A D.C. reading, ghost pipes, & more Dickinson

My new mushroom-patterned dress and I will appear at Kramer’s in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday 7/22, where I’m reading at 7 pm with Steven Leyva and Tonee Mae Moll. (The dress is kind of retro and I think I look like a sci-fi 50s nurse in it, or maybe a waitress at a fungus-themed diner.) If you can’t make it but would enjoy a short recorded reading from Mycocosmic in ms form–made in January!–please check out Tina Cane’s Poetry Is Bread series.

In the meantime, a little more on Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”: I’m now firmly convinced that “Truffled Hut” should read “Truffled Hat.” As Dickinson’s fans know, she hardly ever saw her poems into print and early editors tended to bowdlerize them; in the1950s, editors started revisiting her manuscripts, some of them sewn into little booklets or “fascicles,” to translate them to print more accurately, although her ambiguous handwriting and inclusion of possible alternate wording makes that tricky. A ms version of “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” DOES survive, contrary to what the internet had me believe (shocking, I know, that a web search led me astray). Reproduced in Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, it reveals how closely her longhand lowercase a’s resemble her u’s: it’s not a matter of whether the top curve touches the upright, as you’d think, but of how close the two strokes come. All respect and gratitude to her valiant editors, who in this case interpret the millimeter’s difference perfectly plausibly. I just think “hat,” with its allusion to a mushroom’s cap, makes more sense. I floated my apostate interpretation at my Phosphorescence reading last week, a totally lovely event that was superbly run, and earned a nod from the moderator plus a comment in the chat: “Team Hat!” I felt quite pleased with myself.

Other than events like these, occasionally typing up a poem draft from a notebook, planning some fall stuff, and dealing with postponed medical appointments, I’m not getting much done in these dog days. Okay, I look at that last sentence and acknowledge I’m ridiculous, but I feel guilty when I’m not teaching yet not writing anything new. Like a mushroom, my confidence tends to evanesce fast. My rational self says, “hey, give yourself a break, your sabbatical is just starting, Mercury’s in retrograde, the world is screwed up, and you’re tired.” Another voice says, “you’ll never write a good book again and nobody sees you fruiting on the forest floor.” I see the same doubts manifesting on a few poet-friends’ social media–and even within some of the recent poetry collections I’ve been reading. Same old poetry life. My friend Emily Dickinson would tease me for getting my feathers truffled about it.

Next weekend I’ll be taking a brief break to loll on a New Jersey beach. I’ll leave you with another Mycocosmic outtake, a poem published in Interim but eventually cut from the ms. I wrote it in spring 2020 while teaching Dickinson via Zoom on a laptop propped up by Johnson’s three-volume variorum edition. It refers–too cryptically, I think–to the Dickinson poem beginning “Alone and in a Circumstance,” which seemed to speak to me about my pandemic existence intimately, though from worlds away. After the poem are a few snaps of the fungal life teeming in the soggy Virginia woods these days. I also saw my first ghost pipes! (Dickinson wrote about “Indian pipes”—a plant she admired that can’t photosynthesize so lives symbiotically, with fungal assistance. Don’t we all.)

Alone and in a Circumstance

Check for an angle that conceals
the spider on my reticence.
Prop a fat edition under the screen
for partial invisibility. Now everyone
seeks the doctor’s examination
by flitting past a half-closed door.

Absent-heartedness. Time’s larceny.
Each day creeps by arthropodically.

Later, there sits a slip-jacketed
hardback, nest of arachnid dashes.
I open to a poem I’ve never
understood. It’s crawling with variants.

Syllables can be hospitable
concavities hammocked by webs
of a distant person’s thinking.
Sticking there is the only free thing.