Phoenix’s poet laureate dug into Emily Dickinson's lost poems to give advice to a new generation

A new collection of poetry takes a 21st century look at a 19th century poet.

Right before the pandemic, someone gifted Rosemarie Dombrowski the fascicles of Emily Dickinson — essentially a series of Dickinson’s poems that were only discovered after her death.

Dombrowski is an Arizona State University professor and Phoenix’s inaugural poet laureate. Her new collection is called "Emily’s Advice to Girls in the New Millennium" — and came out of the time she spent with those fascicles.

Full conversation

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: So the fascicles were the little books of poetry that Emily Dickinson bound herself during her lifetime. And she created 40 of them. And we might call them zines today, because they were handbound and handwritten, but after Dickinson put these 40 little booklets together, she tucked them away, and no one saw them again until after her death.

And then everyone ignored them. So anyway, these little booklets of poetry, curated by Dickinson, were finally republished in 2016. It’s as thick as the Bible, you know, it’s about 500, 400, 500 poems. And during the pandemic, you know, I just started reading it nightly.

MARK BRODIE: What spoke to you about the poems in these little booklets?

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Well, I’ve taught Dickinson for 20 years. I teach her as a medical poet, I teach her as a patient, I teach her as a poet who grappled with death in really interesting, philosophical ways, you know, who grappled with various kinds of illness, bodily and mental throughout her life. I teach her as a feminist. I teach her as a bisexual.

So, I already had all of those lenses through which I could read Dickinson. And being able to read these little booklets as she had originally curated them, with the poems, you know, these little clusters of 10 poems per booklet that she had arranged. I don’t know, things just started taking on a new meaning for me.

And, and I guess the main thing that I should have said earlier was that I felt suddenly like all of her poems were little advice columns to girls in the 19th century. That’s just what I was hearing, like fascicle after fascicle, booklet after booklet. That Emily Dickinson was like, what was that advice columnist in the '80s? What what was her name?

MARK BRODIE: Dear Abby.

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Dear Abby, yes. I started reading Dickinson like she was responding to like 19th century girls’ inquiries or something, like Dickinson was a Dear Abby. So that’s where the title of my collection came from, as I was reading these little booklets, I was translating them. That’s what my poems are, they’re just I consider them to be modern day translations of Dickinson’s fascicles.

MARK BRODIE: That seems like kind of a tough task. I mean especially for somebody who is as familiar with Dickinson and her work as you are. I wonder was that intimidating for you to reinterpret her work into a 21st century context?

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Well, you know, at the time it wasn’t, because I wasn’t taking it seriously, Mark. It was the pandemic and I just wanted something interesting to do. And so I just went down a Dickinson rabbit hole. I had no intention of doing translations in a serious way, it was just something that was keeping me sane on the nightly.

And I thought, I’m going to write these translations for all my students. Because once I realized that Emily’s poems were advice poems, I thought my god, I’ve got to try to make this a little bit more palatable or accessible to younger audience, and I was predominantly thinking of girls because, you know, Dickinson was a 19th century girl herself. And I think that was the imaginary audience that she had in mind for her poetry, other girls like her.

MARK BRODIE: Does an example come to mind for you of a subject matter in a poem that she wrote that really spoke to you as advice for the girls who were her contemporaries that you were able to translate to a 21st century context?

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Oh sure, I mean there’s, I mean I can’t tell you the numbers of the poems because those are those have been imposed by later editors and she doesn’t use those numbers in the fascicles at all. But you know, some of the fascicles are I would say more nature heavy, like she curates some booklets that have primarily nature poems.

Some primarily contain poems that she wrote to Susan, her sister-in-law/best friend/lover who lives next door. And is married to her brother.

You know, some mainly contain poems that are musing over illness and pain and death. I would say the ones that sort of struck me the most as advice poems were the ones that were set in nature. I felt like she was using instructional language in those poems.

You know, acknowledge this, girls. Listen to this. Be this way. Understand that this isn’t going to be here forever. Understand that these things are ephemeral, and that we need to capture them while we can.

MARK BRODIE: I wonder if reading these poems in the fascicles and thinking about translating them to the 21st century, like has that made you think about what Emily Dickinson might have thought about things like climate change, she talked about her being in nature. Thought about social media and, you know, sort of the culture in which we all live now, and maybe what she would have written about those things.

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Oh my god, I just can’t imagine that Dickinson would not have been the first Insta-poet, right? She would have been the Instagram poet. For sure. I mean come on, you know, some of her poems are four lines long, six lines long. That’s Insta-poetry. That’s micro-poetry. That’s something we think we invented in the 21st century, and I have to call BS on that, for sure.

As far as climate change, that’s an excellent question. I think she would have been beside herself.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned that you had your students in mind as you were looking at these poems and reinterpreting them for the 21st century. So I’m curious what you hope that people who read your collection will take away from it, both in terms of the content and the context, but also the history of it and its connection to Emily Dickinson and her work.

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: That’s a great question as well. I think I hope that my students, past and present and future, will see Dickinson as a zine-ster, right? A 19th century zine-ster. Like somebody who was making these DIY, handbound poetic publications that were sort of pushing back. Pushing back against social norms, pushing back against the patriarchy, pushing back against the publishing industry.

I want students to know that she was radical. She wasn’t a spinster. She was a radical. She was a radical activist on the page. So I want them to see that. And I want them to maybe read my poems and then feel encouraged, reinvigorated, to go back to Dickinson and just play, play with her language. Play with their own interpretations.

Because I think that’s what makes poetry so special, is that it allows readers to enter into these tiny little texts on the page and play. You know, I’m just one poet who has a relationship with Dickinson that’s subjective, right? Like everybody’s relationship would be. Anybody can have that subjective relationship with any poet.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. We'll have to leave it there. That's Rosemarie Dombrowski, the inaugural poet laureate of the city of Phoenix, a professor at ASU and author of "Emily’s Advice to Girls in the New Millennium." Rosemarie, thanks so much for the conversation, I appreciate it.

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: Thank you so much, Mark. You had amazing questions, it was delightful.