How to use this Page

1. “Are the cops here for you or for me?”
2. “I didn’t know we had sex last night…”
3. “Are you in yet?”
4. “Are you done yet?”
5. “Whats your name again?”
6. “I love you too (person’s name other than your’s here).”
7. “That other boy/girl I was on the phone with for over an hour last night is just a friend.”
8. “I think we should just be friends.”
9. “Trust me, its not you, its me.”
10. “I don’t know where that new phone number came from.”

1. Eat a pickle
2. Call 9-1-1
3. Scream at your cat/dog
4. Strangle a teddy bear
5. Run after the ice-cream man NUDE
6. Put a potato in his exhaust pipe
7. Look at the ice-cream sales person and yell/scream
8. While eating a pickle call 9-1-1 and tell them, that the ice-cream man is yelling at a Teddy bear while in the nude
9. Buy some ice-cream

1. Eat a pickle
2. Call 9-1-1
3. Scream at your cat/dog
4. Strangle a teddy bear
5. Run after the ice-cream man NUDE
6. Put a potato in his exhaust pipe
7. Look at the ice-cream sales person and yell/scream
8. While eating a pickle call 9-1-1 and tell them, that the ice-cream man is yelling at a Teddy bear while in the nude
9. Buy some ice-cream

The Brontë sisters are three of my all-time, all-star favourite authors. I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre when I was at school and was instantly bewitched by them, and have re-read them both often in the years since. Every time I read the Brontë sisters’ novels (not just those two) I find more in them to love. By the time you read this post, I will be in the midst of two long weeks off on holiday, and during that time I’m going to make my very first trip up to Howarth to see the parsonage where the girls lived with their brother and father - I can’t wait - talk about kid in a sweet shop! So, in celebration of this fact, today I bring you an excerpt from Janet Gezari’s 2007 book Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems.

[Elizabeth] Gaskell’s well-known image of the three sisters pacing up and down in the sitting room of the Parsonage while talking over their stories, reminds us that poems were not among the creative achievements shared during those evening sessions. When Charlotte, who knew that her sister wrote poems, came upon her Gondal Poems notebook in the autumn of 1845 and read some, Emily felt violated. Once persuaded to participate in Charlotte’s publication project, she readied only twenty-one of her poems for printing. In the 1846 volume, her poems usually alternate with those of her sisters, so that relations between her poems are subordinated to relations between them and the contiguous poems of Charlotte and Anne. All of the poems Brontë selected for publication in 1846 came from the two books into which she had begun transcribing some of her poems about a year earlier, the Gondal Poems notebook and the so-called Honresfeld manuscript. After transcribing her poems, she almost always discarded earlier drafts. Her single-leaf manuscripts preserve many apparently unfinished or incomplete poems, usually described as fragments, and we cannot know what she intended to do with them. The posthumous publication of seventeen more poems in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey nearly doubled the number of Emily Brontë’s poems available to nineteenth-century readers. What knowledge we have about Charlotte Brontë’s aggressive editing of these poems relies on a comparison of the manuscript versions in Emily Brontë’s hand to the published versions and not on Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence with her publisher about the edition, which says nothing about her editorial judgements. 1850 added one poem to the canon for which no holograph manuscript survives, ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning.’ For generations of Brontë readers, as for T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, this poem has sounded ‘the keynote to her character’, yet its authorship continues to be disputed. In my last chapter, I argue that Charlotte, not Emily, is the author of ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning,’ and that the poem promotes Charlotte’s view of Emily, not Emily’s view of herself or her own poetic project.

My title registers my starting place. A concern with endings, and with how we defy, resist, blur, or transcend them, characterizes Brontë’s life, her art, and this book. In Carson’s words, ‘She whached the bars of time, which broke.’ Brontë’s approach to an end is most evident when death or memory is the subject of a poem, as it so frequently is. But there is no poet for whom immortality resolves less, or for whom ordinary temporal elements—night, day, evening, fall and spring—are more miscible. She gives us a vision of life sub specie iterationis. Her poems’ formal resistance to endings can be seen in the recurrence of the word again both at the end of lines and at the end of poems, where it appears more often than any other word, disrupting our feeling that the experience the poem has recorded is over and done. Or in her fondness for circular structures and for outcomes that resemble openings rather than endings. If time is a prison that confines us, then Brontë’s poems return again and again both to the prison site and to the prison break. Although I do not discuss all her poems, the view of Emily Brontë’s poems presented here seeks to be comprehensive. It relates to individual poems, to the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, to her poetical fragments and her writing practice, to her motives for writing poetry, and to the connections between her poems and her famous novel. When Brontë’s ordinary life enters into my account of her poems, it does so to illuminate them, and not vice versa. I do not ignore the presence of Gondal in the poems, but I resist dividing poems that belong to a Gondal narrative from poems that probably do not, either because Brontë transcribed them into her Honresfeld manuscript instead of her Gondal Poems notebook or because they include no references to Gondal characters or places. A specious distinction between ‘Gondal’ and ‘personal’ narrative contexts continues to thrive, especially when biographical interpretations are at stake. Believing that a Gondal poem is less personal than a non-Gondal poem is like believing that The Bell Jar is less personal than ‘Daddy’. Although she separated Gondal poems from non-Gondal poems by transcribing them into separate notebooks, Brontë composed both kinds of poems intermittently for as long as she wrote poems. For me, a Gondal poem is one in which a lyrical impulse converges with an occasion provided by a narrative about invented characters with aristocratic names. One way to look at Gondal is as intentional dreaming, a release like the one we experience in a dream when the self is freed to act various roles, but always under the aegis of an informing self-idiom that organizes and unifies whatever experience is being represented. The chapters that follow endeavour to describe both the range and the distinctiveness of the experience Emily Brontë’s poems offer.

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“Are you serious? I don’t think we need to start inundating her with safety crap now … should we?”

“Well I don’t want to wait too long and be all, “Have fun at your first day of kindergarten. Don’t forget your lunch. AND NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH YOUR VAGINA!”

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In celebration of finally unpacking the sewing machine, be the first to comment with the original Spanish name of our location above, and I’ll make a shirt for your kid.

Here’s another hint …

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The fear of your daughter falling in love with a big ass spider, naming it “Jesus” and wanting to bring it home.

In your backback.

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Number of preschools that demanded $50 for application fees: 4

Number of preschools we got into: 0

Number of reasons why it’s a bad idea I teach Emme math on my own: W

I was counting on you, preschool.

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My friend Doodaddy gives me endless grief about hiring a painting company that included a free “color consultant” — and I just know he’s going to give me even more grief knowing that after weeks and weeks of flaking on us, the color consultant ultimately led us to the prettiest shade of living room lavender you will ever see.

The thing is, we wanted gray.

Not light purple.

Gray.

So now we are trying to select a gray and we need your help. Let’s call the one on the far left A — with B, C, and D following from there. Which one gets your vote?

Also, I have finally managed to capture Emmeline dancing. She usually stops when I pull out the camera. Here, she is obviously doing a jig.

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And thanks for your kind words in response to my previous pity party about time and blogging. Words and photos resume Monday.

“Daddy Daddy?”

“You’re awake!”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Emme?”

“Daddy go new home?”

“Yes.”

“Mommy go new home?”

“Yes.”

“Emme stay old home?”

“Does Emme want to stay in the old home?”

“Emme go new home.”

“Of course. Hey, Emme?”

“Hmm.”

“What did you dream about?”

“Hmm.”

“Emme? What were you just dreaming about?”

“Mommy daddy go new home.”

“Yes?”

“Emme stay old home.”

“Oh kid, we will never leave you.”

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Christine Duplessis is a Marketing Manager at Simon and Schuster.

I say that my favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. And it really is brilliant—great characters, great story, writing that has held up for all these years. I can still remember reading it for the first time and how it made me feel. But deep down I know that my favorite book is really a historical romance, The Prize by Julie Garwood, because that’s the book I go back and reread whenever I’m sad or sick or stressed out. But shh. Don’t tell.

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My cat is taking over my life! I don't know how it started, but he jumps on my kitchen counter every time I sit down to write! I tell him, “No,” but he just stares at me until I physically remove him from the counter! If I don't give him something to eat from the refrigerator, he jumps on the counter again, and again, and again. I'm going to have to get my digital camera fixed so I will have evidence of how he looks at me! I'm afraid I've encouraged a terrible habit!

Last night, while working on a post I've been trying to post since yesterday, I had to give him sardines! After I put his bowl on the floor, (thinking I’d be allowed to write) he stared at the sardines, as if they weren’t what he had in mind. I had to physically get up again and tap him off the counter. This is what we do. I sit down, he jumps on the counter. I stand up quickly in my chair, and he jumps down. Occasionally, he will whine at the front door to go out, but I can’t let him go since Monster is waiting for him. Monster is the name I gave his enemy I feed outside. He is homeless and no one likes him, with the exception of me, of course, so he never has any food. He hated Simon (that’s my cat’s name) before I started feeding him, so that’s not the problem. Monster is just from a bad family, and blames the world for his troubles. Actually, I think Monster and Simon are related. I met Simon when I went with a neighbor to pick up a kitten. The house we went to was full of other cats and kittens, and Simon was one of them. He seemed like he was going to be sickly, so I took him home with me. I didn't want a cat, but I felt sorry for him, and I didn’t think he was going to live that long. Well, he did, and he turned out to perfectly healthy! Anyway, I had him neutered, but my neighbor didn’t have his kitten neutered, so guess what? We have plenty of Simon’s relatives to deal with, and I think Monster is one of them. Every time I let Simon outside, the drama begins. Within minutes, the two are entangled in a brawl, which is followed by Simon racing (past me, usually) to jump in the door in an effort to avoid Monster’s grasp! On more than one occasion, I’ve had to endure their spitting, screaming, moaning, and fighting in my living room. They are both so inconsiderate! So you can see why I won’t cave in to Simon when he begs to go outside, which is because of Monster, but also since getting him to a vet is such a production! Which gives me an idea: Is anyone out there a vet, or a cat psychologist? I need help!