THE GORGEOUS NOTHINGS: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems | Woodberry Poetry Room

welcome to the gorgeous nothing's and many thanks to my colleagues Leslie Morris and Heather Cole for so generously offering tours of the Dickinson room and for organizing the Amy Lowell exhibit that surrounds us this evening when Walt Whitman sent enclosures with his letters he would signify this to recipient his recipients with the phrase I send you the within four Dickenson and her envelope palms you can almost hear her say I send you the without in the dynamic circulation that constituted one of her primary modes of publication letters and poems were sent to friends and family and the exterior with envelopes that she received back were in turn used as the canvas for future poems the word envelope emerges from two different etymologies to cover and enclose and to be involved in and seems to embody the duality at the heart of Dickinson's work the solitariness and intense sociability that catalyzed one another several decades after Dickinson's death Virginia Woolf used the metaphor of an envelope to describe human experience a semi-transparent envelope she writes surrounds us from the beginning of consciousness in that same essay Woolf urges us to attend to the fragmentary matter and minutiae of existence let us record she writes the atoms as they fall upon the mind let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully what in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small tonight I am privileged to introduce visual artist and poet Jen bourbon and scholar Marta Werner who have brought just such an attentiveness to bear on Dickinson's fragments and gorgeous nothings treating them with equal dignity as both text and textile with ins and without helping us to apprehend literally returning to our hands the magnitude of these works I think of these manuscripts writes bourbon as the sort of small fabric Dickinson describes when she writes excuse Emily and her Adams the North Star is of small fabric but it implies much precise OOP sorry it's painful to miss part Dickinson bedding it um excuse Emily and her Adams the North Star is of small fabric but it implies much presides yet when we say small we often mean less writes bourbon when Dickinson says small she means Adams the North Star please welcome the stars of this evening gen bourbon and martyr Werner thank you so much for coming and it's a pleasure to be here a pleasure and an honor and it particularly a pleasure in an honor to kind of open the gen bourbon and the cordials nothing's itineraries have escaped Emily Dickinson's envelope poems one the wheels of birds collections unlock themselves once a single piece is brought to voice in the beginning was the exemplary object which opens up the way to thought as if by itself groups of documents arise from it from the editors of Walter Benjamin's archive among Emily Dickinson's latest writings is such an exemplary manuscript identified solely by its catalog number a 21 it constitutes a kind of exit text it may have been composed in a few minutes or even a few seconds in the early spring of 1885 since one line of the text reappears slightly altered in three fair copy drafts of a letter from Dickinson to Helen Hunt Jackson composed around March of that year but apparently never mailed in Thomas H Johnson and Theodore Awards the letters of Emily Dickinson the envelope poem is a next to these drafts as a footnote its provenance however as well as the date of its composition remain unconfirmed I found it first by accident in the Amherst College Library when it fell or rose out of an acid-free envelope out of the space of cluster Asian if I had not held it lightly in my hands I would never have suspected the manner in which was assembled although its brevity and immediacy placed it outside the reach of conventional class affected areas a striking affinity to the genre David Porter names small rickety Infinite Earths look at it here flying on the page vying with light a 21 is a sudden collage made of two sections of envelope the principles of its construction are economical even austere the larger section of the collage is the inside of the back of an envelope the address face of which has been torn or cut away one vertical crease bisects the document turning the halved envelope into a primitive diptych that resembles the hinged wings of the bird the manuscript is becoming initially the leaves wings appear to have been folded closed at rest the manuscript has not yet metamorphosed into a fully living figure the other section of the text designated by the catalogue or a 21a is composed on an unfolded triangular corner of an envelope seal a single straight pin in place when I first saw the manuscript many years ago but later removed originally impt the collage elements together while also spreading open the larger envelope fragment to reveal a blurred message about an imminent transition or about the desire of writing to intervene between the visible and the invisible on the right wing the lines afternoon and the West and the gorgeous nothings which composed the sunset keep their flat upward into the West on the left wing the lines clogged only with music like the wheels of birds slant diagonally upward into the east on the smaller pinned wing writing rushes beyond the air or terminus where the scene meets the unseen in there hi appointment the singing of birds marks some believed causes both the break and the close of day if we read from left to right across the contours of the open wings a a 21 a 21 a appears to record the moment when day falls into night yet the grammar or syntax of wings is the grammar of discontinuity the slight variations in the handwriting on opposing wings suggests that the text they carry were composed on different occasions moreover on each wing writing inscribed by velocity rushes in opposite directions to access the texts and to answer the question of where we have arrived we must enter into a volitional relationship with the fragment turning it point by point like a compass or a pinwheel like the wheels of thought 360 degrees as we rotate the text orienting and disorienting it at once day and night each aware of words almost converge in the missing body spaces just beyond the light seems showing the bifurcation in the envelope then fly apart in a synesthesia of sight and sound joy and gravitation Dickinson wrote in another late unclassifiable texts have their own ways gravity fields the instantaneous translation from one condition into another radically different one defines the experience of a a21 and of so many of Dickinson's late and ecstatic writings ultimately the fragments textual status as a fugitive or exile is related not only to its extra generic quality but also to its migration between an among texts and to its capacity to survive outside all of the texts that so briefly shelter it even within the interstices of Dickinson's letter drafts that it first seemed to repatriate and master the lyric fragment a21 marks the place where the ax men you ANSYS comes slipping between registers in a voice at once immediate and alien turning pros back into poetry and writing the text apart initially though the strange vibration of a 21 comes from a crossing of wires between Helen Hunt Jackson's three February 1885 letter to Dickenson containing news of her prolonged suffering from a broken leg and Dickinson's belated response in March Santa Monica California by the sea February 3rd 1885 my dear Miss Dickinson thank you heartily for the fan it is pathetic in its smallness poor souls how did they come to think of making such tiny ones I shall wear it sometimes like a leaf on my breast your letter found me in Los Angeles where I have been for two months and a little more sunning myself and trying to get on my feet I had hoped by this time to be able to go without crutches and venture to New York for the remainder of the winter but I am disappointed so far as the broken leg is concerned I could walk with a cane now but the whole leg having been badly strained by doing double-duty so long is obstinate about getting to work again is very lame and sore and I am afraid badly given out so it will take months for it to recover I dislike this exceedingly but dare not grumble lest a worst thing before me and if I did grumble I should deserve it for I am absolutely well drive the whole of every afternoon in an open carriage on roads where larks sing and flowers are in bloom I can do everything I ever could except walk and if I never walk again it will still remain true that have I have had more than a half centuries excellent trotting out of my legs so even then I suppose I ought not be rebellious few people get so much out of one pair of legs as I have this Santa Monica is a lovely little seaside hamlet only 18 miles from Los Angeles one of the most beautiful seaside places I ever saw green to the tip edge of the cliffs flowers blooming and choruses of birds all winter there can be nothing in this world near a perfection in the South California climate for winter cool enough to make a fire necessary night and morning but warm enough to keep the flowers going all the time in the open air grass and barley are many inches high some of the volunteer crops already in head as I write in bed before breakfast I am looking straight off towards Japan over a silver sea my foreground is a strip of high grass and Mallos with a row of eucalyptus trees 60 or 70 feet high and there is a positive cackle of limits I hope you are well and at work I wish I knew by now what your portfolios by this time hold yours ever truly Helen Jackson the epistolary relation is grounded in unexposed to time when Dickinson received her friends letter she began drafting a response several drafts redacted here into one our extent dear friend to reproach my foot my own foot in behalf of yours is involuntary and finding myself no solace in whom he loveth he chasteneth your valour astounds me it was only a small wasp said the French physician repairing the sting but the strength to perish is sometimes with health though who but you could tell a foot take all the way for me but leave me ecstasy and I am richer than than all my fellow men is it becoming me to dwell so wealthily when at my very door are those possessing more in abject poverty that you compass glance at Japan before you breakfast not in the least surprises me clogged thronged only with music like the wheels decks of Brie thank you for hoping I am well who could be ill in March that month of proclamation sleigh bells and Jays contend in my matinee and the North surrenders instead of the South a reverse of you goals knew I how to pray to intercede for your foot were intuitive but I am but a pagan may I once more know and that you are saved your Dickinson Dickinson was writing she had signed one draft perhaps she was even ready to seal it up in an envelope and send it on its way but before she could make these final preparations the newspapers announced Jackson's death Dickinson's carefully drafted response to Jackson's morning letter reaches its destination only in the night of its intended recipient cut to a 8:21 clogged only with music like the wheels of birds look at it for a last time flying on the screen vying with light unlike the letter proper a narrative of illness and death boundlessly gravid the undated because dateless fragment is a site of radical temporality in the visual linguistics of an early myth mystical imagery and identic metaphysics wings wheels are signifiers for imitate in materiality for bodies that are not subject to the laws of gravity wings wheels can communicate between time and eternity by composing a 21 a 21 a on the reverse of an empty unaddressed envelope no longer the container for a message but the message itself Dickinson creates a template for flight that is also a trope for her late contrapuntal communications in which arrival is another name for departure if we look closely at the body of a a21 for additional sets of pinpricks to along the outer edges of the left wing and to along the outer edges of the right wing are filled the tiny holes maybe signs that the fragment was impt to other texts composed before or after the letter to hunt Jackson signs that writing is subject to changes in course to multiple defections a a21 may be a time shifted bird flown out of the constellation of March a poem breaking out of prose a letters vanishing point in such a case the expectations of closure their high appointment may be endlessly postponed or reversed by the drop of a pin to say the least the common meter of the hymn found in Dickinson's early bound poems has not survived this latest flight in a 21 a 21 a a sudden acceleration is followed by a short circuiting of lyrical cables in place of melody and measure comes suddenness and syncope meet her with neither more nor less but an impossible measure in the end 821 flies to the outermost edges of Dickinson's works then out of this world no bird but rode in ether in August perhaps of 1885 on postal wrappers Dickinson composed a last ecstatic PostScript to hunt Jackson dear friend can you walk were the last words I wrote her dear friend I can fly her immortal soaring reply a further migration wh Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain and fear just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight the rapid motion of wings Laurie neat occur 821 a 21 a comes not alone but is one migrant among many it is the harbinger moreover of Dickinson's furthest flight that beyond the forty bound fascicles the accumulated libraries of her poetic production into a freer air where to cite Ralph Waldo Emerson contrary and remote things seem to cohere at this juncture Dickinson no longer thinks of keeping what she acquires through the labour of writing and her attitude of astonishing recklessness is reflected in her new practice of writing on anything near two-hand chocolate wrappers the margins of books scraps of paper among the makeshift and fragile textual homes for Dickinson slate writings we find about 50 envelopes the nature of Dickinson's connection to these writings she left behind her remains mysterious for while it is unlikely but she deliberately set out to compose a series of poems messages and fragments on envelopes once we have seen the documents it becomes difficult to dissociate the texts from their carriers flocked together for a few moments before dispersing again into equally other equally provisional qualifications and classifications they also remind us that archives are not always founded on the principles of order comprehensiveness and objectivity but sometimes through more heterodox practices dedicated to salvaging the most ephemeral remains that a normative vision of literary history might blithely discard like all of Dickinson's writings the 50-odd envelope texts found an initial sweep of the major collections vex genre boundaries most however appear to be rough copy poem drafts the earliest envelope poem may have been composed around 1864 the date assigned to the last of Dickinson's fascicles and a handful of other envelope texts for by Johnson's dating to by Franklin's belong to the same decade the remaining envelope texts their composition dates ranging from 1870 to 1885 evidence suggesting the Dickinson's practice of composing on envelopes intensified in the wake of fascicle production and at a juncture when she was testing differently and as it turns out for a final time the relationship between message and medium composed moreover at the end of a century whose dream of communication as the mutual communion of souls was often realized or shattered in the fate of written missives the envelope poems seemed with a special poignancy and hermeneutical burden I like the original communications they enclosed and that still had some chance of reaching their intended addresses the emptied envelopes discovered among Dickinson's papers after her death and scattered by the winds of the future are intercepted by unknown and unnamed readers permanently estranged from the writer they remind us of the contingency transients vulnerability and hope embodied in all of our messages by the late 1850s writes media historian John Durham Peters it was possible to mail a letter sealed in an envelope paid for with a pre-purchase stamp and dropped into a public box and in her recent beautiful work on Dickinson Virginia Jackson considers the many possible forms of address the way in which I address you depends upon where you are if you are very near I can whisper if you are across the table I can speak if you are upstairs or just outside I can shout if you are too distant to hear even to overhear my voice I can write and in the allusion peculiar to written address the condition of your absence the condition of my writing conjures a presence or intimate than a whisper before bearing columns the envelopes found among Dickinson's papers presumably carried such cloistered dispatches many of the envelopes on which she wrote were originally addressed to her or members of her family from those beyond the world of the homestead the hands of her Norcross cousins Josiah and Elizabeth Holland Abigail Cooper and Judge Otis Lord crossed them in ink and committed them to the postal service the remaining envelopes in this constellation are addressed by Dickinson to cherished outsiders unlike the envelopes mailed to her though she dispatched there only a name and on rare occasion an abbreviated address like since untitled and undated palms circulating outside of a print economy the original messages these envelopes presumably enclosed were conveyed privately by more intimate carriers neither stamped nor postmarked they eluded the postal systems public circuits of exchange and often as a result their transmission and reception histories remain untraceable returning is a different route Dickinson wrote around 1874 if the envelopes addressed by Dickinson to others often conveyed communications received but long ago dissociated from their envelopes lost or destroyed by custom or accident how and why did the empty envelopes return to her if on the contrary the envelopes never left her possession why would they address at all and to whom were they only potential carriers for communications Dickinson intended to write but ultimately withheld could the poems inscribed on envelopes both those unsent or return to her and those sent to her by others be the true messages she wished to send but never did were they directed to the living or to the dead the often striking contrast between the addressed Dickinson composed on the envelopes face in ink in a magnified fair copy script and the poem she inscribed in pencil on its back or inside in the small dense rough CoffeeScript Higginson described as resembling the fossil tracks of birds seems to point to a split intention in the writer determined on the one hand to send an indelible message to a particular specific addressee still present and locatable in the world and desiring on the other hand to compose a fleeting message for a stranger from another unknown world how can we ever verify the degree of match between what is transmitted and what received the interval separating address and poem with our minutes hours days or years is always infinite thus while it is tempting to see the poems composed on envelopes addressed to the same person fragments of an extended message to him or her to see the addressee as somehow in ciphered in the poems the fragmentary narratives that emerge from such an approach remain frustratingly unconnected to identifiable circumstances in the lives of either sender or recipient what is renounced in the turning of the envelope from face to back is the letters the poems potential to conjure the addresses presence through words what is affirmed perhaps in this very same turn is the mysterious distance separating the sender and receiver but through which they somehow continue to signal each other a message enclosed in an envelope a poem inscribed upon it and prepared for sending over miles or centuries is not a piece of information but a registry of longings no wonder then that we find among Dickinson's envelope poems several enacting the ecstatic reconciliation of souls long years apart can make no breach a second cannot fill for example attest to the power of writing to overcome time and space to collapse the distance dividing writer and addressee who recognize each other instantaneously despite a revolution in forms but this fantasy recur zone Lee rarely in Dickinson's work more often the envelope poems emphasize the address gap depict the vast expanse Sundering writer and reader so often also lover and beloved thus and through what transports of patience the addressee is unreachable separated from the writer who seeks him or her by a void or blank that unmeasurable on a human scale cannot be traversed and similarly the excruciating poem and not admitting of the wound in which we learn only that the source of the speaker's injury is her severance from the beloved and that the wound is so wide that her entire existence has now entered it bears witness to the infinite remoteness of our condition in this case the translation of the wound in two words remains unaccompanied by an interpretive process that might treat the speaker by turning her literal hurt into a figurative one the envelope is the repository of an injury it cannot heal or even contain slit open it functions not as a soothing bandage but as a second almost simultaneous site of rupture at the end of the 19th century the rise of the new telecommunications technologies change the conditions of human contact forever the new media rights Peter's gave life to the older dream of angelic contact by claiming to burst the bonds of distance and death yet signals sent from the distance must still be kept alive along the way one of the unconscious documents in the constellation of Dickinson's writings on envelopes is a Western Union Telegraph Blanc addressed of any Dickinson care of judge Lord and marked paid by the sender the urgent message it conveyed copied by a nameless telegrapher with strict instructions to carefully read every letter to repeat obscure sentences or difficult words and to keep a daily record of all difficulties interruptions or incidents occurring in the working of the lines has been lost in place palms glass was the street in tinsel peril and it came as its turn too big in these palms Dickinson appears to be translating the electrical pulses of the original and unrecoverable bulletin into new messages associating speed and shock the distortion and breakdown of this final message abruptly interrupted by a stranger or a god and registered visually in the repeated cancellations of lines is evidence at communication across the chasm of worlds is asymmetrical and unreadable I gave him leave to live lest gratitude revive the snake thought though smuggled my reprieve the 19th century word for envelope was cover and metaphors of envelopes are metaphors of containment exteriority and interior tea oven folding and exposure in Dickinson's case however the sovereign force of the envelopes address is ultimately countered by the poems openness to a multiplicity of recipients and array of futures the whirring of the envelopes is part of the message they are sending slit open unfolded written across and consigned to chance they reject the asylum offered by the lyric poem to probe the last privacy's of our existence among Dickinson's envelope poems we find an exquisite subset of lyric fragments written on seals or flaps detached from their original bodies the seals compose a coda for all Dickinson slate writings received in pieces as fragments the tiny scale and luminous properties of the seal linked it to the world of the miniature to keepsake or amulet in writing the seal is the ideal container for the aphorism a minimum sign invested with maximal energy only a few lines long the poems inscribed over seals they are witness to the Evanescence of existence brief as a single day or as the isolate piercing notes of a bird saved against all odds unsealed for all the world to see they carry Dickinson's last exorbitant message about fames sightlessness and her final canceled caution against doubt in this short life that only merely lasts an hour how much how little is within our power the vastest earthly day is shrunken shriveled dwindled chastened small by one departing heroic face behind Paul one note from one bird is better than a million words a scabbard needs holds but one sword society for me my misery since gift of thee or fame erect her sightless citadel which has the wisest men none doubt has scattered diagrams high up a mile high perhaps two miles high hundreds of pale gray birds flew south like pages of flickering paper let loose from a small book caught up in a wind Peter Greenaway in order to determine whether or not certain kinds of birds possess homing instincts a person sometimes called a liberator throw several up into the air then turns and turns again each time releasing more birds in different directions the birds are then watched out of sight and the points at which they disappear from view are recorded when a significant number of vanishing points have been noted a scatter diagram is drawn up for study at times for reasons poorly understood large numbers of birds set to return to their original release points seem to lose their way and drift widely across the migration access whirling around the absent center of the fascicles Dickinson's envelope poems resemble these distant migrants that do not come fully into focus and that never constitute a clearly delimit able constellation if at times one or two seem to be in closest touch at other times each seems remote from the others unassimilated and unassimilable to a larger figure who's moving edges and outlines also drift and blur like the homing Birds gone astray from their flocks the envelope writings have exchanged the hermetic relations inherent in letters those fine and private things intended for one intimate and elite addressee for the more elliptical but finally more far-reaching relations of Palms whether or not they ever left her papers Dickinson's envelope poems are still on route their itinerary open their skywriting their messages dispersed to all songs instructions may be fleetingly apprehended by anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear coda suddenly I am letter struck Ln C su even now when I did not discover in my searching of the archives one I missed one I fail to collect together suddenly crosses the sky of my reading I like to imagine that it was sent to me indirectly of course by the ghost of Jay later for it appears on a brief and complete list of envelope poems he made in the 1950s when he was cataloguing Dickinson's writings in which I came across quite by chance a few months ago when sifting his papers for something else the face of the envelope is addressed by Clara Newman Turner to Lavinia Dickinson and inked the color of a calm blue mixed with lavender turned the envelope over though and we find on its torn inside Dickinson's sudden penciled notation circa 1876 death warrants are supposed to be what a hazard a letter is how it seeks us out how it aims at us instead of classifying the envelope poems according to conventional generic codes instead of collecting them in a single bound volume we need to find ways of recording each brief encounter we have with them before noting - they're unpredictable destinies their minish mini vanishing points who knows but one of them is to us thank you so to backtrack for a moment or two I wanted to share the first series of works I did related to Dickinson and I'll go straight into the new edition that Martin I did together with Dickinson's envelope pons and this series is called the Dickinson composites it's based on the fascicles here at the Houghton and some of you have got a great description from Leslie Morris about the variants and how they work in her poems but in short by a variant I mean any word phrase or line Dickinson proceeded with a cross mark instead inside the body of the poem or any word phrase or line seated by a cross mark in a cluster at the end of the poem like a postscript in the poem bereavement in their death to feel in the last stanza you'll see the line in dying T's as if our souls absconded suddenly and the word Souls has a cross in front of it below it are the is a string of three words first with a cross world and a - selves another - Sun and another - and the way you would read that variant in relation to the poem is to go back into the preceding two lines so you travel backwards into the poem in dying T's as if our world absconded suddenly in dying T's as if ourselves absconded suddenly in dying T's as if our son absconded suddenly I loved the system when I came across it I could hardly believe it and I could hardly believe what I did to the poem much less what it did to every other poem she'd written so when I started to read this way and I went back in and I said what happens to the word souls when I see it in relation to those three words every time or for example tenderly or sovereignly in the the poem Marta showed earlier you know my letter to the world judge tenderly of me changed to sovereignly of me it has a very dramatic effect when you start to apply it or study it that way and I thought it was extraordinarily beautiful and then was a shock to find it wasn't really represented in print when her poems were published and was also a ghast about line breaks and others were formal aspects of the page that I thought were inherent in their power and beauty and sound and so I wanted to do something in specifically with these marks and with this system that would in some way picture it or make it visually available and I worked on this series for about four years called the composites and I digitally composited fascicles of poems so I would scan in the Franklin facsimile edition and I would layer every recto on erecto and every verso on a verso in a single fascicle of poem so in a single packet of poems so you're looking at a bunch of poems at once when you're looking at these composites ideally in the space so what you're looking at there is the the folio fold in the center is that faint green line and then every mark that was in fascicle packet 16 and I worked throughout the 40 fascicles and I was interested to see what happened over time so 16 is the first sort of sweeping use of the cross mark in the fascicles and they're so large I compared them you know the difference is like dragonflies versus Nats in fascicle 40 and the scale of the letter and the connectedness of the letters in a word changes dramatically from throughout the fascicle sequences so I started to make these large pictures of it using a combination of cotton batting muslin embroidery thread and cotton thread and I would first so the ground of the paper so if it was on a ruled paper I'd so the rule or the laid lines I said the laid lines and the the quilts are actually bigger than the screen so it's a 8 feet wide by 6 feet tall quilt the embroidered works I made are quite large to convey the exact gesture of Dickinson Dickinson's individual handwritten marks I Trant I transfer the digital composite marks onto the batting with a projector and a pencil and embroidered them with red silk thread red because it consists of the longest wavelengths of light the human eye can see the Dickinson composites are men's of emission samplers of quote a system of aesthetics far superior to mine I wanted to visually reassert that the vital presence of the omitted marks to raise questions about them choosing to circumvent what seemed like an intractable editorial situation I tried to make something as forceful abstract and generously beautiful as Dickinson's work is to me and outside there's a addition that we made for libraries for scholars who wanted to look at these quilts in library contexts and there's one at the Houghton and there's one out there for you to handle and look at and it has a it has a sampler of the quilts so it has a one to one excerpt so as if you were to walk up to the quilt and cut out this much of it it has it reproduced in actual scale okay onto the gorgeous nothings learn to read the PostScript that I wrote which is quite short the title the gorgeous nothings is an excerpt from emily dickinson's manuscript a21 the gorgeous nothings which composed the sunset keep I was thinking of Dickinson's own definition for nothing the force that renovates the world and her definition for no the wildest word we consigned to language these gorgeous nothings are that kind of nothing these manuscripts are sometimes referred to as scraps my grandmother's family ran a scrap yard and judging from the photographs they had an inordinate amount of fun doing so the studio where this addition was made near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn New York is within eyeshot of two scrap yards scrap has value here and it is on the verge of transformation the giant mountains of metal will be melted back down and remade transfigured it will no longer be called scrap when something new is created from it I prefer to think of these manuscripts as the sort of small fabric Dickinson writes of in a 636 excuse Emily and her atoms the North Star is of small fabric but it implies much presides yet Dickenson penciled the poem in one corner of a large envelope interior the writing is small in relation to the compositional space floating in its firmament this poem exemplifies Dickinson's relationship to scale so perfectly when we say small we often mean less but when Dickinson says small she means fabric Adams the North Star Dickinson's fresh eye for creating a visual composition is overtly demonstrated in the envelope poems to understand how forcefully she's manipulating the form of the page take a simple household envelope and see how many of these forms you can recreate you will rather quickly find that what looks simple simply is not there is not one instance here of an envelope reopened out into its die-cut shape look with care and you will see that what may look like a whole envelope is only one face of it slit open note how in four of the larger manuscripts she angled the page to write in concert with a light rule and the laid lines in the paper in the richness of the color reproductions in the portfolio the envelope poems appear to visually hover on a thick white page in reality the manuscripts are wafer thin when Dickinson approached her compositional space to write she was reading and shaping her materials she was reading light Dickinson's material vocabulary might best be described as epistolary the poems fascicles letters and notes were predominantly composed on stationery Dickinson never used pre-folded folio sheets in their nested form at each folio was its own unit even when conjoined with thread to other folios in her fascicles sometimes she broke them down further tearing the paper in two at the fold or smaller yet Pierce pieced to others conjunct with the aid of a pin the envelopes reproduced here are all machine made die-cut forms finished with folds glued intersections and a gummed flap the sender could moisten to seal most often the envelope has been slit or cut open at its sides turned and inscribed in the interior in an early letter to her brother Austin she wrote this is truly x10 poor Austin I have no notes in my pocket suggesting that there were typically jottings accumulating there Dickinson's one surviving dress has an external pocket on the right side where her hand would fall easily at rest the economy of the pocket is worth considering an envelope is a pocket an envelope ree folds discreetly privately even after it has been sliced completely open all of the envelope poems were written in pencil unlike a fountain pen a pencil stub especially a very small one fits neatly in the pocket of a dress Emily Dickinson sent this pencil in poem letter 695 if it had no pencil would it try mine to the Boles is Riley nudging them to write it was enveloped in a fault small folio folded in thirds horizontally pinned closed at each side and that pencil is about two inches long to give you a sense of scale I will just get into nuts and bolts and then I'll then we'll have some time to go look at the edition and read through it and handle it it's comprised of about 48 prints full-color 100% scale front and back and the scale issue is very important here because when you're looking at the scale on the screen it's all over the place or tiny they're large they're giant but it's it was of great value for me to actually know what the correct scale was in all of these things and they're surprisingly small as you'll find with her in many contexts it's the addition is comprised of three parts mostly comprised of manuscripts from Amherst College although there is a fantastic one from Houghton eternity will be which every so pleased to include and the three parts are primarily the portfolio of the envelopes and they are pardon single sheets unbound and we wanted them to be non sequential so that you could group them and reorder them and work with them yourself I should add that the addition is so strongly for use we made it so that people would use it and get to see these things so even though it's a pretty fancy addition I think of it as a workhorse it I hope it gets a lot of I hope it gives at this point so there's the the portfolio of the prints forty-eight prints and we we made some new transcriptions of these they're based on drawings or tracings of the envelope so those were scanned in and then I worked with another poet and designer Mary Austin speaker to work on some new transcriptions and try to as best we could as very challenging feat and I'm not sure we did it the best way but we did it the best way we could we tried to scale an angle and size the letters in a way that was conducive to reading on the page so we tried to treat the transcription like a key like something you would consult to look back into and at the manuscript so it's it has a very specific relationship to the to the experience that we wanted it to be secondary and we wanted it to be a resource not only not something that would stand equal to the manuscript it's also very lucky to have a the essay that you heard a version of by Martha Warner as part of the addition there's a that's the only bound thing in the Edition because it has a set sequence that's very important and it has humble manuscripts tipped into it or facsimile manuscripts tipped into it and there's also a guide which is unbound and that sorts the fragments by forum by address by variants by erasers by writing directions so there are these groupings that very quick visual groupings that you can use when you're looking at the book to look for certain things there's a lot of invisible labor that goes into something like this and one invisible labor that I particularly liked was the half a year we spent removing the space around each manuscript so when you look at that reproduction up there all the space around within a pixel or two sort of right where the shadow starts had to be removed in such a way that the the manuscript would appear to float on the page when you saw it so often when people see the edition for the first time they do this they run their hand over it to see if it's actually on there and that was a carefully constructed illusion that we enjoyed laboring on okay and Martha mentioned this this manuscript long years apart can make no breach a second cannot fill and I've been thinking about it a lot lately because it has the poem continues on to the on to the back so you saw and you get that a little bit better when they're two up actually but what happens is that the right hand poem and the left hand poem continue on the back and the right hand in the left hand so there's this opportunity to make a folio that would follow a normal full EO sequence and she doesn't take it and she this this sort of column structure I think is really curious and I was looking at it in relation to Robert Walters work lately because I think it mimics newspapers actually and it's a great I think it actually has a lot of promise as a publishing solution for Dickinson because her lines her line breaks are so short and her poems are so narrow that one of the difficulties of publishing a poem that short or that narrow on a page is that it takes up a ton of white space if you were to do it in columns as she's done here you might actually have a pretty workable reading solution it's so excited when I realized anyway but I love using I one of the things that was particularly exciting to me about getting to do this edition is that it's for you so we can sort of work through things like this because we have them in front of us because we're using them because we're reading them that way and these sorts of solutions that are most sympathetic to how Dickinson is writing and the choices that she's making as she's composing they're very it's very difficult to get close to what she's doing and I feel like we get a little closer each generation or maybe not but but it's exciting to try and there's all of these clues that she leaves I feel like in the manuscripts themselves that offer up new potential publications I should also say that I learned about these fragments through Mark to Werner so it was through open folios and through radical scatters that I first saw these that I knew that they existed so I only knew about the fascicles and had seen individual blade fragments published so is entirely through their existence through your work that they were even known to me and so there's a huge huge debt I think in the in the scholarship right now to the work you've done and are doing and its beauty astounds me and so I'm pleased that we get to manifest it and anew one thing that that last fragment ends will gleam and understand it's aster and there's a line will gleam and understand and one of the things that was fun to do with the addition was to try to carry over some of the material resonance of the archive so when you when you look at the seals in the archive they do glisten they're like they have such presence that you can't capture in a photograph and so we kept trying to sort of if the trade-off was to get a great print on thick paper we would print the essay on really thin Westen's linen which was a paper that she used to compose on different the watermark differs by almost a century but so we would try to get the thinness and the translucency and the crispness of that paper in the essay on letterpress and and then capture things like the glistening seal on the outside of the box so there was sort of these hints of that experience coming through in other ways if they couldn't be experienced in that manuscript version okay I close with that and I invite you to look at all three editions and open folios and to congregate and converse thank you

Channel: Harvard University

Views: 16,160

Rating: 4.8200002 out of 5

Keywords: poetry, emily dickenson, Jen Bervin, Marta Werner, Envelops

Id: OSGKlCsQngI

Length: 54min 43sec (3283 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2012