Dickinson’s fungal weirdness

This Thursday, 7/17, at 6 pm Eastern, I’m reading with Nadia Alexis in a virtual series, Phosphorescence, hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum. (Nadia’s great book Beyond the Watershed launched on the very same March day as my Mycocosmic so it’s been a pleasure to pair up a couple of times.) The reading is free but you need to register here for the Zoom link (you’ll also be able to watch a recording later if the time is bad). Nadia and I just had a planning meeting with the lovely people who run the series, including the poet Mary Warren Foulk, who will moderate the Q&A. It got me thinking about which Dickinson poem I might include in my reading and why. I’m choosing the verses from which I pull an epigraph for Mycocosmic:

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants –
At Evening, it is not –
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop upon a Spot

As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay
And fleeter than a Tare –

‘Tis Vegetation’s Juggler –
The Germ of Alibi –
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie –

I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit –
This surreptitious scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn –
Had Nature an Apostate –
That Mushroom – it is Him!

You can also find the poem here and some useful notes about it from editor Thomas Johnson here. Dickinson jotted the first draft of “[The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants]” on the back of an envelope in 1874 and later sent the complete poem to her Norcross cousins, who copied it down for posterity but lost the original. When Fanny Norcross shared it with one of Dickinson’s first editors, T. W. Higginson, she noted in the letter, “I was so much impressed with its weirdness and originality.”*

From “Elf” to “Apostate,” Dickinson’s supernaturally inflected language suggests how the mushroom defies Nature’s rules, sneaking through the landscape surreptitiously and vanishing without saying its prayers. Dickinson’s poem is disobedient, too, in ways that are typical for her–shifting pronouns, irregular punctuation and capitalization, twisty syntax, slant rhymes–but I find it more difficult than much of her work. This is partly because she uses some words in antique and unusual ways, “circumspect” as a noun, for instance. (So the mushroom is a deviant child of circumspection, paradoxically created by parental vigilance?) I have no idea why Nature’s face is “supple” or how a mushroom can be a “Germ of Alibi.” I don’t think I’m getting all the allusions, either, although surely “Tares,” in this context, suggests the Biblical parable of weeds sown among the wheat. I found this wonderful blog post by Giles Watson that pegs the “Bubble” to Macbeth in a convincing way. (His post only seems to exist on Goodreads now.) Watson connects mycorrhizal poetry to revolution, conjuring a means of allusion and networking that fosters resistance. He’s so right: a rebellious spirit is strongly latent in this cryptic poem.

I also have to report going down the rabbit hole on the phrase “Truffled Hut.” Truffles are a rare and delicious fungus, of course, as Dickinson would have known; the word “truffled” as in “prepared with truffles” appears in 18th and 19th century British literature. The OED reports that “truffles” didn’t refer in print to chocolate until 1899. It has a rare old meaning, though, related to “trifle”: fabled, trivial, or deceptive (like an “Alibi” or “Juggler”). So this poem’s uncanny mushroom manifests in a small, tricky hut? “Hat” would make more sense, and with no scholarly justification whatsoever I suspect that’s what Dickinson meant, but we can’t check the handwriting anymore. (Well, I’m going to have to see if there’s a manuscript facsimile of the surviving envelope version–I don’t have those books at home.) I also think “Truffled” is a play on “ruffled” and we’re supposed to visualize something like a chanterelle’s frilly cap. I’m always speculating as if Dickinson and I have a secret connection–impudent of me. Plenty of Dickinson’s poetry is occult in all that word’s senses, not only cryptic but populated by witches and ghosts, and I’ve long felt an affinity with it.

I don’t think there’s a better English-language poet than Dickinson, so I hesitate to compare my work to hers even just in subject matter! But from my dissertation, Poetics of Enclosure (which led off with a Dickinson chapter), to Mycocosmic, I’ve been obsessed with hidden life and how it occasionally fruits. Well, since before graduate work, really–the alcoholic family I grew up in was secretive. Maybe there will be an afterlife for apostates in which Dickinson and I can have a tête-à-tête.** Till then, I’m so glad Nadia and I can get this close to sharing a stage with her.

*Adding this note on 7/20/25: I discovered after posting that a full ms version of this poem DOES survive. More in this follow-up post.

**My book Radioland does contain a conversation-poem with Dickinson called “Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat.” I used to talk to her all the time when I had a long, boring commute. The poem doesn’t seem to be online anymore, but I’ll read it this Thursday.