Envelope Poems - Hardcover

Emily Dickinson; Jen Bervin; Marta Werner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811225828 ISBN 13: 9780811225823

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

Synopsis

Although a very prolific poet and arguably America s greatest Emily Dickinson (1830 1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy addressed to no one and everyone at once.

Full-color facsimiles are accompanied by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin s pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson s handwriting. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes)."

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About this title

Review

"Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art." --Susan Howe

"...Dickinson's incandescent thinking is everywhere on display, and the makeshift nature of the scraps gives us a vivid idea of what composition must have felt like for a woman whose thoughts raced far ahead of her ability to capture them." --The New Yorker

About the Author

Arguably America s greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (1830 1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime.

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, artist books, large-scale art works, and archival research. Her poetry/artist books include The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books, 2010), The Silver Book (Ugly Duckling Presse chapbook, 2010), The Desert (Granary Books, 2008), A Non- Breaking Space (UDP, 2005, web-only), The Red Box (UDP, 2004), and NETS (Ugly Ducling Presse, 2004). Bervin's work has been shown at The Walker Art Center and The Wright Exhibition Space, and is in many special collections including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Stanford University, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and the British Library. She has received fellowships in art and writing from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Centrum, The MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop, and The Camargo Foundation and is an editor-at-large for jubilat. Bervin will teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Harvard University in 2011. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Marta Werner s books include Emily Dickinson s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson s Late Fragments and Related Texts.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0811225828
• ISBN 13: 9780811225823
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96