These poems are from an in-progress book-length work called, "feral girl," an integrated sequence considering what can be said from prelingual experience.

ADAM C. BRADFORD, Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. xiv + 248 pp.For those accustomed to the conventional literary wisdom that Walt Whitman's primary mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adam Bradford's Communities of Death may prove startling. Bradford puts forward the audacious thesis that instead of Emerson's Transcendentalist work, Poe's macabre work served to inspire Whitman's most ambitious poetic projects. Contending not only that Poe influenced Whitman, Bradford asserts that Poe was responsible for Whitman's most crucial achievements in both democratic and spiritual poetics; Whitman developed a democratic vision by drawing upon the importance of communal mourning, and a spiritual vision by drawing upon the material proximity of the deceased. Bradford states that Whitman repeatedly testified to the oddly recuperative potential of Poe's Gothic and macabre literature and claimed that it played a central role in spurring him to produce the rather remarkably transcendent Leaves of Grass (6). Central to this argument is the need to see both poets as their contemporaries did, specifically in terms of the cultural work of mourning.That we have largely failed to see the recuperative aspects of Poe's poems and stories in our time is due to our removal from and uneasiness the nineteenth-century practices of prizing attachment, including bodily attachment, to the deceased. Early twentieth-century Freudian conceptions of grief work posited detachment from the dead as the way to reach a healthy reintegration of the self in mourning, but nineteenth-century conventions conceived of attachment as desirable because it signaled a healthy relationship the dead, and could even extend the relationship into the afterlife. Antebellum mourning depended upon culturally sanctioned rituals that drew mourners into involvement members of the community by way of the crucial rituals of making and exchanging material objects of mourning.Bradford's examination of this nineteenth-century material culture in terms of poetics is the most valuable of many astute contributions in Communities of Death. His examination will most likely be of interest to any historian of nineteenth-century literature that deals representations of death and absence-in other words, a great deal of it. Antebellum materials of mourning were drawn from close contact the dead, and included such objects as weavings made from the hair of the deceased, memorial quilts, mourning portraits, jewelry made from the deceased's effects, photography (of the corpse), and consolation poetry inscribed on urns, headstones, and the like. These items, perhaps distasteful to us, were hardly perceived as such during the period and, indeed, aided in the active remembering that might enable a survivor to be in the continued presence of the departed. items connected family members, friends, and communities, strengthening and renewing social ties; not simply mementos, the items served as potent talismans, and were seen as salubrious in preventing separation from the departed for years, or even a lifetime.Bradford investigates the role of these funerary materials to show how Poe's audience read his work with a sense of empathetic commiseration as opposed to shock and horror, making these poems into invaluable tools [for the] bereaved (13). To immerse oneself in such mortuary details and reread poems like Annabel Lee and The Raven under Bradford's tutelage is to discover a different Poe from the one we may have thought we knew. speakers of these and others of Poe's poems do not engage in morbid activities but rather perform accepted nineteenth-century rituals of mourning that allowed access to the bodies of the dead, expressing grief in what were seen as healthy and natural ways. Poe's readers were affected because they approached the text an understanding of grief that made allowance for these types of otherwise unconventional thoughts and behavior (43). …

Nth, and: Why body, and: Slide, and: Lie Daneen Wardrop (bio) Nth November is the Norway of the year. And fjords are my eyes, an ordinal seeing all over. That’s a lot of seeing. The clumpy things on the deck—clay pot?—a child’s chair?—clogs?—whatever they were, flattening to powder now. I have North Sea waves for a mouth. My heart, still as a cut circle of felt, is one bit of nth. Like the fact of many blossoms, there is a look impossible to practice. There is a look much like the coming-on of momentum— Why body Why body inscribed onto space in this exact form? It’s possible a person’s feet are candles. Windows snow. Decks dangle numerable spotlights, glitter-mobile swaying, and by this time something is flung beyond thanks where we won’t have to remember to keep track. I want to light a match. In May, the flowering pear tree bursts, wearing tiny fleece-caps all over itself. Slide One must limit the intake of news or go diffuse with takeout, outsource, make-out, outing, fanning out into the corners of November. The body, a lace of veins, loses count. And the snow after all one-thousand-thousand wicks. That’s the cold’s best offer. At just this flick I know it snows, it snows, my accumulated heart. You might have put that on a patient’s chart. I slide the door open and the body, a tissue of intent, pushes off from a warm deck. [End Page 196] Lie I’ve read that aphasics watching a presidential debate laugh at every lie, like snow reads a landscape. It’s a watcher’s game, laughter as foil crinkling. Must I give up even my small bit of talk? (I admit it is me, despicable truth of elegies, whom I miss.) Sometimes snow finishes the punch line. I suppose our bones sparkle inside like that. You once told me my mother’s stubbornness kept her alive, told me into your stethoscope. Meticulous sparks move by standing still in the storm, they look like tell me again. They look like tell me again, just a little at a time. [End Page 197] Daneen Wardrop Daneen Wardrop is the author of a book of poetry, The Odds of Being, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Bentley Prize from Seattle Review, and the Gerald Cable Book Award. Her poems appear in Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has also authored three books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England). Copyright © 2013 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Woman at the Fence Daneen Wardrop (bio) I was out looking for it— that was before all my chickens died,someone poisoned them— was out looking for the dead line.Looked in thickets, the muck, and the woodsbut I can't find it, where the thing turns, where there's a fringe of long soundsfrom the wisps that might be groans, curses,palpate palpate palpate shutthe door to that man's ear. I cannot tell any more about the dooryard of love. That was before my clouds died,just closed up one by one into flat white cambric and swallowed themselves.I wonder if somebody poisoned them, too. You look at me as if my eyes were red, my eyes aren't red, I see fine,don't pick at myself except when I have to. I don't know a single person here.Every morning my hair falls out in the brush,I feel very pretty,but that was thirty mirrors ago. My children, all of them poisoned,but that may be my cats— [End Page 149] They say on the field the moon will snap the small rocks into smoke. Once I found a man still alive next to a fence,a boy, blond, his hair, dottedwith white tufts where he'd been knocked on the head. I rocked his shoulder to sleepand inside, the painwidened to white.I let him go. Tell you what,if you ever find that linejust don't tell me. I wash my son's shirt and the sleeves fall off in the water. [End Page 150] Daneen Wardrop Daneen Wardrop is the author of a book of poetry, The Odds of Being, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Bentley Prize from Seattle Review, and a Gerald Cable Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, Agni, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has also authored three books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (UPNE). Copyright © 2013 Center for Literary Publishing

Book Review| January 01 2012 Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862 Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862. By Ted Genoways. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2009. 256 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $16.95. Daneen Wardrop Daneen Wardrop Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2012) 44 (2): 180–182. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.44.2.0180 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Daneen Wardrop; Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862. American Literary Realism 1 January 2012; 44 (2): 180–182. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.44.2.0180 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language Daneen Wardrop (bio) Murray, Aife. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language. Lebanon: U of New Hampshire P, 2010. $35. A couple decades ago the common wisdom in Dickinson studies held that Emily Dickinson was fortunate to have lived an elite life that offered her countless hours of leisure she could devote to writing; some years later the common wisdom shifted so that Dickinson was seen as a woman who worked long days performing duties such as caring for her mother and baking, her literary output accordingly seen as nearly miraculous, stolen from midnight hours. Aife Murray sides with neither of these outlooks in Maid as Muse but instead offers a fresh, savvy picture of Emily Dickinson that compasses and mediates both. The Dickinson she portrays was [End Page 110] privileged and had the luxury of performing the tasks of her choosing even as she worked alongside domestic maids who performed the many onerous chores necessary to running a nineteenth-century household. Murray puts forward an intricate and vivid perspective on the poet's day-to-day life, a perspective in which literary arts and domestic arts intertwine. She finds an Emily Dickinson we have never seen before. Murray does this by mixing modes of discourse, offering traditional archival research and interviews of descendents of Homestead workers, interspersed with occasional scenes of Murray's imagining. These created scenes, noted and italicized, present an intuitive interpretation of the information she amasses. Murray's scholarly sleuthing turns up incisive results, and she follows those results to create occasional careful fictions that she argues must be pursued in order to fill the historical gaps in studies of underrepresented populations. Part biography, part literary criticism, part historical retrieval, part imaginings, part personal narrative of a research journey undertaken to glean a sense of her own Irish past, the book undertakes search and research, historical information remaining paramount, fictionalized sections enhancing the historical information. Showing how life and language in the Homestead were matters of coexistence between Emily Dickinson and servants, Murray focuses primarily on Margaret Maher, an Irish immigrant who worked for the family from 1869 to 1899. The intrepid Margaret Maher, called "Maggie" by the family and mentioned often in Dickinson's correspondence, proved important to the poet as confidante, protector, independent spirit, and co-worker in a day-to-day existence of camaraderie that crossed class lines. Murray broadens the angle of inquiry to include other servants as well—immigrant Irish, immigrant English, African American, and Native American, including some eighty servants who were hired at the Homestead (18). Servants affected the community's social structure as a whole, as she demonstrates when she gives a dishy account of a town's power play between two prominent families, the Boltwoods and the Dickinsons, both of whom fought to keep Margaret Maher as their employee. Murray posits the Homestead kitchen as the "generative site" of Dickinson's poetry, (23) where, working shoulder to shoulder with Maher and others, the poet would occasionally stop her task at hand to jot down lines of verse on a chocolate wrapper or a shopping list, interacting with many people as Maher's nieces stopped by, nephews arrived to convey messages, the stableman delivered fresh milk, or a Native American woman paused at the door to sell baskets. Finding an alternative to the society of the parlor, Dickinson in the kitchen heard the Irish, African American, and Native American patterns of speech that would have [End Page 111] thrilled her, given her self-proclaimed "Vice for Voices." In the kitchen she spent time in the "most creative room in the house" (99). Too, Murray reminds us of the unrelenting physicality of domestic chores. One of the most surprising discoveries of the book arises from Murray's correlation of Dickinson's pattern of poetic output not to waxing and waning periods of inspiration, but to the waxing and waning pattern of servants hired at the Homestead. Servants made Dickinson's writing possible because their labor alleviated the unceasing toil of housework. Throughout Maid as Muse we gain a newly urgent...

"I Stuck the Gimlet in and Waited for Evening":Writing and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Daneen Wardrop At a point near the center of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent reports that she has occupied her self-designated "Loophole of Retreat," and sits nearly suffocating in the dark hideaway. She survives in her garret by crawling, crouching, or reclining, unable to stand up, relating that, "the air was stifling; the darkness total . . . there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep."1 The only palpable comfort upon first occupying the loophole comes in the form of having the good luck to find a gimlet, a sharp tool with which she can pierce the wall facing toward the direction of her children's voices. Hoping that she will be able to watch her children play through the small puncture-hole she makes, she instead is overcome with dread when the first person she sees in the street is Dr. Flint. Jacobs describes the deflated hopes of a slave mother, wishing from the space of her immurement to catch sight of her children but seeing instead her persecutor and would-be seducer. The scene proves perspicacious given that the small view offered her is caused by the tool's function of piercing. My purview here is to show how the gimlet punch marks the material and symbolic initiation of a specific act of writing—that is, the act of writing that gears its purpose powerfully toward the reader. During her seven years in hiding, Linda, partly because of the perspective she creates by way of punching a gimlet hole, begins writing and strategizing her writing toward social and political aims. In other words, she begins to write for reasons of abolition and liberation for herself, her family, and her community. It has become a commonplace in the criticism of Jacobs's Incidents to assert that the text offers an account of the condition of slavery that counters or complements Frederick Douglass's Narrative.2 One major difference between the two writers is found in the way each develops the critically heralded scenes of learning to read and write. I concentrate here on scenes of writing: for Douglass, of course, the scene of writing takes on enormous import as he develops into a male adult attempting to gain his [End Page 209] freedom, though he learns to write surreptitiously, while Linda learns to write overtly, taught early in life by her white mistress. For Linda, learning to write might afford more options in her maneuvering through the white network of power plays, but at the same time, problematically, it renders her more susceptible to Dr. Flint's harassment and pursuit. Linda Brent must confront progressively throughout the story the execrable slaveholder and personal vilifier, Dr. Flint, specifically in tandem with the act of writing. In his early attentions to her, Dr. Flint writes more than he speaks, and Linda must, additionally, beware the jealousy that might result if he finds her "exchang[ing] letters with another man" (40). In fact, her resistance to Flint must occur despite her knowledge of writing, rather than because of it. Linda reports that "I could write, though he had failed to make me read his letters" (40). Hence, her early knowledge of writing arguably brings disadvantages that counter, to some extent, the advantages that she gleans from her skill. After the act of the gimlet punch, however, her knowledge of writing enables her to participate more fully in the causes of liberation. As a slave, she owns—because of her ability to write—a weapon used by the slave culture to maintain oppression. As with any dangerous weapon, it can manifest as a further instrument of her oppression or, with careful signifying, as a way to turn dominance against itself. It is not the scene of learning to write initially but the scene in which Linda makes use of writing as an instrument of agency and power toward liberation that I target as the quintessential victory in Incidents. The problem of claiming one's own writing is the major obstacle Linda overcomes, and in...

Previous studies have shown that Dickinson used dress metaphorically in her poetry, but this study reads fashion as a cultural artifact and economic index of nineteenth-century women's lives. Examined here most particularly are Dickinson's letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson and other female correspondents, which use dress to present the self and concomitantly to develop a rich frame of reference to the female body.

In William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, an astute sense of the inequities in white legal discourse prompts the couple's escape. Ellen Craft realizes that...

By staying attuned to Walt Whitman's anxieties and insecurities, Vivian Pollak presents a study of the poet that is—perhaps at first paradoxically seeming—always at the quick of his poetic inspiration. Though not altogether new to discern that Whitman experienced grave tensions at the same time that his persona claimed robust physical and psychological health, nonetheless Pollak finds a fresh approach because she provides in a book-length study an examination of the spiritually replete Whitman of the poetry, tracked concomitantly along the faultlines of the actual Whitman's emotional tensions. To put it succinctly, and to quote Pollak, Whitman "is less generous and more aggressive than he purports to be" (xv). The Erotic Whitman, however, is not a biography per se, even though it utilizes biographical materials—some of them, such as the letters from Whitman's mother, groundbreaking material. Instead the project tends simultaneously to the double helixes of biographical anxiety and poetic ecstasy as they illuminate each other. For example, Whitman could experience profound anxiety about emotional intimacies that would become converted in the poetry to his speaker's espousal of American closeness and union. Pollak locates at the heart of Whitman's poetic urges the exquisite tension between the fear of intimacy and the desire to unite the nation. [End Page 365]

To study the history of Dickinson scholarship is in some ways to apprehend the major confrontations of our culture as they reveal themselves. Find the cultural conflicts that separate differing parties and we will find the places at which Dickinson scholarship comes to a boil. As literary critics, we continue to work out gender roles, sexuality, the identity formed by the "I," and textual issues, even as Americans work out the same or corollary issues on a larger cultural screen. How we fulfill or fail our conception of the American dream, reconsidered over each decade, has flash points of correspondence in Dickinson scholarship over each decade. One can say this, of course, of nearly any author -- that the current criticism reflects the cultural milieu of the critic -- but one can say it resoundingly for Emily Dickinson. (Perhaps it happens in the dashes -- she gives us so much space, paradoxically, to argue in.)