In September of 2021, Amy started an Instagram account for a new project she was embarking on: to transcribe all 1775 poems of Emily Dickinson. To write them out longhand.
This morning, I started writing The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I hope to finish within a year. The book is dedicated to my family—my husband and kids—and I am writing it under the name Amy Robinson because it’s the name I share with them.
Though I am writing a book, transcription is more practice than project. It is a discipline and a means to discipline. By writing her complete poems, I become Emily Dickinson’s disciple. She wrote longhand and so will I.
Writing this book is a spiritual exercise more than a literary one. I mean spiritual not in the casual “spiritual but not religious” sense but truly in the sense of moving within the spirit world. I don’t just mean the spirit of Emily Dickinson; I’m not even sure I mean that at all. I don’t know much about the spirit world, or whether it resembles our world in any embodied way, but I do believe the poetry of Emily Dickinson is a conduit.
The first poem does not have the look of an Emily Dickinson poem. I had the sensation of trying to get to the good stuff. But as I wrote the poem, I found her voice. Death, even in a light Valentine’s poem.
She finished the project, transcribing poem #1775 on leap day, February 29, 2024. Recently I asked her a few questions about it.
Writing 1775 poems by hand is a gargantuan task. How sure were you when you started that you’d be able to follow through?
Probably I was fully sure I’d finish in one part of my brain, and fully sure I’d fail as usual in the other, tender part. Within a few months of pretty steady but often interrupted work, I knew I wouldn’t finish in a year as I planned, but I did feel a calmer sense that I would eventually finish because I loved doing it so much, as a practice rather than as a project.
Let’s see… can you talk a little more about this “tender part”? Where does it come from and how do you deal with it? I ask because I think a lot of people have this shoulder devil, and I wonder if there was something about this particular project—I mean practice—that quieted it.
It comes from thinking I’d have a book out by now, easy. And while I can come up with lots of good reasons why I don’t, the fact is that I’m not going to have a book out until I do the work. That almost seems more devilish to me—the voice that says I will never run out of excuses, and I don’t have to do this (write).
At the time I started writing The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, I had one kid in preschool for three hours a day and an infant who took a long nap during that time, so it didn’t seem possible to engage or reengage in a sustained book project of my own. So I wrote someone else’s writing. And then I became myself.
Do you have a sense of how the process of rewriting her work has affected your own writing?
I don’t know how it’s affected my writing on the page, like style or form, but I do know it’s opened up some kind of portal within me. Like you know how you can do a quick exercise or prompt as a way to begin writing for the day? I feel like this was that, only it was a two and a half year exercise, as a way to get ready for my next forty years of writing. I had a student in a poetry workshop I taught in Bangladesh, who said she didn’t want to be a poet, and I said that was okay, the semester was almost over, and she was like, No, I AM a poet, I just wish I wasn’t. This has affected my writing that way: I have come to terms with the fact that I can’t give this up. Sorry! Kind of an existential answer.
How important was the handwriting aspect?
Do you mean writing by hand as opposed to typing?
Yes.
Then I’d say it was a critical difference. It would not have occurred to me to type her poems. But if you had meant how my handwriting looked, I’d say I was more self-conscious about my handwriting at the beginning. I tried out some things. But then I let go of that.
Did you discover any poems in there that you wouldn’t have otherwise, and that you love more than you thought you might have?
Yes, of course. I’d read only the usual 25 or so famous poems before transcribing all 1,775 of them, so I discovered at least 1,750 new ones.
Haha.
I starred my favorites as I wrote, and now I’m cross-checking those against a few “selected” collections like the one edited by Joyce Carol Oates, to find my favorite “unselected” poems. Those I will typeset by hand and print as a chapbook with the Vandercook Universal 3 letterpress in the Snowfort basement. Here’s one that will probably be in there:
You had an opportunity to actually sit in Dickinson’s room and write for a couple hours. How did that feel?
It was cool! I had to write in pencil, so it slowed me down, but I wrote 32 poems in the room where she slept and, presumably, wrote those poems. Booking the session was my reward for getting halfway there, which took over two years, and the experience urged me toward completion within the next four months. A major acceleration! That said, actually transcribing in the room where she wrote didn’t fill me with her spirit or anything. Just too stuffy and museum-y. I think her graveside would have been a better choice for channeling something. She’s in the dirt the way mycelium is in the dirt. Think of all she’s done since she died.
That’s an awesome way to think of dead poets. Curious, did you have to write in pencil because of their restrictions?
Yeah, pencil only, and I had a monitor sitting just outside. It feels like being in the archives, except with some furniture and drapery instead of old papers.
You’ve continued to transcribe other people’s work. What compels you about a piece to write it out?
I started transcribing more actively a few years before I started with Emily Dickinson’s poems, as a Lenten practice in 2020. There’s alchemy in it. I wrote a Toni Morrison passage and buried it on John Brown Farm. When I wanted to cover up all the Gryffindor branding on a water bottle that I bought online without realizing it was a Harry Potter-themed water bottle, I wrote a Joy Harjo poem on a giant shipping label and stuck that on there. Does that answer your question?
Yep, who’d have thought this would solve so many problems. So, how will you balance your next forty years of writing with running Snowfort and the letterpress studio?
Balance! Perish the thought. How about something more like tides or seasons for all these beautiful swirling currents?