Poem For Emily Dickinson, Referenced Twice in Sophie’s Choice, and for Sophie, of Course, Hounded, Tormented on the Train Platform at Auschwitz by the Nazi SS Commandant into Deciding Which of Her Two Children She Has to Give Over, Consign to the Gas Chambers in Order to Save the Other, How She Chooses, as She Must, as Any of Us Would, Despite What We Say, for Saving One at Least From the Flames, Thinking, Cold, so Cold, the Glaciers, the Rivers of Our Lives Suddenly Shifting; and for Sophie’s Nameless ESL Instructor at Brooklyn College After the War, Saying at the End of Class Soon You Will All be Speaking English in Your Sleep, and Quoting Emily’s Poem About Death Kindly Stopping for Us; and for Sophie’s Classmate Whom Sophie Asks to Tell Her the Poet’s Name Again, Who Says, “Émile, Émile Dickens”; But Most of All, This Poem is Not For, is Decidedly Against the Assistant Librarian, the Shame of All Librarians, the Condescending, Supercilious Prig Who Tells Sophie She Must Mean Charles Dickens, the 19th Century British Novelist, That There is no Such Poet as Émile Dickens, Causing Sophie to Faint Dead Away on the Library Floor

By John Hodgen

Plead with me, pray for the real Émile Dickens, unknown novelist/poet/autodidact, that he be found,
culled, called from the lost regions of the unimagined dead, with all due speed, by acclamation. May he be
remembered for saying that truth and death are a woman disrobing in heaven and also in hell. May he be
hailed as laureate, as Sophie’s last choice. May his every word be revered, his magnum opus rediscovered,
The Chosen One, each word a new child with a soup bowl only asking for more. May he know no shame
nor dereliction. May his ranks never close. May he have all new clothes. May he be lauded for leaving
his bleak house, his hard times, for enduring all of our twists, for exceeding our greatest expectations.
May Death itself die like John Donne, like bloody Keats, hapless Chuzzlewit or faithful Micawber.
May it be that Death’s heartless heart yearns. May Death die in a library sumptuous, vast as Parnassus
among copper fields and forests of urns. May he die hearing there’s no such author as Life, that Life
is pure fiction, a story, a poem, that he must venture alone into a book depository, where presidents
and dreams are killed, where everything burns. May there always be a poet named Emily or Émile,
waiting at a train station, another train coming in, how it chuffs and begins, how one might glance
out a window for just a moment askance to see someone feverishly and forever beating the dickens
out of a poem the way Dylan dropped the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on oversized
hand-lettered cards with Allen Ginsberg standing in an alley in London outside the Savoy Hotel
where words and worlds coincide with everyone we’ve ever loved and everyone who’s died,
carriages pulling up to the station outside, hundreds of them, millions, on which we can ride.

John Hodgen is Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Advisory Editor at New Letters. He is author of six poetry collections: In My Father’s House, Bread Without Sorrow (winner of the Balcones Prize), Grace, Heaven and Earth Holding Company, The Lord of Everywhere, and his latest book, What We May Be, from Lynx House Press.

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