Reader Interrupted: Poetry as Thing in the Lyrical Works of Emily Dickinson

This paper stemmed from a desire to place Dickinson\u27s poetry in conversation within the broader discourse of Thing Theory, namely using Bill Brown, Theodor Adorno, and Jane Bennett collectively. These claims derive as well from my own experiences in reading Dickinson\u27s poetry: those times when faced with delightful frustration, enjoyably utter-confusion, followed closely by a frantic desire to understand at all costs. Dickinson\u27s poetry is that which truly \u27plunge[s]\u27 us \u27for a moment into [a] torrent of sensation\u27 (Santayana 260). Nestled somewhere between my chest and my gut, there is this unnamable feeling that arrests me in a physical way, one that I would assume is similar to Dickinson\u27s response to \u27poetry\u27 which would make her feel \u27physically as if the top of [her] head were taken off\u27--perhaps her selfsame \u27cleaving\u27 of the brain mentioned in her poetry (L341a). What struck me was that the same feelings I had in response to Dickinson\u27s poetry were almost identical to those I experienced when \u27forced to confront an object\u27s thingness.\u27 Such connections led me to believe that Dickinson was writing particular poems in such as a way as to fabricate a similar discovery as Theodor Adorno\u27s recognition of the \u27nonidentity\u27 and the \u27nagging feeling\u27 that Jane Bennett describes. Had I, in my utter confusion, actually achieved even a small part of that which Dickinson strove for in her poetry? It is hard to deny that, by the purposeful defamiliarization and cleaving in two of the poetic focus, Dickinson repeatedly calls attention to our own failures of perception. She orchestrates a readership liminal space that grants the poem the power to insist that it be noticed in the same way that Brown\u27s \u27things\u27 manifest themselves through material interruption. \u27Thingness\u27 becomes synonymous with the \u27experience\u27 of her lyric materialism, and her poems position themselves against the cultural and academic biases of critical literary theory. With Dickinson\u27s poetic voice as a guide, my endeavor has been to discover a more concrete praxis of how to read without reading; to extrapolate and formulate an affective materialism from the two-dimensional plane of ink and paper