connor: It's too neat.
Adam: I bet you there's something more to the story. There's some other neat little twist or somewhere in there.
Connor: Is it possible that Susan had the podcast on her phone somehow?
Adam: She said she was scanning the radio. She just hit scan.
Connor: That's the crazy thing. I'm really drawn to a story like this. My mentor in school, he’s another story. Someone that I went to school with was in a used book store in Kansas City and found a book written by someone we knew in common. And he opened it up and it was the copy that the author had inscribed for his parents.
Nate: Oh wow.
Adam: What was the book?
Connor: And I was like, well, we could figure out how, how did that book of his parents living in Indiana, who are dead now, how did that book, their son's book, wind up in Kansas City? Maybe we can figure that out. Um, and I never really followed through on it.
Adam: Yeah, that would be good to do that. There's a similar story which actually ties in with that, and about something we talked about earlier, the Savage Detectives. That novel mentions a poet named Ted Berrigan.
Nate: They mentioned like every poet that I've never heard of.
Adam: There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot. But Ted Berrigan is a favorite poet of mine, and his sons are two of my best friends, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan. Both of them are poets as well.
So flashback to a time in the 90s when I was living with Edmund, and was in graduate school at Berkeley. I got to the point where I was hating grad school. I thought all of these academics are messed up. There's no laughter here. These people are just too uptight. I gotta get outta here. But I also had this connection in San Francisco with these poets and artists, and it's kind of a family, right?
You might say it was extra-literary. It's a community. But I decided because I was hating graduate school so much, I was going to go to Ecuador, just get away from everything and live in Ecuador for a while. I had this idea in my mind that people in Ecuador at least knew how to laugh. And I was right about that it turned out. I decided when I was down there, I wasn't going to read anything in English, only Spanish.
Nate: And did you have much Spanish before you went to Ecuador?
Adam: No, not a lot. But it was fun to try to only read and speak only in Spanish. I mean, I had enough that I could get around and I could translate too. I would get books of Spanish poetry and just translate them. They were probably terrible translations. But you know, you're, you're basically making new poems, right?
So I was down there for a few months. I hadn't read anything in English for a couple months, and I walked into a small bookstore in a small town called Sua, and in the bookstore, which only had Spanish books, there was one book in English, and it was by this poet named Anselm Hollo, who was Ted Berrigan's best friend. The title of Anselm Hollo’s book was “Pick Up the House”, which is a line from a Ted Berrigan poem. My buddy Anselm Berrigan was named after Anselm Hollo, the guy that wrote the book I so improbably found in this remote book story. So here was this book, and I thought, oh, I can go home now. I can read in English now. It was this one book that somehow had made it to this little town in Ecuador, and this book was from my home. It was from my people. It was that sort of feeling. You know, Just like there is magic in terrestrial radio, I think there's magic in bookstores too, and books. I have that naive feeling that these kinds of productions, when they're made by humans, for love and for art, have some special quality to them, so that things get put in the right hands for the right reason with the right time. I know this is not something I could ever prove.
Nate: I don't think you wanna prove it.
Adam: Yeah, you don't, you don't. I mean, you want to convince other people that it's there, maybe, so that they can try to tune into it. Because so many people are missing it. They're just seeing the tree, they're missing the sea.
It's not that you would want to prove it, but you would want to get other people to see it so that they can also take part in it, so they can have their own productions, their own art, their own communities, their own connection with the magic.
I honestly see it with this podcast. I see it with your music. I see it with what Susan did with the Prowling Bee, and then of course, in the poetry world there are lots of moments where, for somebody's found one of my books that I wrote in a random bookstore, and it feels like, oh, that they were supposed to find that book at that bookstore. You know, that book made it there against heavy odds. It somehow made it to the right place.
Nate: Yeah. Cool. Cool.
Adam: So Dickinson, I feel like she opens us up to that. Because again, the purity of the fact that we're reading her unpublished poems. I mean, there’s plenty of magic in Whitman, but he pushed his poems. Like he was his own biggest hype man.
Nate: Absolutely.
Adam: You know, he wrote his own blurbs right? He also wrote reviews of his own book using fake names. He was totally the opposite of Emily. It’s great. I love that about him too, but like, yeah, no, it's not Emily. Like some other thing.
Nate: He kind of pushed too hard.
Adam: Yeah. I don't know why, but I love that about him too. It's like lovable. I'm always so got though by how completely opposite Whitman and Dickinson were, I mean, they were, you know, alive at the same time. They could have easily run into each other.
Nate: Well, do we know if Dickinson met Whitman?
Adam: She says she never read him. She writes in a letter that she heard it was scandalous! which is hilarious because Emily Dickinson did have an irreverent side to her, but she was also very proper. I mean he liked to push the boundaries of propriety, to be naughty. So I don't know what exactly Dickinson means by scandalous. Scandalous can mean a lot of things to Dickinson. But I think she did read him, or at least knew his project, because she has one poem that I swear is a rejoinder to Whitman. [Fr642] It's just a hunch. That's another thing I couldn't prove, but I personally think that she did know his work. It was in the air. She said she did not read it, but he's expansive, he's outward. She's inward, you know, she's gnomic. He could be that way too, but he's basically trying to go on at great length to bring you in, not keep you out.
Connor: Litanies.
Adam: What's that?
Connor: Litanies.
Adam: There's the Whitman litany, yeah. It's going forever. And he's got this amazing arrogance. Not only am I arrogant, says Whitman, but you're gonna be arrogant with me, because we're both miracles.
And yet for all of their opposite styles and temperaments, they take you to the same place ultimately.
Nate: Well, I think there's only so many places they can take you, right.
Adam: I mean, if it opens you up.
I got a feeling Emily and Walt would've gotten a kick out of each other, though. They would've probably liked each other.
Nate: I don't think so.
Adam: No. They would've been friends.
Nate: She might've sent him a flute of champagne from upstairs.
Adam: Yeah! Well, there's a great scene in that face-to-face book by Mattie Dickinson that I recommended to you guys. It's a short book and it's a great read. There's a scene where she talks about this guy, this Newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles, who was coming over, like he's been invited over, and once he gets there Emily refuses to come out of her room, and he’s not having it, so he goes halfway up the stairs and he is like, Emily Dickinson, you rascal, come out! And she does, she comes out and she's got a smile on her face.
Nate: Like, that’s all it takes. Instead of going away, march upstairs and call her a rascal going up here. I get you, Emily Dickinson!
Adam: To me that would've been Whitman calling on Emily Dickinson. Whitman would've just called her out. And will you, rascal, come out? I mean, Whitman was, he was open like that. Like he was one of the only people to go to Poe's funeral. He didn't care for Poe, because he just thought Poe was too macabre, and, and yet he was one of the few people to go to his funeral. And afterward he told a reporter that Poe had a place in American literature. I definitely think that Whitman would've understood and loved Dickinson. Now, whether Dickinson would've been able to love him back, I don’t know, but I think she would've, I think he would've broke down her defenses quick with his rapier wit and his joie de vivre. I dunno, it's all speculation.
Nate: It also seems like they wouldn't be very threatened by each other, because what's like them? He's not trying to do what you're doing. Right.
Adam: And vice versa.
Nate: Vice versa. It's just kind of like, oh, no, that's cool, you're doing it that way.
Adam: Yeah. I could see some eye rolling on Emily's part for sure. But, I don't know, the wonder with Whitman is that he was so blustery and yet still is so great.
Nate: With Whitman, I feel like it’s like with Compte de Lautremont, kind of like, if you get that evil, it's kind of like, you know, angelic.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: Right. Like, I think like when you are that full of yourself, there is no yourself anymore. Right? Yeah, because it's all you and you're it, and it's like, right, everybody is. And so him blustering is just, you know, affirming,
Adam: Affirming, there's that word again. That's a great, great word. Affirming. Yeah. And she had her own kind of evil, which, you know, which I love. That's why that “Face to Face” book is so good, like all of her secrets with the little kids around the neighborhood and she’s telling them not to grow up, to stay bad, you know. Both of them were in touch with the shadow side. You know, and neither were afraid to contradict themselves like that. And it's crazy how central they are to American poetry and not just American Poetry, I wanna say world poetry. I think Whitman influences poets all over the world. I think Emily does too. And the fact that they're alive at the same time and were so opposite each other, and so ultimately aligned, is awesome. And Whitman is weird too. It's a big part of what I love about Whitman.
I was just saying it today to the students, “this little section of Whitman in Song of Myself when he is making love to the ocean is extremely weird.” Like, he's extremely weird often, you know. It's great because you can't ever predict what's gonna come and you're constantly being surprised and being like, what in the hell are you talking about? Are you having sex with the ocean now?
Nate: What?
Adam: You know, he's having a turn with the sea.
Nate: Yeah. Well, you know, that was kind of like the appeal for doing [songifying] Moby Dick chapters.
Adam: Mm.
Nate: The weirdness. It’s just like, the weirdest shit happening.
Adam: You know? You're right about that. Melville is also constantly weird. Well, especially in Moby Dick.
Nate: Yeah. Especially, I mean, I don't know, I’ve only read Moby Dick. I haven't read all that much Melville.
Adam: oh, Moby Dick’s crazy. like the long chapter that’s just a meditation on the color white or the…
Nate: Oh my gosh. The white chapter's incredible. Oh, the one I wanted to start with is the squeezing sperm chapter.
Adam: Yeah.
Nate: The touch of the hand. Like you don't even know where the sperm stops and someone else’s hand begins. That chapter is weird as hell.
Adam: It is. That would be fun to make into a song.
Nate: Oh my gosh, it's so lyrical that one. The other one that I like and desperately wanna do, but I feel like I might not be able to do, is the one with the cook giving a sermon to the sharks.
Adam: Oh yeah, yeah.
Nate: But you know, because it's like the old black guy, maybe I shouldn't go there. But God, that stuff is so incredible.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's another local, I mean, what I love is that Melville was in that same New Englandly time and place. They all could have have run into each other, you know. Emerson and Thoreau too. Those guys are a trip. Those guys did know each other. And Emerson was a guest at Susan and Austin’s home, but Emily didn’t deign to show up. I mean, at that time there was something in the air. Poe is also incredible. Even Longfellow.
Hawthorne, another one. Hmm. Hawthorne. Incredibly weird and good. One-of-a-kind, a sui generis writer. Have you ever read the letters that Melville wrote to Hawthorne?
Nate: No.
Adam: I gotta highly recommend those to you. Okay. Because they are love letters like only Melville could write.
Nate: They're weird or they're just like,
Adam: oh, no. I mean, Melville was just deeply in love with Hawthorne and probably Hawthorne didn't exactly return it, but, you guys can read the letters, you'll understand what I mean.
Nate: If I like Moby Dick, I'll like these.
Adam: Yeah. It'll give you a whole new appreciation for the sperm and the, uh, and that bonkers chapter where he marries Queequeg and they have the, oh God, they have the…
Nate: Well, that's where it begins, once you start pressing foreheads.
It's just so sweet too. Like, why haven't I had this in my life? Like from the start?
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Like, what a beautiful chapter that is when they wind up in bed together and married.
Nate: Yeah. He's like, you know what? I'm down with your idol. Yeah. You know? What about the idol? Yeah. Well, good. Yeah. And like, well, sure. Like have all my money, obviously.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's wonderful stuff. Melville's another guy that’s kind of bottomless, you know, because there's so many books and, and his poetry is interesting.
Nate: You know what, so on the recommendation of my dad, I got a book of Melville's poetry. I got that book and my Emily Dickinson book, like on the same day.
Adam: Oh wow.
Nate: Like, I kind of flipped through the pages of the Melville book and I was like, I think maybe, and then I never looked at it again. It was like, alright, like something else is happening over here.
Adam: You got pulled to the Dickinson vortex.
Nate: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adam: Like Melville did write some beautiful poems, but I think his strength is his fiction. To me Bartleby is one of the top 10 short stories ever written. I don't know if you've read that.
Nate: haven't. Yeah, I’ve just read Moby Dick and Billy Budd.
Adam: That's a trip.
Nate: A trip. And um, Typee too.
Adam: Typee is a trip too.
Nate: Typee is a real trip, but it's not the same thing.
Adam: No, it's early stuff written for money and adventure. Little flashes of genius in there. But yeah, nothing like Moby Dick, that’s a whole ‘nuther thing.
Nate: The guy who writes Moby Dick can do whatever he wants. The guy who does Typee like…
Adam: Yeah. But the sad thing is that Typee sold really well, but nobody wanted to read Moby Dick back then. Melville died penniless because he “preferred not to.”
Nate: And then Pierre apparently was like the weirdest, most disappointing book of all time.
Adam: I gotta read that one because it sounds really meta and interesting.
Nate: I agree. I haven't read it, but I'm intrigued by it famously being the worst book to follow the best book.
Adam: Yeah. But I think it's supposed to be a meta-detective story. I bet you it's actually good. We have to read it now. It has to be good.
Nate: That's what I'm thinking. It has to be good.
Adam: I think we should read that one and talk about it in a year. In a year. But I love this conversation tonight. Uh, it'll be interesting to see how you cut it down.
Nate: Yeah. We got a lot of tape here. We should definitely stop right now.
Adam: Yeah, to make your job easier
Connor: I’m crashing here.
Adam: Yeah, me too. But, uh, love talking to you guys and meeting you.
Nate: Yeah. Likewise. Once I get something kind of cut together, I'll send it out.
Adam: Yeah. And I think what I'll do is maybe I'll just transcribe the podcast and make that the post.
Nate: Oh, as is? Like, have it like a seamless thing. It's one thing.
Adam: Yeah. Just like, what are they called? Not a mashup, not a merger, but like a crossover joint release thing.
I like when there’s an opportunity to change up the form of the blog, without going too far astray from its original purpose.
I don't know if you saw, but there was a recent post where I realized that the poem could possibly be read as an account of being raped. Did you see that one?
Nate: The correspondence with Susan?
Adam: Yeah. I just wrote these e-mails back and forth with Susan about a poem that was troubling me and then that became the commentary.
Nate: It was pretty powerful. I read that while watching my daughter play soccer.
Adam: How old's your daughter?
Nate: My youngest daughter is 13.
Adam: Alright, so mine's also 13 . I have a 13 and 15-year-old.
Nate: Okay. I've got a 13-year-old a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old.
Adam: Oh wow. Okay.
Nate: Anyway it was pretty moving and Susan’s writing is great.
Adam: Yeah, she has such facility and grace.
Nate: There were some lines where I was tearing up watching my daughter play soccer. Like, oh my goodness.
Adam: Yeah, I can't. That was the first time I've ever cried reading an Emily Dickinson poem. It was the first time the sadness really broke through, and I just felt her pain.
But also I was also in disbelief. I still can't quite come to terms with the possibility that Emily was raped. Having daughters, it just, then it just really rips you up. You're like, oh, no. So it rocked my world, and it is still rocking my world. I'd heard that rumor before, but it just felt a bit crackpot, until all of a sudden you read a poem like that and it all seems plausible. I'm glad it didn't seem like too far afield for you reading it.
Nate: No, not at all. No, and I think, you know, I think that it's, never mind the subject, but I think the impulse to just kind of keep things fresh, kind of play with the format…
Adam: Oh, the letters back and forth, yeah. And then doing this with you guys. Yeah. I think it'll be fun. And again, I know you are making this podcast for your friends and family, but I hope it brings you some new listeners. I mean, it'll probably turn some people onto your podcast.
Nate: Well Connor and I have talked about this, but you know, I think you reach as much as you have space, but I could definitely do this just as a way of, you know, oblivion. Just like, well this is one way to make time disappear.
Adam: Yeah. It's a good way to do it. But you could just call each other up, you know what I mean?
Nate: Well, this is what Connor's been telling me the whole time.
Connor: This is an incredibly elaborate way…It's like a Rube Goldberg machine just staying in touch. Nate doesn't wanna talk on the phone.
Adam: Well, the other thing is, it's kinda like this prowling bee thing where I love doing it, but part of the reason I'm doing it is because I know that it's helpful. Because Susan's blog was helpful to me. So it might be a fancy way of staying in touch, but at the same time, you are still answering what my dad might call a sacred calling. That term feels a little heavy, but there is something to it when you're opening things up for other people, like that DJ in California. You opened something up for that DJ enough that she put it on the air, you know, and that opened up something for Susan. It’s full circle. She wrote me a synopsis of your show and sent it to me. Right. And that's Susan!
Nate: Yeah, but now the job's done. Susan wrote a synopsis. What more could we ask for?
Adam: That was a nice little synopsis. But that's just the start. That's just a little tip of the iceberg, I think. But it's a good tip. I mean, having Susan hear it and love it, unsolicited, because the long white fingers sent it through her car radio. Like, how cool is that? You know, it's kind of like when you're a kid and you're just like trying to understand infinity, you're trying to understand eternity, and you can't do it, and then your brain starts bugging out and eventually you shut it down, that thought. Whitman has a line where he says, “A clock indicates the time, but what does eternity indicate?” There's something there that I think is worth coming back to, like, damn, eternity! What the hell is that? What is that? And Emily does that all the time. She's obsessed with eternity and immortality and infinity. She wrote dozens of poems about that. She keeps coming back to it.
And I think that there's something about what happened there with Susan which is getting into that. I mean, you said it Connor, like what if you found out there was no DJ, but Susan was just then tapping into eternity. I don’t know. There is some weird connection there. I just love it because it makes my mind glitch.
Connor: Yeah, totally. It's just like forehead slapping.
Adam: Yeah. How lucky are we to have that, you know, to get outside of the definitions and be able to like enter into the pine a little bit?
I like how the poem has ended up becoming the template for the conversation too.
Nate: Yeah, totally
Adam: Don’t edit it down at all. Just put all three hours up on your podcast. It's all gotta go in. If Lex Friedman can get away with 4 hour podcasts, so can you.
Connor: Oh my God.
Nate: Yeah. Just turn the mics on and roll.
Adam: Sometimes those long meandering conversations are very enjoyable, so, I don't know. Whatever you do with it, obviously, it'll be great.
Nate: Well, yeah, I'm gonna try to keep it under 10 minutes.
Adam: Oh, there you go. I can't wait to find out how you do that. Well, it'll be less that I have to transcribe into the old blog. Only 10 minutes. It'll be easier on my fingers. If I put the whole thing up I'm gonna have to get some kind of machine to do it.
Nate: No, yeah, for sure.
Adam: I would love that though. Like, I would take all three hours and just make that the blog post, like pages and pages and pages. I would do that.
Connor: You could do it. I have a subscription to something that does that.
Adam: Connor, if you have that, yeah, if you have that I'm saying I would do that, I would just tidy it up and let it be an extremely long post.
Nate: A format breaker.
Adam: And maybe a few like-minded folks will sit and read it all, and maybe most will just skip it. I do feel a duty to Susan to continue with her format. I even find myself writing in her style sometimes, which is why maybe you didn't notice the switchover, because I really try to pick up on her tone, because I love her writing so much. I fear that if I had started my own blog, it would be much weirder and less accessible, much less accessible. Thank God for Susan. But I don't mind doing a post now and then that is inaccessible, because there's another thousand poems to play with.
Connor: Yeah, it's okay. Every post is like a different chapter from Savage Detectives.
Adam: Have you read that too, Connor?
Connor: Yeah, I love that book.
Adam: Cool. I haven't read 2666 yet.
Nate: Oh my gosh. It's so good. It's so good.
Adam: Savage Detectives is good, but I know it probably doesn’t compare to 2666, which is supposed to be his masterpiece.
Nate: So it's also really hard, the subject matter. There's a big chunk of that book where it’s a matter-of-act account of one rape/homicide after another.
Adam: Oh, I've heard about that.
Nate: Yeah, and it's a lot.
Adam: So not not hard to follow, but hard to stomach?
Nate: In terms of the storytelling, it's so effortless. You just turn them pages, much more so than Savage Detectives really.
Adam: And I found that to be pretty readable.
Nate: Well I think when you've got the voice of whoever starts the novel, the horny kid, he kind of starts and finishes in first person, like that's super readable. But then when it's just the transcripts of the interviews, I feel like that was a little bit, well, you know, less page turning.
Connor: It keeps wrong-footing you. Yeah,
Nate: Absolutely. Yeah.
Adam: Wrong-footing you. I like that.
Nate: That's not 2666. You just turn on pages, even though it's three or four pretty disconnected components. There's like fantastic through-lines for sure.
Adam: It sucks you in.
Nate: Yeah man, it sucks you in.
Adam: Alright, that and Pierre, I’m in.
Nate: Yeah.
Adam: another couple things to put on my list. Alright. I'll do it. All right. Well, you guys have a good night.
Nate: Great hanging with you.
Connor: Yeah. Appreciate it, it's so fun.
Adam: Thanks for reaching out and uh, I got a feeling the conversation will continue and, if not, if nothing else, we'll find out about the mystery DJ. You're gonna do some little journalistic investigation, right?
