The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems

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From 1999-2012 I worked at The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest artist colony, but I've also done time at an arts magazine, a library, an art museum, and a raptor rehabilitation center. In May of 2012 I left MacDowell to pursue writing, speaking, curating, and creative projects full-time. La busta postale è quella che contiene la lettera, è una sorta di scrigno, qualcosa che avviluppa, contiene, include qualche altra cosa. Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem. … It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. … It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on” (Olson 241, ellipses mine). Conjunctions of the Literary and the Philosophical in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Writing

Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different elements of its composition keep a fine balance between the visible and the legible, including for instance a “Visual index” classifying the envelopes according to their shapes. Poised on the limit between the two modes, Marta Werner’s transcripts of the facsimile manuscripts suggest how delicate their interactions can be, particularly by giving prominent visibility to the creases, folds and lines dividing the surfaces of the envelopes. I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. — Yet she was not secretive about the fact that she was writing poems; she sent more than three hundred poems to recipients in letters—letters that were often indistinguishable from poetry. These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark. First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOS (...)Awareness of the importance of the opposition between metrical segmentation and semantic segmentation has led some scholars to state the thesis (which I share) according to which the possibility of enjambment constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose. For what is enjambment, if not the opposition of a metrical line to a syntactical limit, or a prosodic pause to a semantic pause? “Poetry” will then be the name given to the discourse in which this opposition is, at least virtually, possible; “prose” will be the name for the discourse in which this opposition cannot take place. (Agamben 109) I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but have called New Hampshire home since 1999. My studio is located in the historic, mill village of Harrisville. I miss fried okra, the early southern spring, and restaurants that stay open past 9:00 p.m., but rural life agrees with me. In New Hampshire I can see the stars, go kayaking or snowshoeing, watch bald eagles fish in the lake, and focus on my creative work in silence. I no longer have to worry about traffic jams; deer, wild turkeys, and frost heaves are the primary road hazards here. Although I live in the country, I’m fortunate enough to be part of a vibrant arts community that extends beyond this small New England village. The quiet days are punctuated by regular travel and frequent visits to museums, theaters, readings, arts events, lectures, and open studios around the country. ( You can read my full CV here.) I like Jan Bevin and other artists finding permission in the fascicles and other of ED’s written fragments to make their creative work--that's always a plus. On the other hand, scholarship requires proof rather than mere assertion, no matter how authoritatively given. Marta Werner asserts that ED’s words and the material on which they are written create a meaningful engagement, design, etc., and that this material somehow reinforces, completes, extends, both the meaning and purpose of those inscriptions. That is the assertion that I question. There are some really standout poems to me in this but the sentence that hit me hardest was “I have no life but this to lead”, as if Emily from centuries away knows what I’m going through, what I’m thinking���. Maybe humans do have universal truths after all…. Olson , Charles. “Projective Verse.” Collected Prose . Eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Agamben , Giorgio. The End of the Poem . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. I’ve spent almost 20 years helping thousands of successful artists of all disciplines and working to make the arts more accessible. (One friend likes to call me “the arts enabler.”) Le buste di poesia sono dunque scritti sulle buste che, più che poesie, sono messaggi, annotazioni. Etymology tells us that “secret” also has to do with lines, since it comes from an Indo-European ro (...)

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This is beautiful and it certainly encapsulates something of the experience undergone by the poet. But the envelope MS has the following significant variants—none of which are crossed out: False impression” could easily be read as a pun here. Without detracting from its substance, it mu (...) It would seem that Johnson chose the version that had more comfort. The MS, I think, more powerfully conveys anguish--the thin ice of faith over despair. Hi)stories of American Women: Writings and Re-writings / Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France And if you care about poetry at all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance for that kind of intimacy? Billy Collins and Archibald MacLeish
certainly would.

Passeurs de la littérature des États-Unis en France(1)/ L’héritage de Michel Foucault aux États-Unis A study of the line breaks in this corpus of texts should therefore take into consideration the interaction of several issues. Firstly, line breaks can no longer be a mere matter of poetics, more specifically of metrics, but are crucially determined by material constraints out of which a poetics of the line may emerge , a poetics that calls into question the role measured lines play in defining poetry; a poetics which particularly challenges the pivotal role of the line break as the primary mode of distinguishing verse from prose. In “The End of the Poem,” Giorgio Agamben has proposed a definition of poetry contra prose according to the line break as a superstructural characteristic: Etymology tells us that “secret” also has to do with lines, since it comes from an Indo-European root word meaning “separate, cut off,” also to be found in “harvest” amongst others. One of Susan Howe’s earliest poetry sequences is entitled Secret History of the Dividing Line (Howe, 1996 87-122).But not for all of them, as shown by the recent print edition of the complete poems, the third to b (...) tender’ is given with the variant “sovereign” but written in the margin up the side of the paper is “unsuspecting carpenters”. I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –” (J657, Fr466, M233). In a less optimistic perspective, they might also be seen as coffin builders.

The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century / Exploiting Exploitation Cinema Montgomery , Will. The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority . London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Loved this publication, the juxtaposition of the original letters and how they looked was marvellous and interesting especially as a historian and (aspiring) palaeographer, though I imagine even non-historians find it fascinating. I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –” (J657, Fr466, M233). In a less optimistic pe (...) The Gorgeous Nothings] opens up an aspect of her craft that suggests she was, in the so-called late ecstatic period of her career, experimenting with creating texts in relation to the visual, spatial, and technological possibilities of her medium—composing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it.

Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different element (...) For Proust,” Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings,“a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present.” Carpenter” clearly refers to Christ and “sovereign” certainly has a different connotation than “tender”. But why did she use “unsuspecting” in the margin? Is the implication that Jesus doesn’t actually know what is happening? Why the plural? Is it a slip or are there many “Carpenters” depending on the person and the suffering. One of the many interesting points made in the introductory material is that Emily played with the actual shape of the envelope as she developed her thoughts. Susan Howe says that the poems should be viewed as “visual productions”. Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versificati (...)