<p>I got a copy of <a href=”http://www.powells.com/biblio/0674018249″>this</a> the other day. I thought it might be nice to have a good collection of Emily Dickinson’s work, and you know, this was published by Harvard and all.&nbsp; It’s supposedly the authoritative one-volume edition of the extra super-duper authoritative multi-volume edition by the same scholar. Cool, right? </p>

<p>Pop quiz: What is the first thing you think of when you think of Emily Dickinson’s work? If you&nbsp; said her puctuation, in particular her liberal use of the dash, then you get a gold star. And I don’t mean some little old en dashes here and there, I mean big, bad em dashes, emmmmmm-dashes, even. If you’ve ever seen handwritten copies of her work, you can see that the dashes are physical, active parts of her work. Some of the dashes are up to an inch long.&nbsp; In my opinion, Emily Dickinson poems without those bold em dashes lose their urgency, they lose their physicality.&nbsp; In case any of you are unclear on the difference between an em dash and an en dash, I will illustrate. These are em dashes:</p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”>Because I could not stop for Death—</p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>He kindly stopped for me—</span></p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>The Carriage held but just Ourselves—</span></p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>And Immortality. </span></p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”></p>

<p>These are en dashes:</p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”>Because I could not stop for Death – </p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>He kindly stopped for me – </span></p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>The Carriage held but just Ourselves – </span></p>

<p style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 1in”><span face=”Times New Roman”>And Immortality. </span></p>

<div><p>In non-professionally type-set work, you generally find an em-dash written as a double hypen (–) and an en dash written as a space, hypen, space ( – ).&nbsp; They get their names because an en dash is the width of an ‘n’ and an em dash is–you got it–the width of an ‘m.'</p>

<p>Anyway, of course an authoritative edition of Dickinson’s work would keep those em dashes intact, right? Wrong. En dashes, every single blasted one of them.&nbsp; At first I thought maybe some editor or slap-happy typesetter got their hands on them and changed them to fit the press’ particular style. There is, afterall, contemporary disagreement on this issue. Here’s a <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash”>Wikipedia article</a> on the stylistic issues regarding em dash vs. en dash use:</p><blockquote dir=”ltr”><p>Traditionally an em dash—like so—or spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a “dash” in running text. Newer guides, including the <em>Elements of Typographic Style</em>, now recommend the more-concise spaced en dash – like so – and argue that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash caters to grandiose Victorian era taste. However, longstanding typographical guidelines such as the <em>Chicago Manual of Style</em> still recommend unspaced em dashes for this purpose. Furthermore, it is also argued that using an en dash here can lead to confusion, since the primary semantic role of an en dash is to represent a number range.</p></blockquote><p>But it wasn’t a stylistic issue. The introduction? Chock full of em dashes.</p>

<p>Plus, note, I said there is <em>contemporary </em>disagreement on the matter. Can we agree, please, that Emily Dickinson is not contemporary? </p>

<p>Thank you. </p>

<p>Heck, she <em>is</em> Victorian, at least chronologically speaking, and certainly grandiose. So let her have her freakin’ em dashes, okay? </p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

<p>P.S. Lanea, I thought you might be interested to know that Paul Muldoon was the editor on the most recent <a href=”http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-0743257588-1″>Best American Poetry</a> volume.</p></div>

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