The most famous proponent of the dash was, of course, the poet Emily Dickinson, and it is because of her that, for me, the dash has a feminine slant. With Emily Dickinson at the table, my simplistic division of dashes into table forks and salad forks falls apart. She used dashes for everything, and sometimes for two things at once. If a different size and style of fork were assigned to each of her various dashes, the table setting would require not just dessert forks and fondue forks and those tiny forks used for teasing out snails but also tuning forks and pitchforks.
Dickinson’s dashes have given rise to an entire academic industry. There is still no agreement among scholars over which of our conventional dashes suits her typographically. I think of dashes as an aid to conventional syntax, so I am not the ideal copy editor for, or even reader of, Emily Dickinson. The scholar Cristanne Miller writes, “In Dickinson’s poetry the dash’s primary function is rarely syntactic, to mark a tangential phrase for the reader or enclose a narrative aside. Rather, dashes typically isolate words for emphasis, provide a rhythmical syncopation to the meter and phrase of a line, and act as hooks on attention, slowing the reader’s progress through the poem.” Some scholars think the dashes were a form of musical notation, with the length of the dash indicating the length of the pause, or even a tonal system. R. W. Franklin, whose edition of the poems for Harvard University’s Belknap Press is the approved academic text (there is both a single-volume “reading edition” and a three-volume variorum edition), writes that although the poet also used the comma and the period, she “relied mainly on dashes of varying length and position, tilting up or down as well as extending horizontally.” While some of Dickinson’s poems do have a period at the end, Miller writes that she “is apt to use the period ironically, to mock the expectation of final certainty.” She is fond of the “syntactically ambiguous dash,” which “both allows the sentence to continue (if we read the dash as dash) and makes the continuation a surprise (if we read the dash as end punctuation, which it often is in Dickinson’s poetry).”
What is a copy editor to do? I don’t hate ambiguity, but I can’t be trusted to punctuate it, either. The one time it fell to me to style Dickinson’s dashes, when her poetry was quoted in a book review by Judith Thurman, I blew it. The fact checker had on her desk the author’s source, which had what I took for en dashes floating unmoored between the words. I’d never seen anything like this in The New Yorker. Quivering with impatience—
Patience - is the Smile’s exertion
Through the quivering -
—I styled the verse in the most pedestrian way possible, marking all the dashes as one ems and closing up the space between the dash and the preceding word. The Library of America, in one of its volumes of nineteenth-century American poetry, treats the Dickinson dashes in this same flat-footed way. Today, the entire archive of Emily Dickinson is available online, but even scholars who can read the poet’s handwriting have to make decisions about how to handle the dashes. In the Franklin edition, “a spaced hyphen,” as above, “rather than an en or an em dash, has been used as appropriate to the relative weight of her dashes in most of the poems.” Franklin makes the point that Dickinson’s poems were never published by the poet herself. She copied her finished poems onto sheets of folded stationery, poked holes in the fold, and stitched them together, into what the scholars call fascicles. So although poetry is “a public genre, to be brought editorially into line with public norms of presentation,” her poems should be treated as a “private genre,” like a letter or a diary, and therefore her practice should be followed as closely as possible.
When Dickinson’s pencil jottings on odds and ends of paper—envelopes, receipts, wrapping paper—were published as an art book, The Gorgeous Nothings, by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, I went downtown to see some of the originals in an exhibit at the Drawing Center, in SoHo. They were under glass and distorted by reflections from overhead lights, and it was hard to inspect them without slobbering on the vitrine. An artist friend who had been somewhat irritated by the show asked, about Dickinson, “Didn’t she have any pads of paper?” These “Gorgeous Nothings” are not formal poems but things that the poet was thought to have been working up or fragments from her correspondence that she had decided to keep. Much is made of the way she fit them onto the scraps, some no bigger than a guitar pick. Of one vertical poem that begins “With Pinions of / Disdain,” the scholar Susan Howe wrote that the dots over the i’s are expressive. Any poet who can get so much satisfaction out of dotting her i’s, as if concealing upside-down exclamation points of anger, deserves to have her dashes respected.
The dots and dashes actually put me in mind of telegrams, an obsolete form of communication (the Twitter of its time?) that had its own style—almost an anti-style—lacking any form of punctuation except the uninflected command “STOP.”
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