An Interview by David W. Hill
The following interview took place in the English Department Library in Swetman Hall on the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego on the afternoon of May 9, 1990, after Lewis Turco's book manuscript, Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 
which included the poem sequence “A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” had been completed and accepted for publication by the State University of New York Press (1). Present were David W. Hill, Prof. of English in the College, a well-known Emerson scholar and the contributor of an essay to Turco's book; Amanda Smith, a senior in Biology but arguably the best student fiction writer on campus, having won the undergraduate Mathom Fiction Award for 1989-90; and Mary Bagalonis, a non-traditional student double-majoring in English and Mathematics. Both Ms. Smith and Mrs. Bagalonis were students in Dr. Hill's American Romanticism class during the Spring semester; Ms. Smith had earlier taken two fiction writing classes with Mr. Turco.
David W. Hill. Professor Turco, where did the idea for “A Sampler of Hours” come from?
Lewis Turco. During the winter of 1980 I was reading an anthology (2) that contained an essay about Emily Dickinson titled "Hawthorne in Salem, 2: Emily Dickinson" by Van Wyk Brooks who quoted four lines from Emily Dickinson's letters: "The Moon rides like a girl through a topaz town"; "Tonight the Crimson Children are playing in the west"; "The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the trees," and "Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do is what detains the sky."
I was struck by the modernity of these prose expressions; their sounds and images seemed to me to have more of the feeling and flavor of modernity than even Dickinson's poems, or even the lines of many and many a poem of the 20th century. Immediately, I wrote four poems that included, and tried to live up to, the Dickinson lines I have quoted.
No doubt this was a foolhardy thing to do, but I had attempted the same sort of thing with Robert Burton's 17th-century tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and I produced a book of poems the whole title of which reads, The Compleat Melancholick, A Sequence of Found, Composite, and Composed Poems, based largely upon Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy" (3). I felt then, and I still feel, that my poems did little damage to Burton and, indeed, that Burton inspired me to accomplish some of my better work. These are the first four poems I wrote in a similar series based on Dickinson:
THE HARPER OF STILLNESS
The lawn is full of south
and the odors tangle,
and I hear today for the first
the river in the tree.
The cricket in the root
has found a note to cast
upon the pool of eventide,
of shadow welling from
a coast of pines. Swiftly
now he comes, the harper
of stillness, lifting up his strings
to net the western fire
shoaling the upper limbs,
the roofs of our houses
swept by a wave of daylight lost
in the depths of summer.
CRIMSON CHILDREN
Tonight the crimson children
are playing in the west.
They do not hear the stars call
down the burning sky
that time has passed, is passing
under clouds afire,
tumultuous with ash.
THE EAR OF SILENCE
Not what the stars have done,
but what they are to do
is what detains the sky.,
keeps it from failing us
now when the children sleep
in rooms of dream's keeping.
What does darkness confide
in the ear of silence,
vessel of the hollows? —
echo of a sunken
bell ranging the far fields
of light, the well of chimes
that takes us awake now
in our waiting for night
and the starlight falling.
EPITHALAMION
The moon rides like a girl
through a topaz town,
her steed the beast of air,
the mound of the wind.
We see her riding there
where the desert knocks
against the horizon,
cactus burning like
silver on seas of ore.
But our doors are shut —
they are studded and barred,
and if we are still
she will pass in our streets
blind to our whispers,
deaf to our lingering.
The sand will take her,
this girl who comes riding,
this bride of the night.
When I had finished these first four pieces I titled them "A Suite for Emily" and sent them to a magazine at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo titled Escarpments whose editor, Carol Sineni, accepted the set immediately (4). However, I was by no means satisfied with the poems myself, for I felt I had not assimilated Dickinson's tone and style and made my additions indistinguishable from her quotations. I went to the library and checked out Dickinson's Collected Letters, hoping to find other lines I might quarry. Much later I was fortunate enough to find a copy I could purchase for my own library.
By 1984 I had written sixty poems in a series I titled "A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos on Lines from Emily Dickinson's Letters, Selected, Arranged and Augmented by" myself (5). Some readers of these pieces have wished to know which lines are Dickinson's and which are mine. At first I had tried italicizing her words, as I had done with Burton, but that practice seemed to break up the poems badly whereas in the Burton poems it had actually seemed to help. The subtitle of the sequence indicates that I "selected, arranged, and augmented" Dickinson's lines. In the first four poems I had simply used each of her quotations as the first stanza of a poem, breaking the passage at the ends of phrases — what William Carlos Williams called "the breath pause" — and writing subsequent stanzas in the syllabic line-lengths into which Dickinson's phrases had happened to fall. For instance, the first stanza of the first poem fell into the form of a quatrain the lines of which happen to be 6-6-8 and -6 syllables long; thus, the succeeding stanzas are quatrains with the same syllable counts line for line.
At times I did little more than select a complete passage from a particular letter and cast it into syllabic prosody; more often, I took lines from various letters and arranged them in some sort of order. Reasonably often I "augmented" Dickinson's lines with my own. Some poems are almost entirely hers, others are more mine then hers, but the shortest poem in the series may serve as an example of the method of composition I used most often:
THE GIFT
A one-armed man conveyed the flowers.
I gave him half a smile.
The first line is Dickinson's, the second is mine.
I have never met a person who had such a brilliantly wide-ranging mind, or such an ability to toss off, seemingly at random and on any occasion, images as arresting and colorful as any in American poetry, or to match in depth of perception and succinctness of expression the flowers of anyone's intellectual garden.
Hill. What do you find the relationship to be between the striking images or lines in Dickinson's letters and what you see going on in her verse?
Turco. Oddly enough, I feel that the imagery in her letters is more modern than the imagery in her verse. The images in Dickinson's verse are striking, but it seems to me that when she put the images into her verse something about the process changed the quality of the images.
Hill. Do you think that she conventionalized in her verse but not in her letters?
Turco. Perhaps she was merely not quite so self-conscious when she was writing letters.
Smith. When she first sent her verse to Mr. [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson [Editor of The Atlantic Monthly], he wrote that she had to learn to rhyme better and her meters were off, and he told her to delay publishing. Did that make her want to write in more structured forms?
Turco. Dickinson's forms were always the forms of common measure that she found in the hymnals of her church in Amherst. She never changed that. She didn't take Higginson's advice at all. She never learned to rhyme more neatly or caused her verse to scan more regularly, although subsequently the editors of her collections of poems, Higginson, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Millicent Todd Bingham, tried to neaten her poems by doing two things to the poems themselves that colored our perception of them in the first part of the 20th century.
One thing that they did was to add punctuation — Dickinson's punctuation was mainly dashes; the editors added periods and colons and so forth. The second thing the editors did was to add titles to the poems, often from the first lines — Dickinson never used titles. In Bolts of Melody: New Poems, edited by Todd and Bingham and published in 1945, the poems were numbered, and in the 1960 standard Complete Poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson the poems were not only numbered and untitled, but they also lost the added punctuation.
The early editors did a third thing that colored our perception of Dickinson's verse, not to the poems themselves, but to their sequencing: they arranged her poems in categories such as "Life," "Love," "Time and Eternity," "Nature," and so forth, and published them that way in the first collections: Poems (1890), Poems, Second Series (1891), and Poems, Third Series (1896). Just seeing them put into pigeonholes that way gave Dickinson's early readers an erroneous impression of her work. It wasn't until 1960 that most people could see what Dickinson had originally written. It was at that point that the truly modern quality of her poems became perfectly apparent.
As I said earlier, however, some of the images from her prose letters are even more modern-seeming than the images of the original poems.
Hill. I'm curious about what you mean by "modern." [Chorus of yesses and me toos].
Turco. There's the idea of "abstract syntax" that was first identified and discussed in Donald Davie's book Articulate Energy, which was published in 1958. The idea behind what I call "abstract syntax" and Davie calls "musical syntax" is the same idea as that which is behind "abstract art," and that is to approach the condition of music in language or in painting.
Now, what is the condition of music? Music is the most abstract of the arts in that there are no "meanings" attached to notes or musical phrases. There may be a kind of general feeling attached to some aspects of music; for instance, minor keys "feel" sad whereas major keys don't; fast music feels happy, but slow music feels moody. Aside from that sort of thing, no meanings inhere in music, yet we enjoy it because we can perceive musical structures and progressions, harmonies, dissonances, counterpoint, and so forth.
If painting, let's say, wants to approach the abstract condition of music, what must it get rid of?
Hill. Figures.
Turco. That's right — if you're an abstract painter you get rid of identifiable representations, of figures, in your work. Well, that's what you have to do in language, as well, if you're going to write using abstract syntax, and of course T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is written partly in abstract syntax, Wallace Stevens is an abstract syntax poet, and one of the first Dickinson lines I read in the essay by Van Wyk Brooks was a line written in abstract syntax, and I used in the poem titled "The Harper of Stillness": "The lawn is full of south / and the odors tangle, / and I hear today for the first / the river in the tree."
What the hell does that mean? [laughter] The syntax of that line does not come to a point where you can say, "Oh, that means this, that, or the other thing." It is an approach to music. I think that's just stunningly beautiful. One of the other three is like that, too. The poem that I call "The Ear of Silence" starts with a sentence written in abstract syntax: "Not what the stars have done, / but what they are to do / is what detains the sky." So, two of the four Dickinson lines that Van Wyk Brooks quoted from her letters were sentences written in abstract syntax.
Hill. That is, beautiful but not easily seen as representations of something in language. As for instance in Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation which quotes the artist Willem de Kooning who said, "Content is very thin, very tiny." What we see as content in art — you know, the "profound meanings" that critics have been shoveling at us for a long time — are just these tiny little intersections that don't really matter.
Turco. What you're really doing with words when you use abstract syntax is manipulating connotations, associations and overtones, and not their primary meanings, their denotations. Dickinson did not get those overtones into her poems as often as she got them into some of the lines from her letters.
Hill. Then this kind of language is not something that carries goods, like teamsters, but it is something to be experienced, like music.
Bagalonis. I'd like to ask a question. What is the purpose of writing poems like that? Is it so that readers can get their own meanings from the words? So that the mind is not limited when one reads the poems? So that the poet is not confining the poem?
Turco. I would imagine that various writers would use abstract syntax for various purposes. The major abstract poet of the twentieth century was Wallace Stevens. Oddly enough, he was a message poet. His message was that mankind had to get rid of romanticism, religion, and all that emotional baggage that we ought, as a race, to have worn out by now. We ought to substitute for them an existential viewpoint that would allow us to get through life with dignity, without resorting to the crutches of tradition.
Now, Stevens could have said that in so many words, and in a way he did in some of his poems, but really what he did was to wrap around this idea some amazing tropical images when he was young and, when he was older, images of the arctic. It is often extremely difficult to get down beneath the imagery to the bedrock of statement, to the condition that he called, in his poem "The Snowman," a "mind of winter." It takes a mind of winter for modern men and women to bear up under the weight of mortality and the perception of that mortality.
Stevens used abstract syntax because he had to in order to write the "larger poem for a larger audience" that he talked about and called for — the largest audience being, one supposes, all the race of Man. Otherwise, it was just, write an essay and get it over with. But writing poems was how he proposed to get through life without the lush security blanket of religion wrapped around him.
Bagalonis. In other words, his poetry was designed so that he was not going to limit who was going to read it and enjoy it, no matter what they believed? So that people would discover their own meaning in it?
Turco. Not exactly. Beneath the abstract syntax and the lush images there lay the foundation of meaning that bore up these landscapes of language. But at least on the surface unsophisticated readers might wander about in those vistas and enjoy them without falling into the pit of existential Despond.
Hill. Also there's pleasure. I mean, he wrote this way and we read it this way because it is pleasurable in and of itself. It's the pleasure of language magnificently handled.
It's something else, too, Mary, that we considered when we talked in class about the Dickinson poem "This Was a Poet" [No. 449]. The poet "Distills amazing sense from ordinary Meanings," and of course that opposes the normal idea of the function of poetry which insists that the poet provide the reader with a sense experience evoked in an image which leads him or her to the meaning — that meaning is distilled from sense. Dickinson says, "No, no, the opposite is true — it turns ordinary meanings into amazing sense." That, I think, is not in itself an example of abstract syntax — it is a statement, but a statement that suggests a way to write so as to provide the reader with an amazing pleasure.
Turco. In my Nature of Poetry class I discuss the difference between a poet and a fiction writer, a poet and an essayist, a poet and a playwright: of those four, the only one who is interested in language as language is the poet. The others are interested in language as a carrier of narrative, or of argument. Poets are simply interested in the way the language chimes — I think it was W. H. Auden who said, in the way words "rub up against" each other. That's why Stevens was a poet and not an essayist.
Smith. That's the quality about Dickinson — even in her letters, maybe even when she didn't mean to be doing it — she treated words that way.
Turco. Yes.
Smith. When she got older, her letters got shorter and shorter, starker and starker, and what she wanted to say was right there. Mary Todd said that often the people who received her earlier letters didn't understand them because they didn't know what she was trying to say, that they'd have to read their own meanings into the letters.
Turco. That's quite true, I'm sure. To get an Emily Dickinson letter must have been quite an experience. As a matter of fact, I discovered somewhere along the line that she was writing to someone in Dresden — I think you may have run across a letter, in that book you're holding, that mentions that she has a correspondent in Dresden.
Now, that can't have been Dresden, Germany; it had to be Dresden, Maine, which is where I have spent my summers for more than thirty years and run a bookstore, the Mathom Bookshop and Bindery. So I've been quite interested in trying to figure out who it is she was writing to in Dresden, Maine, because I get into people's attics there sometimes, and I would dearly love to run across a stash of letters written by Emily Dickinson.
[Laughter and comments]
Turco. Sending those letters was Dickinson's form of publication.
Hill. Yes, I was thinking that earlier — the letters were what she published.
Turco. But often she included poems in her letters. Many of the poems that appear in her Complete Poems were culled from letters.
Bagalonis.. I guess I'm curious. I've never been a poetry person. I'm curious about how you would get into...I guess I'm going to have to take a poetry course, but my first experience with poetry was at Jefferson Community College when we were writing essays about literature, and what we learned to do is paraphrase and look up words we didn't know.
Turco. Well, it's good to look up words you don't know, but paraphrasing....
Bagalonis.. But it was just to get the meaning, and we went on from there.
Turco. The point with most poems is that there is no meaning other than the poem itself. For instance, there's a wonderful poem by Archibald MacLeish called "Ars Poetica" that is a self-destructing poem, in a way, for it describes abstract syntax, by example: "A poem should be palpable and mute," MacLeish says, "As a globed fruit," and a number of other things, "...wordless / As the flight of birds." But then, in the end, he spoils it by saying exactly what he means: "A poem should not mean / But be."
The rest of the poem wrapped around this central idea all sorts of images and lovely expressions and showed, rather than told what the poem "means," or, rather, as John Ciardi said, how the poem means. It's not what the poem means that matters, it's how it means that is important.
Bagalonis. So is language the key, then, and not idea or meaning?
Turco. MacLeish should have left the last line off his poem. He turned an abstract syntax poem into a statement, a subjective statement. The other kinds of syntax, according to Davie, are "subjective" syntax: sentences that express personal opinions, "I love pizza with pepperoni," for instance; "objective" syntax: sentences that express actions: "I went downtown and bought a pepperoni pizza"; and "dramatic" syntax: "I, Hamlet, a character invented by Shakespeare, love pepperoni pizza." Those are the three traditional syntaxes.
Abstract syntax really is a twentieth century phenomenon, except, of course, I'm showing that it appears in the work of Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth century. And it appears in both her letters and her poems — in other words, in both her prose and her verse, which in itself is an unusual phenomenon because there isn't a whole lot of abstract syntax prose in the world, although James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake would perhaps be examples.
Hill. What is Dickinson doing in verse that makes her verse a little bit less abstract, perhaps? I'm uncomfortable with the word "abstract" — I know it's the language we need to use because it's conventional....
Turco. Call it "musical" syntax if you like.
Hill. I don't like that, either. I think "non-representational" is too negative. "Language for the pleasure of language," I suppose is a good way of putting it. In her verse that occurs a good deal, yet there seems to be what fancy critics nowadays call a "project," which seems to me to set structure and aim that Dickinson resists pretty successfully in a lot of her verse.
Bagalonis. But all words have meaning. And you, the reader, will develop that meaning by reading those words.
Hill. Words don't have meaning; phrases and clauses have meaning. Words in context have meaning. A word has a denotation, a dictionary definition or a set of associations, but a dynamic notion of meaning requires a context for those words, and syntax sets the order for that context.
Smith. Dickinson's concepts of death are interesting to me. Why did she write poetry? It's not just that she had the quality of "creativity" — there was something driving her to create, and it seems to me that death was the main force that drove her.
Turco. Evidently there were two things that were driving her. The sense of her own mortality was one, I think, and that's what drives most poets. I believe that most poets tend to write about their mortality, and the younger they are the more they write about it. It seems to me that the older they are, the less they write about it — that's certainly true in my case, at any rate.
But the thing that caused Emily Dickinson to write more than even the perception of her own mortality was the argument between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Calvin. Her father was a Calvinist, and her spiritual mentor in many ways was Emerson. She was very much interested in Transcendentalism, which was a movement of her time, and she was also unable to throw off the snares of her upbringing, which had been Puritan; therefore, what her poems very often tend to be is a debate between these two theological views. Some poems will be all Calvin, some poems will be all Transcendentalist, but most of her poems will be a debate between the two sides.
This is something else that is a twentieth century phenomenon. If you look at the major poets of the twentieth century, you discover that the debate that drove many of the great Modernist poets is exactly that same thing: a question of religion, a loss of the sense of God — that's what drove Stevens, it's what drove Eliot in his early poems whereas his later poems were rationalizations and justifications for returning to the fold of traditional religion. It's what drove Vachel Lindsay, who was an American Swedenborgian; it's what drove Robert Frost, who was an Emersonian. This is what poetry has often been driven by in the twentieth century: an inner debate of the poet with his sense of existential loss.
Stevens wanted to substitute an aesthetic system for the religious system. Each individual would have to develop his or her own, of course, which is asking a bit too much of most people, it seems to me. That's what Emily Dickinson did, though.
Hill. Yes, she did.
Bagalonis.. I always sensed when reading her poems that, right from the start, I didn't even get the impression that she was going to pick Transcendentalism. I always felt that she was a nonconformist.
Turco. That's right. She never did pick either one.
Bagalonis. And I felt that she was never going to really address the issue, because she had to go her own way.
Turco. Perhaps it wasn't that she was innately a nonconformist as that she was innately an existentialist. I think she was a twentieth century personality living in the nineteenth century. And I wonder if she didn't live a solitary, inner life because she found in existence itself almost too much joy for her to handle.
Smith. [Reading from Dickinson's letters], It says right here that "Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it."
Turco. Absolutely. That is her aesthetic. She was an existentialist who enjoyed the moment. She loved living. She says so over and over again in the letters. I used some of the lines that say these things in several of my..."our" poems. How do her letters affect you?
Smith. I feel a real connection. I feel as though there is no separateness between the reader and the writer. I feel almost as though the letters were written to me. Often in reading writers I don't feel as though I have a high enough level of awareness to understand them, but in the case of Dickinson I feel that she writes what I want to say. She's a person I wouldn't feel nervous about meeting.
Turco. There's a real sense of her personality that comes through her writing, isn't there? I mean, you feel as though you know her, as though she were your next door neighbor, and you feel fortunate in the friendship.
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(1) Turco, Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters, Albany: SUNY PRESS , 1993. Hardbound, $39.95, wrappers, $14.95. ORDER FROM AMAZON.
(2) Burnett, Whit, editor, This Is My Best, Cleveland: World, 1942.
(3) Minneapolis: The Bieler Press, 1985. The sequence is included in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco, 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007.
(4) "A Suite for Emily," Escarpments, ii:1, Spring 1981, pp. 42-3.
(5) The sequence is included in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.
