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Envelope Poems

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Although a very prolific poet―and arguably America’s greatest―Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems.

But, of course, it is her words that are foremost, the shortest of these (of less characters than one can use on a Twitter post) being my favorites, though a slightly longer one (none are long) near the end was intriguing, as it was written on three small sections of a flattened-out envelope and can be read at least two different ways depending on how it is turned. I almost felt a bit voyeuristic reading these poems, like I walked into a room and found these scraps on someone’s desk. Dickinson was born to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. Her own transformative power, often frightful even for her to contemplate, is their presiding subject: the “still—Volcano—Life” she describes as ever churning under her daily rounds.Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously; publication was, as she put it, as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. 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.

As a historian it’s always wonderful to see anything and everything from simple things to simple thoughts, however careless they may seem to us, or unimportant and forgettable to the contemporary maker. 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). The words “notice” and “not” reflect each other more vividly without the hard stop of the intervening question mark. And, if the letters are sounds, so, too, are the spaces between the letters, the margins and gaps, the shape and other material aspects of the paper she chose. The discovery of a new Dickinson treasure in the course of an attic cleanout or a basement purge is a perennial, if distant, possibility.The way that Dickinson’s poems made it out of that house, eventually reshaping American literature, is a story that is still unfolding.

Except that the actual manuscript has multiple anomalies, cross-outs, and alternate words surrounding the lines I have just quoted. This exquisitely produced book [ The Gorgeous Nothings]—lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner—allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’ in full-color facsimile for the first time. It felt like a four star read to me simply because many of the ideas didn't feel finished or realized. my rating literally comes from the aesthetic appeal of the book, I am in fact judging a book by its cover.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.

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