From a reader:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedKind of a bummer, very early you said 'Boston, Philadelphia, Canada, even London!'

Generally, in English, and hopefully American, because it should follow similar rules, when there is a list of similar nouns, all should be similar, or another clause is used. We would not say chickens, pigs, cows and potatoes.

It may have been an honest grammar error if you thought Canada was a city, but it is not. You might have thought this is a group of similar population but it is not. Canadian people are kind of sensitive about how people portray us and our country at present.

Please be more cautious. You don't really want people like me thinking you are something we dislike.

Thank you, From a tender soul who is easily pissed off at present.

My reply:

Thanks, friend, for your welcome thoughts. Knowing one’s been read with care is crack cocaine to a careful writer. Most readers rush in their hurry to get who knows where, as if the end of a paragraph were an end in itself. Speed reading is to prose as a compactor truck is to garbage, masticating vivid variety into disposable mush. Gobble gabble if you will, but prose worthy your attention should be savored like haughty cuisine.

I handle words as if they were fresh eggs, still warm from mom. I delight in the life within them, wondering what I might make. Words propel my thoughts as the river Huck’s raft. Devices like alliteration, assonance, apposition, asyndeton, anaphora tickle me to chortling (and that’s just the A’s). I often characterize writing as composing. Words that don’t sound right aren’t sound, in my fanatic faith (hence Hegel’s home in hell, poor guy).

Here is the passage that pissed you off, as you piquantly put it (and yes, many of us are touchy in this parlous present):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedBut with a Substack page! (Emily Dickinson’s) words might wriggle past her three thousand Amherst townsfolk to, well, Boston, Philadelphia, Canada, even London! Surely among such a multitude mightn’t there be one, maybe a dozen, who dreamed as she dreamed?

Let’s assume this writer knew that items in a grammatical sequence are typically alike in kind. Why in this instance might he have ignored this rule?

I can think of two reasons off the top of my hat. First, he meant by this discord to poke his reader awake. Predictability dulls perception in person and in prose. If you know what someone’s going to say, you quit listening – yada, yada. Another city in that list would have gasified the whole. Shakespeare’s the wizard at this, incessantly injecting unexpected words to wake you (e.g., of countless: “Creeps in its petty pace” – why petty?). This helps explain why a Shakespeare play makes one feel so alive (if one can keep up).

Second, more to the point, this writer has slily slipped into Miss Dickinson’s brain, as she contemplates the recruitment potential of a Substack page. Note that it is her imagination venturing out of her constrained present (Amherst with its three thousand citizens) into more populous, prestigious and tempting centers of English-speakers – Boston (closest and most familiar), Philadelphia (notable for civility), Canada (not that far but foreign), and finally the legendary center of her world, LONDON. Her imagination would not have specified Quebec, Toronto, Nova Scotia, but Canada in its exotic entirety.

That’s my hunch anyway – that the jarring substitution of a country for a city was neither inadvertent nor inconsiderate. (If you suspect this elaborate response to your modest question reflects vanity in its author, you would not be wrong.)