Guest Post by Ivy Schweitzer

“White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a Weekly Blog.”  http://sites.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/

Created and edited by Ivy Schweitzer

I tell people who ask, that Dickinson called me. That is why I came up with a year-long project to document one of the most intense years in Dickinson’s writing life. I am both a scholar of early American literature with a particular focus on women, and a poet. Wanting to invigorate my relationship to poetry as a writer of it, I thought I would immerse myself in all things Dickinson and get as close as I could to her writing process and to the texture and contexts of her daily writing life. There are many exemplary biographies and accounts of Dickinson [could link to a list] and no end of fascinating fan literature and fiction, but I wanted something more experiential and sustained.

I had just finished a digital humanities project, The Occom Circle (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~occom/), a scholarly digital edition of works by and about Samson Occom, an 18^th century Mohegan Indian leader, public intellectual and Christian minister. In the course of working on that project, I explored the Dickinson Electronic Archive [put in link], an innovative research and teaching tool created by a collective of Dickinson scholars in the wake of the recently digitized Dickinson manuscripts by Harvard University and Amherst College. In 1981, the world of Dickinson scholarship had been revolutionized by the publication of Ralph’s Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which afforded a unique view of Dickinson’s texts as she wrote (and rewrote and preserved) them. Since then, scholars have been busy “unediting” Dickinson’s writing, as Marta Werner expressed it in Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, “undoing” a century of distorting editorial and critical work so that we can finally begin to read what Dickinson actually wrote. Digital access to Dickinson’s manuscripts is producing another revolution, again in Werner’s words, “constellating these works not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.” I wanted to explore and find a way to present Dickinson’s poems as events of freedom.

I thought I would use the digital technologies I learned about in The Occom Circle to create an immersive experience for a wider audience of poetry lovers, students of Dickinson, and folks interested in the nineteenth-century. I tried out this approach in the two iterations of a junior level colloquium on Dickinson I taught at my home institution of Dartmouth College, titled “The New Dickinson: After the Digital Turn.” It was a revelation to see how our readings of the poems changed, deepened and grew more complex and dynamic when we worked with the digital scans of the manuscripts. As my students often commented heatedly, they felt “gipped” when comparing printed versions of the poems with the manuscript images. How dare the editor make those choices about diction, syntax, line breaks, and the fixed length of Dickinson’s iconic dashes–– and without telling us! they complained. This “new” way of reading Dickinson was further aided by the ease of finding contextual materials on the web like newspapers, magazines, the Dickinson Lexicon, information about the Civil War and other players in her creative drama. That rich mix is what I imagined our weekly blog posts would offer.

Despite recent films about Dickinson (A Quiet Passion, 2017 and Wild Nights with Emily, 2018) that counteract the myth of the quaint recluse removed from the world, it still seems important to ground the poet in her time and place and suggest her engagement with contemporary events. To do so, each weekly blog offers several sets of related materials: what was happening in the wider world, nationally and internationally, in the local world of Amherst and the Dickinson family, and what was afoot in the literary worlds of her moment. These materials are not meant to be definitive or restrictive but suggestive and opening. We cannot know whether Dickinson read about or engaged in debates about current affairs, but they were in the air she breathed, perhaps on the lips of her family members and in the minds of her growing circle of correspondents. They formed part of the networks of sociability in which she moved and created.

Each weekly blog post consists of four parts:

1) national/international events of the week evoked through headlines, summaries and links to major news outlets that Dickinson’s family subscribed to and often read aloud to each other

2) biographical events of the week in Dickinson's life, domestic circle, and expanding correspondents evoked through daily events and letters

3) literary trends of the week or time that form a backdrop for a cluster of poems written during the year and curated in relation to the first two section, and evoked through summaries of scholarship and approaches. Our goal is not to interpret poems for readers, but to provide materials that will facilitate interpretation.

4) a reflection on and response to the weekly events and the poems. The nature of the reflections will vary, depending on who is reflecting. The project seeks to connect users to scholars and poets around the world who study and appreciate Dickinson’s work in order to offer diverse viewpoints through creative and critical musings. If you would like to be a guest respondent, please contact the editor, Ivy Schweitzer at Ivy.Schweitzer@Dartmouth.edu.