NaPoMo16: Robert Fernandez on Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” (466) |

When asked about his favorite poem, Robert Fernandez replied with “I dwell in Possibility – (466)” by Emily Dickinson.

I dwell in Possibility – (466)

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

This is one of my favorite poems. I think that Dickinson here is thinking about the question of being. It’s not just the poem that dwells in possibility, it’s the person. The person has the potential to dwell poetically. What would that mean? We’re still in a house, a structure—like the poem, a place of laws and limits, possibility partitioned off, diverted into channels—but above us recede the “Gambrels of the Sky,” a void that fills us with the sense that anything is possible. Kierkegaard, seizing on Christ’s assertion that “with God all things are possible,” noted that “God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is the existence of God.” The poet has to break with the reified, prosaic supports and repetitions of the world, which exist to make us feel safe and to keep things productive, into the exposure of this “fair” (meaning pleasing to the sight, beautiful, bright, clear) place of poetry, a place made beautiful and bright because resonant with possibility, the divine. This is the human in its capacity to exist for and toward the unknown, new truth and new light. Dwelling poetically is dwelling in the dread and wonder of this exposed place and affirming it. Dickinson here speaks to poetry’s relationship to being, to what it means to be human (to see possibility and disclose the unknown), thus situating a radical thinking of being and the event, the seer’s work, at the center of American poetry.

–Robert Fernandez

Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh and Pink Reef, the cotranslator of Azure: Poems by Stéphane Mallarmé. His new original poetry collection Scarecrow was published by the Wesleyan University Press in February 2016. He has won a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fernandez lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.