Communicating with Emily Dickinson

      (different cover on order page)

“Deep Calls Unto Deep:Communicating with Emily Dickinson” is a condensed, multi-perspective exploration of insights into the resonance of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, her artistic process and her psychological outlook. The selections included have been drawn from years of reading deeply and widely about her work.

The intention of the book is to ignite and rearrange our synapses in unforeseen ways, to provoke not just an interesting engagement, or create cognitive and even existential shifts (though those too), but to elicit that rarer state of aesthetic bliss.

“The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it’s something that a person needed to do and which awakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.” – Peter Schjeldahl

As a Gift

Help inspire someone to access the depth and breadth of their imagination through the example of Emily Dickinson’s. Let’s chip away at the barrage of speed and distraction that’s infiltrating our lives these days. If you’ve somehow managed to meander your way through this welter, perhaps the arrival of this physically small but aesthetically expansive book may tip the balance for someone else to do the same.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

Table of Contents

Preface 

Celebrations

Merging the Minor and the Vast

Jacob as a Model 

Obstruction, Disparity and Compulsion 

Stopping the Narrative 

The Enormity of her Inchoate Conceptions 

Her Barefoot-Rank 

Paradoxes, Contradictions and Union 

Illuminations

How She Wrote Her Best Poems 

Embodying Delight 

Why Such Short Poems? 

Her Social Conscience 

Ourself behind Ourself a Superior Spectre 

Bright Impossibility to Dwell Delicious on 

Conveying Her Calling 

Afterward

Samples

“When Dickinson loses her housekeeper, who quit to get married, she writes that she really misses the maid – a common enough statement – but then writes, ‘To all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts.’ This merging of the minor and the vast is a key trait of Dickinson in the poems and in the letters. The leaps of imagination are stunning. One needs privacy and silence, and flourishing genius, to live in such a realm. Otherwise, one stops at, ‘Gee, I miss Maggie the maid so much.’”

“What she needed before she could do her finest work was a situation, a figure, that would set out most of the structure for her. She was in trouble whenever some little thing had to be amplified, developed, teased. In the great poems she seizes her theme, normally, not as an idea but as an image or, better still, a relation. And, best of all, the relation has domestic analogies or can be translated directly into domestic or social terms. And then there is a new relation, often a marvelous counterpoint between the intimate relation and the new domestic figure that it has annexed. And the most conclusive example of these felicities is ‘Because I could not stop for Death’. . .”