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...observations on statements by Melinda T. Koyanis, Copyright-and-Permissions Manager of the Harvard Press ("Hot Type," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17). Koyanis asserts that "authorizing" an anthology such as my Poetic Work of Emily Dickinson, a text "based on one person's variant typographic interpretation of the poetry, aimed at a general reader, was not in the best interest of preserving or presenting the integrity of the Dickinson work...
...characterizing my project--a typographic interpretation--she neglects to apply its sense consistently. Harvard's forthcoming variorum typographic text is also based on "one person's" (Ralph Franklin's) construal of the holographs and related material. Moreover, to describe my version of selected poems as a variant typographic interpretation implies that it is somehow a deviation from a standard or authoritative typographic interpretation of Dickinson's work. The point of producing my collection was to offer a more satisfactory printed rendering of selected poems than is found in the currently standard typographic versions produced by Thomas H. Johnson...
...Koyanis is suggesting that my collection is a variant of some authoritative printed anthology, she is mistaken because none exists. The typography of Poetic Work is my construal in that medium of Dickinson's poesis based on my own handwritten interpretations of photographic facsimiles and, in some instances, the original manuscripts. (Neither the principle of selection in Poetic Work nor my approach to the problem of representing the poetry in print for the general reader was derived from any particular typographic edition. And I made no photocopies of any source materials.) Koyanis' statement could even give the impression that...
Also of concern is Koyanis' response to the Chronde's query as to whether it turned down my project in part because of the variorum edition that Ralph Franklin is preparing for them. Koyanis asserts that the Harvard Press declined my request because my next amounts merely to "another variant of the typography. The question is," she declares, "How many competing versions do you want?" The typography? Dickinson handwrote her poetry--resisted the printing of verse as editors oversaw it in her day. The growing consensus among scholars in our day is that not only does not authoritative typographic text...
America has become a society that makes too much of its living by marketing its own Impure Thoughts: a corrupt dynamic. Secular realists reply to the idea of abstinence with some snorting variant on what Hemingway's Jake Barnes told Brett Ashley at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (Jake's problem was not sexual indulgence, of course, but the reverse--grim chastity enforced by a war wound.) Get real...