There’s poetry in the way Barbara Mossberg, Pacific Grove poet-in-residence and professor of practice at the University of Oregon, talks about the 19th-century poet, arguably one of the best American poets of all time, Emily Dickinson.
“She was the Anderson Cooper of her time,” says Mossberg, 72, who first discovered this “life correspondent, delivering nature’s news” when she was in college. “A woman who imagines that she is a loaded gun?” here Mossberg does an over-the-phone enactment of her reaction to the poet many years ago: “I was thinking: What is going on with this woman?”
Soon, Mossberg was so consumed with what was going on with Emily Dickinson that she wrote a book, Emily Dickinson: When a Writer Is a Daughter, published in 1982. The poet has been with her ever since.
“I have read all of her poems [1,800 of them] many times over the years,” Mossberg says, “I always find poems I haven’t seen before. They have been waiting for me, like in a freezer. Until I’m ready to catch up. She has grown with me, always a few steps ahead.”
Mossberg says she doesn’t know how Dickinson liked to celebrate her birthday. In her letters, this super outspoken recluse was preoccupied with other people’s birthdays. There was a reluctance in everything Dickinson did – reluctance to publish and reluctance to celebrate too early. “My fame shall be my holiday,” the poet famously wrote.
Nonetheless, since 2004, Mossberg and the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel have celebrated Dickinson’s December birthday every year, with a poetry reading and gingerbread made according to Dickinson’s famous recipe. They’ll do it this year, too.
Mossberg has no doubts Dickinson would have loved it on the Monterey Peninsula. She never traveled West, but she had a very good idea of the West, Mossberg says. “She comes here with me, to feel the wind. This is not a coincidence that this area is so nourishing to the arts,” she says.
Bandaged in obscurity, Mossberg says, Dickinson sent her letters into a world that never wrote back – and she was kind of cool with that. “She trusted us. That we will find her on the page. And now she’s immortal.”
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