Or ALL WRITERS WANT READERS
I think about Emily Dickinson all the time. As a kid I had been exposed to maybe three of her poems because they were included in our literature books at school, but that fact alone was enough to kill any interest in her for all time. Later on I somehow got a copy of some of her works and ended up reading the thing late into the night. I'd grown up in a fundamentalist church and I was very familiar with the poetic structure of a hymns. I noticed that there was a similarity in structure, but the works were far deeper than most of the hymns of my childhood. While I didn't understand or even like every poem, I did find 6 or 8 of those poems to be among the best I'd ever read. I always want to know more about the writers I admire. I'm looking for something in their past that will give me insight into the secret of great writing. I haven't found the secret out, not yet, but I continue to look for it.
As I read about Emily Dickinson I learned that she was a sort of recluse, an introverted odd duck, and since that was the way I saw myself, I formed a connection to her. Emily had made a half-hearted attempt to get a poem published, and failed, and I had made a few more efforts to be published, but I was just as half-hearted as she had been, and rejection was as crushing to me as it was for her. From time to time I read her biography, which is more about the history going on around her than about her, since she left us so little direct insight into her life. In one passage I read that she sent her sister to request someone come and play the piano for her, but when they came Emily remained in another room, never meeting the guests face to face, and listening from a safe and private distance.
Emily's sister Lavinia knew that Emily was writing poems, but she was apparently unaware of just how important writing poetry was to her little sister. One might be tempted to assume that because Emily didn't publish poetry in her life time, that she was writing poetry just for herself, that her poems were private and not intended to be read by strangers, but if you think this you are mistaken. Poetry is intended to have an audience. Poetry is self-expression, but is is also communication. You can't have self-expression if you don't have a target audience to which you are expressing your self. It is highly possible that your target audience is the little red headed girl in the third aisle second desk from the front. It is even possible in rare cases that a poet's target audience is himself or herself. In the case of Emily Dickinson, we have clues that tell us that Ms. Dickinson desperately wanted readers, and was preparing to have readers.
Emily Dickinson, as she neared the end of her life, roughly between the years of 1858 and1864, started going through her many hundreds of poems, sorting them out, and selecting sets of poems to be grouped together. Then Ms. Dickinson started a craft as she hand copied the poems into little booklets, and used ribbon or twin to bind the packets up, neatly storing these packets of poems away. These booklets are referred to by scholars as fascicles. Lavinia, when she discovered them among her dead sisters things, called them little volumes. In all there were 40 fascicles containing over 800 poems. There is no question that there was purpose and intention behind how the fascicles were collected. Scholars that have studied the primary documents tell us that the arrangement of the fascicles are not in chronological order. The poems in these little packets contain poems written in different years. Ms. Dickenson was not just gathering her poems into a pile, she was arranging the for publication. Actually, by hand copying the fascicles and binding the packets with little pieces of twine, she was self-publishing. Had she lived in the days of Lulu.com, she very well might have published her works using the economical and effective Publish On Demand (POD) services offered by Lulu.com and her more expensive competitors.
In her life we know that she would occasionally send some kind of baked good over to a neighbor or relative and include a little poem, but in her life time she did not show anyone, not even her sister Lavinia this vast accumulation of poems, and there is absolutely no documentation that I have ever seen that Emily Dickinson ever showed even one person any of these fascicles. Emily Dickinson died in 1886, leaving all her earthly possessions-to her sister Lavinia. When Lavinia went through Ms. Dickinson's room she was astonished to discover these forty booklets stacked and stored together, as if they were waiting for someone to receive them. In addition to the fascicles Lavinia also found another four hundred poems arranged in an almost identical arraignment as these poems in the fascicles. This indicates that Emily Dickinson had some plan, some intention for how the poems would be read, which poems were thematically associated with other poems. Lavinia also found miscellaneous writings, worksheet drafts, many written on scraps of paper, on envelopes and the backs of old letters, etc. Clearly, Emily had written a lot of stuff that was not intended to be read by others, but the work in the fascicles was intended to be read, and read in an order and arrangement of her own choosing.
If you want to write, then you also want readers. You may be ignorant and unsure of how to get readers, you may be afraid of rejection, you could be too easily crushed by criticism, and you could be spineless or lazy, but unless you suffer from hypographia it is nearly a certainty that you want readers. Most of us are hungry and desperate for readers. If you write and want readers admit it. If you won't send out manuscripts now, then prepare the manuscripts, and put them in a safe place where they are sure to be discovered, ready to be read.
Originally published on SearchWarp.com for Tex Norman Friday, January 02, 200
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