I confess that I haven’t read much Emily Dickinson, but a couple of new books and a garden show that I’m too far away to attend, is more than enough inspiration to fill that gap.
The title of Holland Cotter’s recent New York Times article, My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst, considers one of the imagined Emilys from passive, love-lorn recluse to feminist and queer studies icon. Cotter’s story reminds us that, if written works are any kind of window into a true self, Dickinson was equally capable of being the village eccentric as she was of being a terrorist:
Had I a mighty gun
I think I’d shoot the human race.
My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst, Holland Cotter
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, a novel by Jerome Charyn
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,
a biography by Lyndall Gordon
Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers
is on view at the New York Botanical Garden through June 13.
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