New England Public Radio

Items Left At Emily Dickinson’s Grave

Emily Dickinson, the great American poet, was born December 10, 1830. Commentator and author Martha Ackmann lives a few miles up the road from Dickinson’s Amherst home, and often takes walks around town, planning her route to include a stop at Dickinson’s grave in West Cemetery — behind the Mobil station. What draws her attention is the tombstone, and also what’s been left on and around it.

Dickinson wrote 1,789 poems. Ten were published in her lifetime. Aside from a few forays to Boston and a trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. , Dickinson spent her entire life — a reclusive one — in Amherst.

She’s buried in a plot with her parents, paternal grandparents and sister, Lavinia. There’s an imposing iron fence around the graves, a tribute to her father’s prominence as a town leader as much as her own posthumous fame.

There are other things too, especially atop the poet’s marker. Mementos: rocks, candles, pennies, scallop shells.

The head of Amherst’s Department of Public Works told me that several times a year a crew cleans the things left behind. Sometimes they find clothing, too, or a sleeping bag nearby. Homeless people occasionally sleep in the cemetery, he said, especially near Dickinson’s grave. It’s a ‘safe place’ for them. A harbor.

More than anything else, though, visitors leave notes at Dickinson’s grave. Lots and lots of notes. I unfolded one long strip of paper — soggy from rain the night before. It was a McDonald’s receipt for two orders of hash browns and a cup of coffee with cream and Splenda. On the back of it was this sentence: ‘I am thankful for the words you left.’

Another note was inside the gate, almost hidden among wet leaves: ‘Thank you for lighting a spark in me when I have been dormant for so long. Thank you for letting me question death by your side.’

Why does America’s greatest literary recluse continue to beckon us? She hardly seemed the type to engage with her own world, let alone ours.

In 1864, she wrote:

‘The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.’

Recently, I stopped by her grave and unwrapped another note. This time it wasn’t an expression of a reader’s gratitude. Someone had written Emily’s own words — speaking back to us.

‘In this short Life that lasts an hour
How much—how little—is within our power.'”

Commentator and journalist Martha Ackmann teaches at Mount Holyoke College and is writing a book about Emily Dickinson.

Swear Words Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Commentator Josh Lambert has spent the last decade researching the use of obscenity and taboo language, and he sees its virtues. But lately he’s had to consider whether to give his six year old permission to start using the words he’s been studying for so long.

The other day, my son and a friend were sitting at the dinner table and the friend said,  ‘Sh** is a word for poop,’ and then looked at me to see what I would do.

That’s not unusual; every parent I know has a story like that. But the difference between most parents and me is that I study swearing for a living. For a recent book on obscenity, I read thousands of pages of legal and cultural history, combed through every dirty book I could get my hands on, and listened to the oral arguments for a dozen Supreme Court cases.

The book’s acknowledgements section ends with a line addressed to my wife and son: ‘What else can I say, but that I owe you both so f***ing much?’

I never thought about it while I was doing all that work, but it’s a bit concerning, now that my son can read, that the shelves in my house are filled with hundreds of books—by writers like Henry Miller and Erica Jong—that are not exactly fitting reading for a six-year-old. And what’s even trickier is that I’ve underlined all the filthiest passages.

To be clear, I love profanity when it is deployed artfully. On shows like The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm, by comedians from Lenny Bruce to Sarah Silverman, swearing is raised to an art form. And I have every intention of sharing all this culture with my son and his younger sister, un-bleeped and un-bowdlerized, when the time is right.

But I do worry about what will happen if I let them learn these words too early. I find myself being much less easygoing about ‘inappropriate words’ than one might expect from someone with my scholarly interests.

My concern isn’t that exposure to profanity would harm my kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that it can lead to aggression. But the cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen, in his terrific new book “What the F,” shows that the academy didn’t have any actual evidence to support that claim.

No, the real reason I find myself insisting that some words should not be spoken at the dinner table, or at school, is that I want them to be just as powerful for my kids as they are for me. Because part of the fun, and the strength, of profanity is the deep-seated sense that using it breaks a taboo. And if we don’t pass that taboo on to our kids, the words will lose their force, if not their meaning.

So, for the sake of preserving the magic of f*** and sh** for the people I love most, I’m willing to take on the role of the language police in my own house.”

Josh Lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst and teaches English at UMass. His most recent book is “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture.”

Post-Election, One Voter Reaches For Poetry

Individual reactions to the results of the presidential election have been varied. For commentator and author Martha Ackmann, it meant reaching to her bookshelf.

‘Find your comfort wherever you can,’ one friend emailed me.

I resisted at first, but then gave into instinct, pulled books from my shelf, and looked for poetry.

First, Emily Dickinson:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes–
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs

Then Langston Hughes:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table.

Adrienne Rich:

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I resisted reading poetry at first because it felt passive. Reading poetry seemed like a luxury, an acquiescent act. It’s like floating in a life preserver when everyone around you is in a boat rowing as fast as they can or worse yet–sinking.

But poetry is much more aggressive than that. It’s tough and combative: a bellicose art.

Poetry does offer solace, but it also sheds light—showing us what we cannot see or refuse to recognize. When we most want to cower, it is the steady eye, the unflinching stare.

Our Amherst poet, Emily Dickinson, spent much of her life in her second-story bedroom telling us how it feels to be alive and where actions may lead us.

Better than most, she understood that poetry illuminates, burns and sears. It is incandescent.

Dickinson nearly always was talking about poetry, even when she wrote about what terrified her in the darkest hour. Here’s what she said: ‘We must keep gas burning to light the danger up, so we can distinguish it.’

I think that’s why, after this election, I pull down books of poetry. We need to light the danger up, now more than ever.”

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who is working on a new book about Emily Dickinson. She lives in Leverett, Massachusetts.

A Daughter Remembers Her Mother’s Campaign Buttons, Sense of Citizenship

This election has many American women thinking about their mothers. Here’s what commentator and author Martha Ackmann has been thinking about hers:

My mother loved elections. She collected campaign buttons, saved old newspapers announcing presidential results and worked the polls, setting up voting booths in our school gym. One time, a line of wobbly booths collapsed on her. She was fine, but the image of American politics crashing down on her was not lost on any of us.

She especially prided herself in being among the first to vote. “Number 16,” she would proclaim to my brothers and me as she came in the door. I always detected the slightest hint of disappointment in her voice. For a woman whom everyone called reticent, she wanted to be number one when it came to voting.

As much as Mom loved elections, she was not political. I never saw her wear the campaign buttons — she only seemed to collect them and keep them in a cardboard jewelry box. She was part of that hinge generation: born just after women won the vote, but before many had won political office. Her interest was more civic than it was political. When it came to politics, she believed women kept things to themselves.

That’s why a long-ago phone call sticks in my mind so vividly. It was October 1964. She was shopping in downtown St. Louis and realized Lyndon Johnson would be speaking later at a rally. She already told us she’d be home in time to cook dinner, but she called to say she’d be late. Dad rustled up scrambled eggs.

Such a seemingly inconsequential phone call should have drifted from my memory years ago. But there’s a reason it hasn’t.

The other day, I went on-line looking for photos of the rally. I found old pictures of LBJ sprawled across the podium, Lady Bird sitting next to him with hands folded, St. Louis streets filled with men in hats and women in head scarves knotted tightly under their chins.

I couldn’t find Mom in the photos, of course, but now I know why I had to try.

I never told her how proud I was of her that night. Proud that she was there. Proud that she stood up for a candidate. Proud that she put herself and citizenship above us, if only for one meal.

After she died, I found the cardboard jewelry box with all her campaign buttons. “LBJ For The USA,” read one. I hope on that October night in 1964, she pinned it on herself.”

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and the author of the award-winning “The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight.” She teaches at Mount Holyoke College and lives in Leverett, Massachusetts.

A Muslim Mother Tries To Reassure Her Kids They Do Belong Here

Commentator Shaheen Pasha says she’s been dreading the talk she needs to have with her kids. It’s one she thought
she’d never be having. But now that the presidential election is upon us, she can longer put it off.

I almost wish it was about sex. I can answer those inevitable questions.

But the U.S. election has taken center stage in the minds of my two older kids, and they have so many questions. Questions about society and of belonging. Questions about their own identity and how they are perceived as third-generation Pakistani-American Muslims.

At first, they simply had questions about the election itself. They watched the news coverage on television and tried to understand the policies and promises of the presidential candidates. My 13-year-old daughter ran around gleefully yelling, ‘Girl power!’ My 9-year-old son declared he was ‘feeling the Bern’ as he jumped from couch to couch.

And then it changed. Soon they came home puzzled over conversations about Mexicans being called rapists and walls being built. My son watched crowds cheering over plans to ban Muslims.

‘Are we going to have to leave?’ he asked me.

I tried to reassure him that it was just political blustering, that no one was coming for us. He didn’t believe me.

Recently, my daughter and I were trailing behind him in a toy store. She suddenly grabbed his hands  as he swung a pirate sword.

‘Don’t play with that in public,’ she chided. ‘They’ll think we’re terrorists.’

He stopped smiling and put it back.  That is what it feels like to be the other.

There’s no way I can make it better for them. I thought my biggest challenge would be trying to explain to my children that sadly some people support misogyny and xenophobia. Now I have to somehow assure them that, regardless of the outcome on Election Day, they are not pariahs in their own land.

I can’t believe I even need to have this conversation. The election has galvanized a movement that had long been building in the shadows. It suddenly seems more acceptable to publicly advocate  bigotry and fear. It’s almost considered a sign of patriotism by some.

I fear those people won’t be silenced any time soon.

Like so many Muslim moms around the country, I’m trying to figure out how to help my kids navigate the culture of intolerance that has become their new normal. I’m not going to tell my kids that they are victims. Or that people in our country are generally racist. Or that we are doomed. I don’t believe any of that.

I hope, instead, I can teach them how to stand up for themselves when they’re faced with ugly behavior. I will tell them, ‘Don’t ever let yourself be silenced.’

I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

Commentator Shaheen Pasha teaches international journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sailing By Surprise Into Family History

Commentator Michael Carolan recently returned to the Jersey shore, where his family been sailing for six generations. He made some surprising connections to family and place while he was there.

My wife and kids and I joined my father, sisters and cousins on Long Beach Island. Its sandy shoals have sunk three centuries of schooners and square-riggers alike. My sailboat’s a Hobie Cat, a sports car for the water: light and speedy; I’ve overturned it more than once.The first day there’s wind, we’re off. My son hangs over the water, suspended by a trapeze wire attached to the mast. The boat rises into the air. He smiles.

It’s memorable, this trip. I’ve just turned 50 and he’s about to enter his last year of high school. Suddenly, he’s taller, taking more risks, like getting on a boat with his old man.

My own dad learned to sail here about 70 years ago. He taught me when I was my son’s age. The first sailor in the family though was a great-great grandfather. John William Rose was 17 when the Ontario brought him from London in the 1800s.

A cabinet-maker by trade, he built coffins in Philadelphia during an epidemic. His descendants continue the funeral home that he started as a result. They crack mortician jokes. And sail Little Egg Harbor Bay. There’s Eddie’s sloop, Bud’s scow, Tink’s sunfish, John’s 25-footer.

I visit the local museum with my dad. There’s an old anchor out front. I inquire after its origins.

‘The Ontario, of course,’ the caretaker says. We learn that five years after the Ontario brought my great-great grandfather over, it sank a mile from where we stand ‘in a good breeze, dense fog, a high sea, and a rising tide.’

A haunted synchronicity overtakes me. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of this ancestor’s death. This year, too, marks the moment my son wrestles with the Big Questions.

What do I want to be? How will I get there?

Questions I had at his age. That my father had. That John Rose surely had as he set sail into the wild blue unknown. How will what my son does today affect those who come after him?

Back at the beach-house full of family, I tell the tale of our common ancestor, his month-long sea voyage, his startup company, our remarkable discovery that his ship sank. Off this very beach in shallow water.

‘We could dive for it!’ cousin Eddie says.

My son smiles and nods.

‘We’re leaving tomorrow,’ I say. ‘Next year? How about next year?'”

Michael Carolan teaches writing and literature at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.