I don't know Dickinson

I don’t know Emily Dickinson, and I don’t think anyone else really does, or maybe ever did.

I want to make this clear though, I am not saying I need or even want to know an artist to understand or appreciate their work. Case and point: it’s been noted that Salvador Dali, whenever he was in public, would literally jump up and down for the sheer hope to get attention. He also kept a piece of lucky driftwood around the house, to ward off evil spirits, and was notorious for not knowing how to count money. There’s a boundless supply of trivial information, referencing the world’s most renowned, cherished artists; information more often than not that’s unknown to the general masses when weighed against to the general recognition of their work. The point is, I don’t need a million reasons to support why I think that Dali was a nutcase, to think his art was revolutionary, or validate why I think his art was revolutionary. I don’t feel a need to try to understand Dali as a man, to feel like I now have the right to interpret his material. Hell, I can’t even understand Dali’s paintings, how could I expect myself to understand Dali?

But this personal thirst to interpret an artist based on their personal information, this unwarranted hope get to know the man/woman who created the work you love or identify with is something that I’ve noticed for quite some time now. I have this friend, for the sake of public medium, let’s call him Joe. Joe could tell you Mick Jagger’s shoe size, Mick Jagger’s bubble gum of preference, Mick Jagger’s work-out ritual (that’s actually true I found out). And yet, whenever I’m around Joe, I tend to feel like my own love for Mick as well as my love for the rest of the Stones is less legitimate somehow, just because I don’t know the tuning on Kieth’s guitar when he laid down “Brown Sugar” (it might have been open G by the way). While, getting to know where an artist is drawing inspiration from when they create, attempting to understand an artist’s psyche or possible causes that shape their psyche can be a wonderful way to better appreciate the content of their work, it shouldn’t ever be a requirement. Art is, after all, ultimately interpretive and the beauty in the eye of the beholder is just as legitimate as the beauty in the eye of the supplier.

But this is where I find myself having issues with Dickinson and her work (which, unfortunately goes hand in hand according to her fans and critics). I take away from art what comes naturally and personally based on my own perceptions on the same subject matter. So, I ask this to most Dickinson fans: why do I have to know Dickinson, or try to know Dickinson, to know her work?
This side effect doesn’t lie solely on Dickinson’s readers, considering most all of her work not only instills but I’d argue it demands a conscious or subconscious decision to delve into the psyche of Dickinson in order to ‘get it.’

It’s interesting, most any artist is complex, intriguing, their ideals easy to confuse or misinterpret. Yet, there is always one shimmering consistency for most successful artists: their work relates to the experiences of others, feeds off of the reciprocation of the reader in some form so, consequently there isn’t a need to know exactly where the inspiration was coming from. However, it’s common knowledge that most of Dickenson’s poetry had no intended audiences, no underlying wish to be shared, she shoved her poems in a desk for crying out loud. This sense of privacy, personalness is drenched all over the texts.

For starters, Dickinson rarely spends time introducing her poems, she neither provides the details of a physical setting as a conventional nature poem might do nor does she explain the poem’s occasion. The poems begin suddenly often with a declaration (“Superiority to fate/ Is difficult to learn”) or a definition (“Hope is a glutton”) As our introduction points out, “Dickinson doesn’t knock before entering, so the reader may feel swept up into the character of the poet’s thought process without knowing it. Instead of a steady run of meaning, the Dickinson poem hops from one figure to another in a kind of zigzag logic that required not just our concentration but our own agility in making imaginative and grammatical leaps.” (xiii)

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept of putting effort into a reading, trying to follow the author of a poe but at the same time I don’t think that Dickinson would have even wanted me to understand her thoughts, her feelings. So why make the effort? I envision Emily as that girl in school that no matter how nice you were to her, no matter how much you tried to include her, she’d look at you and try to make you feel like you were an outsider. You know who I’m talking about…

Emily didn’t want to share her genius, her art, her insights, her beauty. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to read some chick’s material if she doesn’t want me to, let alone feel anything from reading it. I’d like to feel motivated to understand an artist’s point of view in accordance with how I interpret it, rather than feeling obligated to ‘get it’ or ‘get her.’