Envelope Poems

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By abandoning the idea of the manuscript as mirror and, with it, our search for depth, we may begin to traverse its surface and decipher the traces inscribed upon it. When we do this, we encounter what the textual scholar Louis Hay has called the “third dimension” of the text, the passage of writing traced through time, the multiple, contradictory decisions made during the process of composition and registered in part in the spatial play of the hand across the paper. 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. 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. Conjunctions of the Literary and the Philosophical in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Writing Although the quote was perhaps not widely noticed until it was highlighted by the viral tweet, it appeared in academic publications as early as 1996. ‘… And Historians Thought They Were Just Friends’

It comes, without a | consternation - | Dissolves [Abates – Exhales -] – the same - | But leaves a | sumptuous [blissful] Destitution - | Without a Name - 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). Le buste di poesia sono dunque scritti sulle buste che, più che poesie, sono messaggi, annotazioni. Fourth, there’s the mysterious presence on A 821 of other sets of pinholes. Was this document pinned to other documents we haven’t yet identified? Poet and artist Jen Bervin understands this tension between past and present, as well as between text and object, better than most. Her own art practice beautifully explores this interplay. Her 2004 book of modified Shakespearean sonnets, Nets, is a classic in the world of erasure poetry, and strips the bard’s famous lines “bare to the nets,” chiseling away at the familiar sentences to reveal surprising new poems.

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." — Jessica Michalofsky, Quarterly Conversation 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 next year—to my great delight and terror—Howe came to Buffalo to teach a course. She was then about the age I am now, which is rather strange to think about! The course she taught focused on early American literature, and at its center were documents—17th-century captivity narratives and conversion narratives—most composed by women, most composed in extremis. It was riveting. Howe was always prepared. I think she must have spent hours and hours, probably days or weeks, writing her lectures. And when she spoke, she was moved by a kind of intensity and nervousness and conviction all at once that was profoundly compelling. She was—she is—fierce and fragile. She’s always at the very edge of thought.

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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.”