Emily Dickinson in 'Living with Limericks' Tomorrow is the birthday of poet Emily Dickinson, born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. Over a 1,000 poems were found in her bureau drawer after her death; only seven were published during her lifetime.
Garrison Keillor wrote about Emily Dickinson and her influence in his hybrid memoir/poetry collection Living with Limericks, dedicating a full chapter to her. Here is the beginning of Chapter 13, entitled "Me and Emily":
The Nobel Prize in Literature will not come my way. I know this. (Men who write poems that sell are unlikely to win the Nobel and I’d rather peddle than win a gold medal. Tack så mycket, Swedes, go to hell.) But posterity makes its own choices. Many are the medal winners who sank in the swamp of obscurity, while oddballs rose to posthumous fame—Edgar Allan Poe—Thoreau—Emily Dickinson. Legions of her admirers make pilgrimages to her gravesite in Amherst and leave pebbles or poems in homage. My gravesite is out in the middle of nowhere, much harder to find than hers, which is well-marked and in all the guide books. She lived in one house for most of her life where now docents lead tour groups up the stairs to her bedroom. I’ve lived in several dozen houses: no museum for me. And she lived a simple straightforward life, thanks to remaining single, whereas my life is a tangle of relationships, some of them bewildering even to me. She is so much what I am not—or is it the other way around?—and right there is the basis of my love affair with her, the most famous shy person in American literature, who wrote in a small precise hand dazzling poems, many of them tiny, that I now look at and see were attempting to be limericks. Look at this one: O Wild Nights! were I with thee.
Wild Nights should be our luxury
You’ve won my heart
It’s off the chart.
I wait for you to unbutton me. She was heading toward limerick, then lost her way. Get the Book >>> | 