New Poems of Emily Dickinson — a bold title! — by William H. Shurr, with Anna Dunlap and Emily Grey Shurr, offers hundreds of new poems found within Emily’s correspondence. Many of them are "fourteeners": a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter. New Poems was published in 1993, and I recently spent a year obsessively reading it.
Emily Dickinson has a matchless, branching mind. Questions about her mostly return unanswered. Her secretive life repels investigative prying. In a sense, this entire book is an unanswered question: "Did Emily secrete poems within her letters, disguised as ordinary lines?" I find the book generally unconvincing, but never wrong.
We must be less than Death,
to be lessened by it —
for nothing is irrevocable
but ourselves.
That’s the piece Shurr calls "poem number 266." But is it exactly a poem? I would say no. But neither is it a non-poem. Just as Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches are more engaging than his paintings, because they show his tumultuous, exacting thoughts, Emily’s fugitive lines are more intimate than her poems:
To be certain we were to meet our Lost,
would be a Vista of reunion,
who of us could bear?
That’s 317. (Aren’t those commas electrifying?)
Though she lived in increasing isolation, she sounds like a ceaseless traveler:
I trust you may have the dearest summer
possible to Loss —
One sweet sweet more — One liquid more —
of that Arabian presence!
(Number 288.) Emily is one of the great American inventors, like Thomas Edison and B. F. Goodrich. She is not so much writing poems as reimagining poetry’s future.
Would success have wrecked Emily? Possibly. If she’d had an audience, she might have diluted her brave metaphysical wit for the shopowners and dentists who read her. Instead, she had the recklessness of the finest rappers:
Ya know, some of these niggaz is so deceptive,
Usin my styles like a contraceptive.
I hope ya get burnt, it seems ya haven’t learnt:
It’s the nick nack patty wack, I still got the bigger sack;
So put your gun away, run away, cuz I’m back.
Hit ’em up, get ’em up, spit ’em up, now
Tell me what’s goin’ on…
Could I visit the Beds
of my own who sleep,
as reprovelessly,
even Night were sweet —
That’s "Doggy Dog World" by Snoop Doggy Dogg, followed by (the last four lines) number 417.