Petaluma scholar explores life of Emily Dickinson

Library to host Holly Springfiel’s talk on influential poet|

Wouldn’t it be fun to spend an hour with Emily Dickinson, the great American poet?

Unfortunately, she died in 1886, at the age of 56. The next best thing, then, would be a conversation with someone who (sort of) knows her. Someone like Holly Springfield, of Petaluma. Springfield will be delivering a free talk on the life and work of Emily Dickinson, on Monday, Oct. 29, at the Petaluma Public Library. The talk will be followed by an open discussion.

Dickinson, who described herself as Nobody in the following poem, is definitely “Somebody” today.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you - Nobody - too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! They’d advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!

How public - like a Frog -

To tell one’s name - the livelong June -

To an admiring bog!

Springfield will be reciting selected poems as part of the presentation, and will distribute a handout for those in the audience who wish to follow along.

“The handout is like a boulder in the river,” says Springfield. “We will flow around it and see what happens.”

Eighteen years ago, Springfield realized that she craved a deep and long-term challenge, something both spiritual and intellectual. She recalled that her ex-husband, a classics professor, once told her, “If you want to truly know a great mind, start with the first page of the first thing they ever wrote and read straight through to the last page of the last thing.” So, Springfield went to the library and browsed the biography section to see who spoke to her the most.

It was Dickinson.

The reclusive New Englander met all three of Springfield’s criteria.

“A great mind, a hefty corpus, and a life-long development of ideas,” says Springfield. She decided to read all of Dickinson’s 1,789 poems (a 690-page book), in chronological order, without the help of any critical commentary.

“I wanted to be free of influence,” she says.

Springfield is now on her fifth chronological reading of the poems. For her, “reading” means orating the poems out loud as well as meditating on them.

“You need to hear the voice of Dickinson - it’s everything,” she says.

Springfield has also undertaken a deep reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, because, as she puts it, “To really know Emily you need to have read what she read.” And Dickinson was a keen reader of Emerson, her contemporary.

One of the peculiarities of Dickinson was her secretiveness about her poetry. Springfield says the reasons are complex and speculative, but that we need to remember that only men wrote serious poetry then.

“She knew she was a genius, and that she would not be understood,” Springfield says, “so she was selective about readers. She didn’t suffer fools and was only interested in people she called rewarding.”

Another unique feature of Dickinson’s poetry is the form - short and often cryptic, with numerous dashes breaking up the lines.

“Dickinson was raised singing hymns, and her form is actually simple and hymn-like,” Springfield explains. “But she tweaks the form and plays with it like a jazz musician varying a melody.”

The dashes may reflect Dickinson’s student training in elocution.

“She had seven years of practice in school, where you write something, then you read it aloud,” says Springfield. “She was good at it, the envy of the school. The dashes in her poems may have represented pauses in the reciting.”

Springfield herself grew up in Mill Valley, earned a master’s degree in English at UC Berkeley, married her classics professor, had a baby, divorced, and supported herself and her son in Berkeley for a decade by doing a large variety of jobs. In her thirties, she became a lay therapist doing couples counseling.

Her life began to change radically when she “unplugged” for six months, retreating to a cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

“It was a profound experience,” she recalls, an experience she repeated in the 1990s by buying a van and traveling in the Northwest for six months. She eventually moved to Napa to care for her aging father and stepmother, taking care of them until both were gone. A small inheritance freed her from financial pressure for a period, during which she joined Waking Down in Mutuality, a spiritual community in Marin County. She credits her five years there with her spiritual awakening.

Springfield now conducts a monthly study group on Dickinson and hopes to start a second one.

“Dickinson is timeless. She doesn’t age,” Springfield says. “She sounds so modern because she uses her personal experience of life to express universal experience.”

Springfield says she’s loved the challenge of getting to know Emily Dickinson, and has never doubted that she picked the right person to become immersed in.

“I’ve entered her world,” she says. “A friend joked that Dickinson had become my best friend, and I said, ‘Well, my best disembodied friend, at least.’”

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