The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems

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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. Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different element (...)

Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versificati (...) 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”. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-24 06:01:21 Associated-names Werner, Marta L., 1964- transcriber; Bervin, Jen, transcriber Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40750502 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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) 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.

Suivez-nous

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:

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….I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. — Agamben , Giorgio. The End of the Poem . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. La busta postale è quella che contiene la lettera, è una sorta di scrigno, qualcosa che avviluppa, contiene, include qualche altra cosa. 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.

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.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). 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.”)