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Although a prolific poet - and arguably America's greatest - Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems!
Instead, she created small, handmade books. In her later years, when 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.
The full-colour facsimiles are accompanied by transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, allowing us to clearly read the text, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote - the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns and overlapping planes.
These short, lively poems - written around 1870 to 1885 - are a selection from The Gorgeous Nothings (Hb $63.95). This beautifully presented new gift edition has a transcription of the poem on one page and a reproduction of Dickinson’s original writing on an envelope on the other. Although some poems seem almost impenetrable, others come bursting through like a shaft of light piercing the greyest cloud. Her illusiveness is part of her attraction, yet even then there is the odd moment of pure poignancy:
In this short life
that only (merely) lasts an hour
how much - how little - is
within our power.
reviewed by Greg, Abbey's bookseller
Arguably America's greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime. Jen Bervin's work includes The Dickinson Composites, The Desert, and Nets. 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.
An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes - envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art. -- Chicago Tribune For years, Dickinson critics have been looking for some kind of order among the manuscripts - some way to describe or theorize the filing system that the poet left and we found. In The Gorgeous Nothings, instead, what s restored to these traces of the work is a sense of occasioned disorder. What s been preserved through time in her handwriting is the decision to occupy the page. The page becomes just as important as the writing. -- Los Angeles Review of Books We see from The Gorgeous Nothings the way [Dickinson s] art and life were not separate endeavors. Dickinson wrote poetry every time she addressed or received an envelope. Whenever there was paper around, she put quill or pencil right to it. Dickinson, master of paradox. started these un-conversations with nobody, and so many years after her death, now - in curled script, with their sweet, perfect Ms and half-formed Ys, unpublished and unseen until now - they speak to us. And they have so much yet to say. -- Brenda Shaughnessy - Los Angeles Times Here is a book almost as rare as its author, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). -- Larry Smith - New York Journal of Books The Gorgeous Nothings is a rare gift for all poetry lovers. -- Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR The beautiful reproduction, on the pages of The Gorgeous Nothings, of what might seem only negligible scraps of waste paper brings us closer to the restlessness of the constantly thinking poet who, in her later years, repeatedly seized her pencil and a fragment of an envelope to write about the lowliest and the most exalted states of being. -- Helen Vendler - The New Republic The first and immediate shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. The great thing about [The Gorgeous Nothings] is, of course, that it gives us all of this, complete. -- Holland Cotter - The New York Times 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. -- Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker 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. -- Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker [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. -- The Quarterly Conversation The Gorgeous Nothings is one of the most ambitious, important literary feats of the year. It's stunning, revelatory, and it functions as a key text to Dickinson's oeuvre: seeing it demands a tectonic shift in the way we read her, brings her back to us even more extremely idiosyncratic than we could have guessed. -- The Rumpus Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments. -- Marjorie Perloff - Times Literary Supplement The Gorgeous Nothings is proof that one of our most important poets can still amaze and teach us new thing about the practice of poetry. -- Tupelo Quarterly Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art. -- Susan Howe 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's an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both. -- Ben Lerner - The New Yorker
