On Emily Dickinson: I learned this week that in 2016 an edition of her poems was published which, for the first time, took into account her own prioritization and arrangement of her po-ems. At some point Emily assembled some small batches into booklets, perhaps showing which of her poems she held most dear.

I find it baffling that I had never known this. I have never heard that she did any arranging or other work toward publishing her work. I always assumed that later editors sorted through all the scraps, tried to pin down dates, and published everything all together in the books which exist (Final Harvest, that other newer one), not making any attempt to delineate between a fragment and a complete work.

How can it have taken more than a century for anyone to try and put the Dickinson canon into a form that might bear Emily’s stamp of approval?