Eunsong Kim Processes Abstracted Violence and the Making of a Scholarly Text Through Howe's My Emily Dickinson

Eunsong Kim's new essay in Michigan Quarterly Review dissects and reflects on Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, asking central questions "about white feminist poetry and its deployment of chattel slavery as metaphor." The essay, writes Kim, is about "my time in Susan Howe’s archive at the Archive for New Poetry. It’s about graduate school gaslighting. It doesn’t say all that it must because it is the first part of many essays about the process and life behind what is finalized as the scholarly text." An excerpt:

…Akin to white women’s early tactics in the suffrage movement, Howe links white women’s oppressions to enslavement. Not only does Howe make this equivalence, towards the end of the book, “My Life” becomes a poem about slavery and emancipation. 

Howe’s politicization of Dickinson opposes previous apolitical renderings of the poet. Acknowledging this, she writes, “Emily Dickinson, who is so often accused of avoiding political issues in her work, certainly did not avoid them here. As she well knew, the original American conflict between idealism and extremism was being acted out again” (Howe 74). Thus, for Howe, not only is Dickinson political but, in My Emily Dickinson, Howe alludes to how the poet’s position in the original American conflict—slavery—was its abolition.

Howe contends that Dickinson’s poem “My life” could be close read as a poem “triggered by parts of it” (Howe 125). The “it” refers to “Nat Turner’s Insurrection” written by Thomas Higginson, an abolitionist and an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. However, there are no passages from Higginson’s essay and no analysis to support such claims. Neither are there drafts in Howe’s archive that outline or deepen this argument. With this, Howe adds, Higginson “was intrigued by black music” and wrote about it (Howe 125). She then goes one step further. She makes an association between a letter written by a Black soldier to Higginson to describe her Emily Dickinson.…

The full piece is at MQR.