I Would Like To Apologize To The Class

From: PaulMarlowe@Stanford.edu
To: AllStudents@AmericanPoetrySeminar.Stanford.edu

Dear Students,

I would like to apologize to the class for the remarks I made last Thursday during my lecture on Emily Dickinson. Although my memory of the incident is somewhat hazy, the complaints filed with the dean’s office lead me to believe that I accidentally confused Emily Dickinson with my soon-to-be ex-wife, Emily Marlowe-Horowitz. In order to rectify any confusion, I’d like to clarify a few points.

For starters, Emily Dickinson is not “practically a prostitute.” She is one of the most important female poets in the history of American letters. Emily Dickinson neither slept with my friend Tim Henninger or my colleague Dr. Harold Chesterton. In fact, many scholars believe that in spite of her complex writings about the human heart and the coded references to sexual passion in her poetry, Ms. Dickinson may have remained a virgin until her death. My soon-to-be ex-wife, on the other hand, will go to bed with anything that moves, including—and this one I just found out about—Greg, our holistic couples therapist. Greg has a large mole on his forehead and always smells like ham.

Emily Dickinson is not “a bar rat whose name is written on the bathroom wall of every men’s room in Palo Alto.” In fact, she lived a rather hermetic lifestyle in Amherst, Massachusetts, and had a limited circle of friends. Emily Dickinson would not “bone her own brother if it weren’t against the law,” though some do believe she harbored unrequited amorous sentiments toward her brother’s wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. While much of the scholarship on Ms. Dickinson’s homosexual leanings is suppositional, my wife’s lesbian affairs can be readily verified by going to BoredProfessorsWife.com. You’ll have to send $10.95 via PayPal to see the really graphic stuff, but the splash page will give you the basic idea.

I was in error when I said that Emily Dickinson had been instant-messaging with several members of the Roosevelt High School basketball team. Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in early December 1891, well after Ms. Dickinson passed away. Though Ms. Dickinson’s family did recover approximately 800 poems after her death, they did not find any e-mails from someone named eZeeLover@MarriedButLooking.com on her hard drive. Should you need to distinguish between an Emily Dickinson poem and an e-mail from eZeeLover, you should know that while they both use capitalization and punctuation idiosyncratically, Ms. Dickinson is less reliant on the words “juicy,” “pink,” and “balls.”

Also, Emily Dickinson did not use the money I had saved up for a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to buy a fuck-swing.

Emily Dickinson passed away May 15, 1886, from nephritis, also known as Bright’s disease. It would therefore be impossible for her to die a horrible fiery death after being torn apart by elephants and stomped on by a million billion angry horses.

Emily Marlowe-Horowitz, on the other hand, should probably sleep with one eye open.

All the best,

Dr. Paul Marlowe
Professor of American Literature