This is my Text to the World That Never Texted Me

Traci Brimhall and Lucy Biederman


 

Notes & Sources

With the exception of "Hil, everyone else is prose," Emily's texts to Hillary come from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Back Bay Books, 1976).

Poetical: "I am an extraordinary I & not you" is from the poem "From the Proscenium," by Lucie Brock-Broido (The Master Letters, Knopf, 1995). "The Man— the Woman— " is from Janet Holmes's The Ms of my Kin (Shearsman, 2009). Critical: "the exaggeratedly feminine mask of perpetual childhood" is from Christanne Miller's A Poet's Grammar (Harvard U P, 1989). "[H]er greatness rather than her littleness" is from Adrienne Rich's essay "Vesuvius at Home" (as published in Parnassus, 1976). Paul Legault calls Dickinson "the father of American poetry" in his facetious "Translator's Note" in The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to English Translation of Dickinson's Complete Poems (McSweeney's, 2012).