I am at another crossroads in my life. I have experienced unemployment twice in the last two years... and maybe the worst fear is not being unemployed, but maybe being unemployable. I never thought that before. The "what if" of life.
I add up the obstacles to the employable life I used to know and they build a very high wall. Then looking at that wall, I look inward at what I can still contribute to the world... and I find myself looking into my poetry. It has always been a gift. I just read my blog page "Free Poetry" and was reminded of my original passion. The poetry is a gift. And then I look at the finances and wonder, is there something in the gift that can help me out with the bills and the debt? I am conflicted.
Emily Dickinson is a big inspiration to me. Here is a portion of her biography taken from "The Poetry Foundation"
"Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him(her) ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Dickinson is now known as one of the most important American poets, and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests."
Oddly enough... it isn't Emily's poetry that is so inspiring to me. I can't recite one of her works by heart. But who she was as a woman is what inspires me. Her poetry wasn't published until she was long dead. She wrote with no audience available to her. She garnered no financial gain from her words. She challenged the religion of her day. She didn't find the need to go along with the program just because that was expected of her or that was the thing to do. She was her own person. She rode the waves in the heart of the ocean more than the stiller waters closer to the shore. For that, she is my inspiration.
I am not looking for fame, fortune or fans. Maybe I can be content to one day let my death be the catalyst that will invite more people to read my work. But I am wondering what I can do now to help "feed my family". I don't know. I wish I could just let the poetry be a gift to me and a few others while I'm alive and a memory of me after I'm dead. But maybe I'm longing for more significance. But for Emily... poetry was her significance. She just didn't know how much.
Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin’s version of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.
I am glad for Emily that they republished her poems as they were originally wrote. I also made a plea in this blog that my poems wouldn't be altered after I'm gone... because that is what happened to Emily's poetry. I read through some of the poems that Poetry Foundation has on line. There were some that gave me a smile. Maybe Emily and I are soul sisters. I will end this post still uncertain as to what my poetic future holds... but I will end it with a poem that I like because I like the vision it gives me.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
