Emily Dickinson: A Brief Synopsis
Emily Dickinson
Wished Mr. Higginson
Hadn’t been so loath
Her poems to critique.
Higginson, piqued
At her rhyme and her syntax,
Wished he could toss them
Right into next week.
Em then dissembled—
She loved to seem small, for
It lessened the hurt
Of responses like this.
She spoke from the hallways
And hoped that he’d always
Remain in her life
And perhaps give her bliss.
Was there a romance?
Only a slight chance,
For he thought that Em was
A bit of a bat.
She served him some sherry,
But that was as merry
A time as they ever
Would have—that was that.
The Ballad of Fruit Salad
The apple girds against its fate,
A plum lies passive on the plate.
Bananas, naked, peeled away,
Are sliced against a roundelay
Of mangoes, berries, pears and such
That cringed before the whetted touch
Of blade against their ruddy skins,
Then swayed to tossing’s gentle spins.
Small daily expirations. Salad
Made from fruit deserves a ballad.
A Summer Hour
A burgeoning bush, some butterflies,
Low wooden steps, warped, faded, rise
Amid the calm of idle talk—
The blur of shadows on the walk.
Sometimes a passing, random thought
Within winged fantasy is caught,
While puffed clouds in a bowl of blue
Lie quiet in the overview.
Inconsequential bits of light
Form auras there, against the night.
Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter of magical realism. Her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool.
Three lovely, painterly poems, especially, “A Summer Hour”, although all three beg re-reads.
Sally Cook is both a painter and a poet. Her poems have a definite painterly feel to them, as if she were working in colors and shapes more than with mere words. There’s an old Latin aesthetic maxim: “Ut pictura, poesis.” This means “”As with painting, so also with poetry.” The idea behind this is that a poet must use language in ways that evoke not just thought, but also visual imagination, pictorial remembrance, and scenes both real and fantasized.
There is a major split between poets who primarily deal with thoughts, arguments, reasoning, and intellectualizing; and those poets who deal with what can be seen or remembered or visualized. The former are basically rhetoricians and/or debaters, while the latter are the true practitioners of fictive mimesis.
Why did Plato fear and dislike poets? Simple — he was an incurable intellectualist, fixated on thoughts and logic, and he could not tolerate fictive mimesis with its imaginative fantasy and use of real-world experiences and perceptions to create the artifacts called poems. For someone who lived in the realm of abstract ideas, the whole process disgusted him.
A poet like Sally Cook comes along very rarely. Her fierce attachment to what she can see and feel and touch and remember has made her poetry both earthly and sublime.
Three totally different pieces. I loved the humour of the ‘Synopsis’, the whimsicality of ‘The Ballad of Fruit Salad’, and your eye for detail and the imagery in ‘A Summer Hour’.
Thanks for the reads, Sally.
Delightful poems, Sally!
These are delightful poems, Sally!
Sally, you have a magic creative touch to your poetry with imagery that is always luminescent and satisfies the visceral senses.
Dearest Sally – unique, engaging, tangible and beautiful – your poetry is a pleasure to read and inspires me, as ever. Thank you for making my day brighter.
Still up to your old tricks, I see. Your take-down of old Em is priceless. It isn’t easy to turn tragedy into comedy. Sally on!!
Unfortunately, Emily Dickinson’s published work is a “deep fake” Aside from her pretty occasional phrases the published material is not as she intended. She abhorred the confinements of true poetry such as rhyme and meter. After she died her sister handed her work over to editors Higginson and Todd who cobbled her cryptic pieces into publishable poetry. Thus, the signature of her published works should be accredited to Dickenson Higginson Todd.
That is untrue. Only a very few of Dickinson’s poems were edited by Higginson. The great bulk of her poetry (in her own manuscript handwriting) was preserved in small paper booklets that she had made herself. They have survived, and were edited and published in the 1950s by a serious scholar, who followed Dickinson’s text meticulously, even to her somewhat erratic punctuation. There have been other editions following that one, but they also follow the structure and layout of the poems that appear in those small paper manuscripts that Dickinson made.
Moreover she used slant rhyme very frequently, and she wrote largely in a very recognizable hymn meter. We have the poems EXACTLY as she wished them to be.
It’s not a good idea to talk about a writer if you are ignorant of the facts about her work. This is especially true if you misspell her name as “Dickenson.”
To my knowledge, many of her pre-publication works are available to view online, which I viewed, as well as extensive accounts regarding Higginson’s initial appraisal, Emily’s disdain of the rules of the traditional poetry of her time, and the labor that Higginson and Todd applied to Ms. Dickinson’s original poems. It’s all out there to be studied.
Truthfully, I do not deride Ms .Dickinson but those who, as she might title it, committed “a robbery” of her work. I feel sorry for her and am certain that she would be most upset about it. I do so love her angelic lines but I perceive the transmogrification of her intent as a cautionary tale.
True, I did misspell her name, above, for which I apologize
Lovely work, Sally Cook! I especially like your clarity on Emily Dickenson.