if the top of my head were taken off . . .

Emily Dickinson on poetry. (The Commonplace Book Project)

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
— Emily Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1870) in The Letters of Emily Dickinson

I appreciate that the quote above says ‘book’ and not ‘poem.’ Because it implies that words can be poetry even if they’re not called poems. I want poetry to do this to me. Make me so cold no fire can warm me or take t he top off my head. But it doesn’t.

Through years and years of undergraduate and then graduate study of creative writing, I’ve sat through many, many poetry readings. My brain knows that the words are pretty. But I struggle, often, to understand. And then there’s this poetry reading sound that passes around the room and I end up feeling stupid.

Too stupid to feel the way that Emily Dickinson does about poetry.

I did love it once, though. When I was in high school, I kept a tiny notebook filled with lines of Dickinson and Shakespeare and Hughs and Frost. I have a kind of muscle memory of having the top of my head blown off.