♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ How many have been published?

Seven.

Eleven?

I cannot recall.

MAN: And no more?

DICKINSON: And no more.

Still.

Ah.

To be wracked by success.

CYNTHIA NIXON: 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."

♪ ♪ NIXON: I cannot dance upon my toes-- no man instructed me.

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

(Ma playing Bach cello suite) 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.

NEW: 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.

HOWE: She sends him poems, writes a letter to him that is a poem, asking him if these verses "breathe."

NIXON: 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.

HOWE: So he writes her back and says, "I advise you not to publish."

NEW: 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.

(Bach Cello Suite No.

1 playing) NIXON: "I cannot dance upon my toes, no man instructed me."

MA: 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."

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

NEW: 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?

NIXON: "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.

(playing intensely on cello) This could be poetry.

NIXON: "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.

(jaunty piano music playing) NEW: 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.

NIXON: "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?

NIXON: 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... NEW: 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, (squawks), right?

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

It seems a deformed kind of femininity to me.

NEW: 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 (barks like seal), 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?

(laughter) "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."

(applause) 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.

MA: "More, bravo, give us another one."

And placard is sort of like poster, right?

Announcing Emily Dickinson, prima ballerina.

NIXON: 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.

NEW: 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.

NIXON: 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.

HOWE: 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.

NEW: The capitals give the poems real depth.

They have a sculptural, dimensional quality.

HOWE: 3-D. (laughs) NEW: 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.

HOWE: 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.

NEW: 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.

NIXON: "Until I was out of sight, in sound, (echoing): "the house encore me so."

NEW: The house-- who is the house?

Where's the house?

(Bach cello suite playing) MA: This thing happened in the house in my imagination.

(applause) - There's this roar... - The sound is from the encore... (applause) (music stops) MA: It happened, and then it disappeared.

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

MA: So you're playing to an empty house?

You're in your house?

NEW: 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.

DANCER: 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.

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

HOWE: 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... NEW: Within her art form.

HOWE: 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 (plays note) to this one (plays higher note), you can do it by connecting it-- (plays one note slowly, then the other) You can go-- (plays two notes in quick succession) So I could play-- (plays notes quickly) 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.

(playing same tune as earlier with more fluidity) 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.

(Bach cello suite playing) NIXON: 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.

MA: Opera would be sort of a combination of all the art forms-- dance, theater, music, costumes, design.

DANCER: 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.

NIXON: 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, (quickly): "It's full as opera."

Right?

(more drawn out): "It's full as opera."

And it almost sounds like a crowd cheering, you know, at the end-- "Aaah."

(playing fast tune) 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.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪