Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - I Cannot Dance Opon My Toes - full transcript

How many have been published?

Seven.

Eleven?

I cannot recall.

And no more?

And no more.

Still.

Ah.

To be wracked by success.

Arguably, the central conceit

of Emily Dickinson's life



is the tension between
the private and the public,

the interior
and the world itself,

and her struggle with the idea
of publication and fame,

and a yearning for it, too.

She's not saying something
about dance... is it about dance?

Maybe a little bit, yeah, sure.

But the thing that we have
in common,

between music and poetry,

or any other art form,

is that you're trying to go from
the specific to the universal.

She dances all through the poem.

I mean, that's Emily for you.

She says, "I can't, I can't.

I couldn't... me?"



As she does it.

I mean, she's always saying,

"I can't, but if I could,

then I'd do it like this."

I cannot dance upon my toes...

No man instructed me.

But, oftentimes, among my mind,

a glee possesseth me.

That had I ballet knowledge

would put itself abroad

in pirouette to blanch a troupe

or lay a prima, mad.

And though I had no gown
of gauze,

no ringlet to my hair,

nor hopped to audiences
like birds,

one claw upon the air,

nor tossed my shape
in eider balls,

nor rolled on wheels of snow,

till I was out of sight,
in sound,

the house encore me so.

Nor any know I know the art,
I mention, easy, here,

nor any placard boast me,

it's full as opera.

Her poetry was unlike anything
anyone had ever seen.

A woman had never written
like this...

The intensity, the desire in it.

Poetry of the day
was strictly rhymed,

conventional in diction,

and the themes deemed
appropriate for women

were often limited to flowers,
love of children,

and deathbed sorrow.

Emily Dickinson surely knows
her poetry is unusual

when she writes to the prominent
literary critic

Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

She sends him poems,

writes a letter to him
that is a poem,

asking him if these verses
"breathe."

He had many criticisms of her,

including her bizarre syntax
and her meter,

and he had many things...

Odd punctuation.

Her odd punctuation,
many things that he wished

were more standard
and more traditional.

So he writes her back and says,

"I advise you not to publish."

Dickinson continues to send
poems to Higginson,

and Higginson continues to
advise she delay in publishing.

To his remark about her verses'
"spasmodic gait,"

she retorts with this poem.

"I cannot dance upon my toes,

no man instructed me."

That's kind of interesting

because is it almost a rebuke
to somebody to say...

Well, first of all,
a man has to instruct?

I mean, couldn't it be a woman?

She doesn't use "man"
by happenstance.

I think, you know,
at the time she's writing,

arguably, still today,

but certainly at the time
she's writing,

it was men who controlled
who was published

and who was lauded
and who was not.

And women, still, say,
"I'm sorry,

"this is probably not important,
but if I could just add,

maybe it doesn't mean anything
to you."

So she's dealing with patriarchy
pressing in on her.

And feigning a kind of...
pretending to diffidence, or...

I'm helpless,
I can't do anything, right?

I can't, I can't dance upon my
toes, no man instructed me.

- I'm untrained.
- Right.

I'm untrained. - I'm an amateur.

Absolutely,
I'm, I'm just at home,

writing on pieces of paper.

Is the artist taught,
or is the artist self-taught?

And also, can you create your
own rules about what ballet is,

or what opera is,
or what poetry is?

"But, oftentimes, among my mind,
a glee possesseth me."

And then she says this
gorgeous thing, "among my mind."

One might say,
"That's just incorrect grammar.

Doesn't she know better?"

Thank goodness she doesn't.

- So what does "among my mind"
give us

that the more expected
"in my mind"

would not?

Well, it seems, then,
that mind is plural.

You would usually say,
"within my mind,"

but her mind seems to have
many, many chapters.

We think, "Okay, this is
in my mind."

Okay, that's one thing.

Like a mind? It's got...

It's a container
and there's stuff in it.

That's right.

But maybe there's so many layers

that are interlocking and,
in fact, maybe even competing.

Two minds, three minds,

four minds,
possibly eight minds.

And then she says "a glee,"

and then there's
that hard word...

"possesseth me."

Glee is something that kind of
crosses all the barriers,

or boxes, compartments
contained within a mind.

So even in her mind,
she is not mistress.

A glee has possession of her.

"Glee" has a comic tone, right?

"A glee possesseth me,"

meaning, literally, I become,
you know, the Exorcist.

Right? - Yes.

I'm mad. - Something... I'm mad!

Something takes over my body.

She's launching herself,
and she's off.

This could be poetry.

"That had I ballet knowledge,

"would put itself abroad,

"in pirouette to blanch
a troupe,

or lay a prima, mad."

At the beginning of the poem,
she's very sensible,

and she's very controlled
and well-behaved.

But as soon
as she launches herself

into this... into this
alternate personality,

the very first thing to come out
is her competitive streak.

Yes. - Right?

"Blanch the troupe
and lay the prima, mad."

It's such a crazy phrase,
to "blanch a troupe."

Yeah, what does that mean?

Blanched.

Which means to go pale, right?

Which isn't necessarily
to be pleased.

Pale with envy.

Or horror.

The first thing
is not to wow the audience

or be showered in flowers or
become rich and, you know...

Her first thing is to make them
so startled,

they lose all the blood
from their face,

and the prima donna is enraged,
and, you know, runs screaming.

The comedy of this non-dancer

who is blanching
a whole troupe...

- Yes.
- All lined up on the stage,

all going pale... - Yes, yes.

- Is quite funny.

This is a poet with edge.
- Oh, yeah.

And she might be talking
about this girly thing,

being a ballerina,
whether she can or can't

dance upon her toes. - Mm-hmm.

But...

If she had it,

she would devastate everybody
with what she could do.

Decorous social dancing
was taught

to well-bred young women
of Emily's class,

but in Dickinson's America,

ballet was still
a controversial art form.

Europeans might approve
performances

in which young women revealed
their ankles and knees,

but not upright New Englanders.

But though she never attended
a ballet,

Dickinson clearly absorbed
every word she read

in the illustrated papers on the
lavish theatricals of the day.

Never actually seeing a diva
bedecked in gauze and feathers

did not prevent the poet from
setting this diva to dancing

on the stage of her imagination.

"And though I had no gown
of gauze, no ringlet to my hair,

nor hopped to audiences like
birds, one claw upon the air."

She extended herself
to the external world,

and then she said,
"Yeah, but, you know."

"Gown of gauze,
ringlet to my hair,"

sort of, like,
slightly disdainfully?

These ballerinas
are in front of massive crowds

who scream and pull their
carriages through the streets,

and, you know, it could not be
any farther away

from her own experience...
- Costumes and sets...

...and who have really elaborate
costumes and do bizarre things

like hop around like birds,
with one claw up.

"Like birds,
one claw upon the air."

Is that a description,
or a caricature?

It seems sort of ridiculous,
right?

You take the most beautiful
women with the most artistry,

you know, these ballerinas with
these long legs and long necks.

But when she says
hopping with birds,

like one claw... all of a
sudden, it seems ridiculous,

and you kind of imagine it
going, like, , right?

I mean, that's an unnatural
gesture for a bird.

It seems a deformed kind of
femininity to me.

Mm-hmm, it does.

- A little aggression.

Yeah, a little rage.

That's the only time where it
seemed a little hostile

toward what one is willing to do
for an audience.

Like, in my house, when I want
to make fun of myself

as an actor, I bark like a seal.

I go, right?

I mean, this is sometimes
how you feel as an actor,

that really, am I just...

am I putting all this effort in
to play this character

just so that someone
will throw me some fish?

Right?

"Nor tossed my shape
in eider balls,

"nor rolled on wheels of snow
till I was out of sight,

in sound,
the house encore me so."

We're also making a little fun
of the audience here.

Not just of the performers,

but of the audience,
who are kind of a dumb mob.

"More, bravo,
give us another one."

And placard is sort of
like poster, right?

Announcing Emily Dickinson,
prima ballerina.

Once you are striving

to please an audience
and to get fame and approval

and money and all the other
things that come with it,

you've sold your art at auction.

And it's not yours anymore,
and it's cheap.

And the placard, it's a
terrible, cheap commercial

advertising the death of art.

Emily Dickinson's name
never appeared on a placard.

Fewer than a dozen of her nearly
1,800 poems ever saw print...

And these anonymously.

By the late 1860s,

Dickinson was refusing visitors
outside the family circle,

and shunning
all public appearances.

But in the very years that she
recedes from the outside world,

Dickinson makes the white page
of the poem

her performance space...

As if cursive handwriting were
a kind of living choreography...

And punctuation marks
the gestures of her actual hand.

Dickinson's lines find
more dimensions

than words on pale stationery
ever found before.

This is before she became
the woman in white,

a few years before she started
wearing only white,

but there are so many
white images in this poem.

So Emily seems to be
writing about dance,

and she is in a way, but she's
also dancing within the poem.

"I can dance upon my toes,
maybe not in my body,

"but I can do it in language.

Watch this."

Writing,
as it isn't for us anymore,

was a visual art, as well.

And with the dashes,

and with the other marks
that we now know had been erased

from a lot of the poems,

there is a sense of
a kind of geography.

The capitals give the poems
real depth.

They have a sculptural,
dimensional quality.

3-D.

They make it 3-D.

She stitched these poems
into little booklets

known as fascicles,

and bound them
with a needle and thread,

where the puncture marks
actually stood up in relief.

I'm looking at
"nor rolled on wheels of snow."

And the whole line
is a whole bunch of wheels.

Like, all those Os and Es.
- Yes.

- You know, the whole thing
just goes...

And the dashes,
the breaking off...

she takes us to that region
that's in between

both the visual and the oral.

She will not reduce it
to something that can be said.

And poetry holds the unsayable.

Not because it's taboo or
because it's scary or wrong,

but because it simply
cannot be reduced

to something
that can be explained.

"Until I was out
of sight, in sound,

"the house encore me so."

The house... who is the house?

Where's the house?

This thing happened
in the house in my imagination.

- There's this roar...

- The sound is
from the encore...

It happened,
and then it disappeared.

"Out of sight, in sound,
the house encore me so."

So you're playing
to an empty house?

You're in your house?

Let's remind ourselves

that this poet is telling us

the whole time that she's not
doing any of these things.

Right, right, yeah.

"I'm describing this,
I can imagine this.

But I'm not doing it."
- "I'm not doing it.

"I'm not on a stage,
I don't have a costume,

"I don't have any training.

"I'm not tossing my shape
in eider balls

nor rolling on wheels of snow."

She's gone off on flights of
fancy and in wild imaginings.

She's taken a fanciful vacation
from her room

into the ballet halls
and opera houses of Europe.

And then when she comes back
to herself,

she has all of this emotion
there

that wasn't there before.

She's describing, really,
the power

of what the mind can conjure up,

of what the mind is capable
of doing

when you go
deep inside yourself,

so you don't have to just
go into the external world.

In fact, your internal world
may be richer

than the external world.

I think a lot about the
internal life of a performer,

and it feels
like she's inside the performer.

So we're reading it from the
inside of that state of being,

rather than as a spectator.

Oftentimes you hear a poem
about a performance,

it's about watching it,

as opposed
to what the state of being

for the person being watched is.

"Nor any know I know
the art I mention easy here."

So she's completely
in the present,

both in time and place.

And the place is the poem,
and "I mention easy here"

refers to her ease within...
- Within her art form.

Her own art.

There's a lot of rolling imagery
and lift in it,

which sort of makes it feel that
it's not entirely earthbound,

and yet it's very solid
in its ideas.

Her laying claim is very much
of the Earth.

And that she says, "I cannot
dance upon my toes,"

so already that has
a lift connotation,

but she says she can't do it,

so there she is, swirling around
in this feeling.

She doesn't need to have
the technique

in order to have the experience;

that's not a block for her.

I once heard Isaac Stern
say to me,

"Music is what happens
between the notes."

How I want to get from A to B,
from this note

to this one,

you can do it by connecting it...

You can go...

So I could play...

Oh, you're using technique.

You're using, you know,
playing shorter...

Shorter notes.

But that doesn't quite do it.

You actually have to be
in the state of mind.

You breathe life into something.

- And for it not to be stuck

in the literalism
of mirror execution.

Kind of rigid, static.

I can create anything,

and I don't need
all the contraptions.

I can actually have it
at my beck and call

with this internal life
that is so full, and so rich.

You can go on your toes,
and almost weightlessly move

from point A to B, right?

You are floating.

I think Emily Dickinson
is claiming

that she's got
the between A to B thing down.

There are a lot of ways
to interpret the last line.

"Nor any placard boast me...

It's full as opera."

It's, like,
a wonderful reversal,

it's a very dramatic moment.

It's a very emotional moment
in the poem.

You could interpret it
as saying that crowds,

even though I wasn't
traditional,

and no one had ever heard of me
before,

my art would be so undeniable

that they would fill
the opera house.

Opera would be

sort of a combination
of all the art forms...

Dance, theater, music,
costumes, design.

She's talking about
this big performance

with curtains and applause.

A crescendo of some kind,
a crisis.

And then something is overcome

or we're left, you know,
weeping.

She takes

her art, poetry, which is a
very solitary and quiet art,

if you will,

and she contrasts it with the
most diva-ish types of high art,

and all of her making fun,
you know,

her distancing herself from it,

she embraces it again
at the end.

"It's full as opera."

The "it" stands
for so many things.

It stands for the dance
that I would do,

the opera I would sing,
the poetry I do make.

But I think it's beyond standing
for a literal noun.

"It's full as opera."

You're going, now,
to the universal.

You know, not only to a mind,
but, in fact, this is something

that's possible
in anybody's mind.

I also think
"it's full as opera"

is a more personal expression,

that the feeling in her breast
is that full.

The way opera must make us feel
when we're singing it,

but certainly the way
opera makes us feel

when we're hearing it,
particularly live.

She knew what it was to feel
that power come through her,

and to be someone through whom
melody and energy,

electricity comes.

She knows that.

She feels it.

It's full as opera.

Right?
I mean, it's, like, "Aaahh."

Right? You wouldn't say,

"It's full as opera."

Right?

"It's full as opera."

And it almost sounds
like a crowd cheering,

you know, at the end... "Aaah."

It's full of life,
cascading with energy.

So it's not just,
"I can imagine this,"

but, "I can imagine this in a
way that it actually happened."

This woman embraces
the complexity of being alive

at every given moment.

Her poems are experiences
themselves;

they're not the record
of an experience.

That's why they're so vital.

No one has ever described it
so well.