Thinking About Emily Dickinson

 I've not ever read Emily Dickinson in any sustained way. I did drop her into my "Chasing Ashes" as a counterpoint to Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe I am right to do this and Bianca Stone in Back Draft: Bianca Stone and Ruth Stone makes think I may be onto something, but I got more reading to do.

Guernica: Your poem feels to me like a pointed response to Billy Collins’s “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.”

Stone: Yeah, I’m definitely referencing the Collins poem. I know that’s a beloved poem for many people, but for me, it’s indicative of that whole male poetry oppressiveness. To be clear, I love male poets. But that Collins poem in particular is a very telling instance of the sort of co-opting of female voices I’m talking about. I mean, she’s dead and she can’t consent to anything and you’re going to eroticize her in this way? It’s a shame. And look, there’s no reason why we can’t fall in love with poets who are dead. I myself am in love with some of them. We’re all in love with Keats, right? But do I really want to take his clothes off? It’s icky, it’s rapey. I wanted to reclaim her on her behalf.

Guernica: Your poem does that reclaiming in such a powerful way. Instead of Collins taking off her clothes, she’s the one stripping all of us bare.

Stone: I think that for a lot of people who have felt strangled by somebody else emotionally, this fantasy of taking back control is very powerful. Even if this world of The Mobius Strip Club exists only in my book, it’s not just fantasy. It’s a tiny alternate reality. And I like to think that this is just the beginning of rethinking Emily Dickinson’s legacy in many different ways. We’ll never stop mining her work for new insights because she just left so much there. So much ambiguity, and so much symbolism, and lyricism. It’s a wonderful strangeness. We owe so much to her.

As well as getting more writing advice.

Guernica: How would you describe your approach to revision?

Stone: I’m 37, and it’s been a lifetime of practice. Just constantly trying to get it right. Revision also means realizing when a poem just isn’t worth revising, when it’s time to write a new poem. Now, over the years, I’ve gotten more in love with the challenge of making something work that isn’t working. Sometimes poems come off kind of easily, and that’s satisfying too, but the radical revision when you bust something open and really take it far, that’s the joy. And I love teaching revision to students. One thing I’ve noticed with new poets is that they often struggle to see what to revise. They can’t see what needs to go and