Envelope Poems

Product Information

The shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. These books were found in Dickinson’s room after her death, in 1886, by her sister, Lavinia, along with hundreds more poems in various states of composition, plus, intriguingly, the “scraps,” a cache of lines that Dickinson wrote on scavenged paper: the flap of a manila envelope, the backs of letters, chocolate wrappers, bits of newspaper.

I did find some gems and dogeared some pages I'll go back to in the future, but I read through most of these thinking "I have no clue what' going on. Lyndall Gordon, a recent biographer, argued that Dickinson was epileptic and feared suffering one of her seizures in public. Those looking for an even closer connection to Dickinson can rent her bedroom for an hour at a time and see precisely what she saw. 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. 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.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. Another gorgeous copublication with the Christine Burgin Gallery, Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems is a compact clothbound gift book, a full-color selection from The Gorgeous Nothings. The envelope poems suggest the current exhilarating paradox of Dickinson’s work: her unique actions of mind are bound in unusually dramatic ways to slips of paper a hundred and fifty years old or more, rarities whose near-perfect reproductions are nevertheless now widely and freely available online.

my rating literally comes from the aesthetic appeal of the book, I am in fact judging a book by its cover. Not that she intended her poems to go unread—she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket. The book is a work of art in itself, with gorgeous facsimiles of Dickinson's writings scrambled on bits of envelope (hence the title). For too many years I’ve had an image of Emily as a perennial girl, never a woman, with genius of course but not emotions she showed in real life, only displaying them on the page; an image where she submissively sits behind her cross-barred bedroom window when she is not writing, imprisoned almost, perhaps by her father, occasionally looking out and ignoring the gawkers on the lawn below. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once.Lavinia, soon after entrusting her collection to Susan for editing, abruptly reclaimed it, and delivered the work instead to Austin’s mistress (and Susan’s nemesis), Mabel Loomis Todd, who, with Thomas Higginson, a mentor of sorts to Dickinson, put out the first editions of Dickinson’s poems, in the eighteen-nineties. It is a pleasant fancy to imagine that Dickinson, ever the tortoise in relation to rushing time, knew that, in the end, we would catch up to her. Now that the Internet has destabilized the conventions of the printed page—in which a poem is a block of language so many inches wide and so many inches long, with pure white space surrounding letters and phrases set at fixed intervals—it is harder than ever to defend the translation of Dickinson’s wild, dynamic graphic surfaces into such confines.