Envelope Poems

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Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. Buste di poesia raccoglie fotografie e trascrizioni che la mia amata Dickinson ha tracciato a matita sugli involucri delle sue missive.

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.Much of Lavinia’s pile ended up at Amherst College, the cornerstone of its special collections; Susan Dickinson’s batch went to Harvard, along with several household treasures that had been preserved at the Evergreens. It felt like a four star read to me simply because many of the ideas didn't feel finished or realized. But neither is it a mere draft: the scraps represent the audacious pinnacle of Dickinson’s mingled verbal and graphic gifts. 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.

Firsthand stories about the Dickinsons were still told in the early nineteen-nineties, when I was a student at Amherst. The vertical column of the first panel then becomes a broad horizon, which, when the poet runs out of space, picks up on the third blank panel. Though she usually composed at night, Dickinson sometimes jotted down lines during the day, while gardening or doing chores, wearing a simple white dress with pockets for her pencils and scraps of paper.

It looked out over the family’s property on Main Street, in Amherst, Massachusetts, toward the Evergreens, her brother’s grand Italianate mansion, nestled among the pines a few hundred yards away. La rovescia, la smembra, la apre, la dispiega, la sviscera (…) In queste scritture Emily sembra giocare con il dentro e il fuori, con l’involucro, la custodia, il contenitore: non c’è niente in verità da nascondere, in ciò che sta nell’aperto della parola. Which is fine—there is enough, in the end, to justify the material's interest, even if I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more actual writing (a number of pages simply contain pictures of bits of envelope addressed to or by Dickinson). Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy―addressed to no one and everyone at once.

Talvez sejam as imagens dos envelopes (a cor, a sugestão da textura, do toque - do objecto real que pode ser tocado); talvez sejam os poemas fragmentados, as palavras rasuradas (o mundo de bastidores, a vida privada, o processo de criação); ou talvez seja a própria letra da autora que carrega o peso da presença: eu estive aqui, eu escrevi isto. It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects. 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. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once. It sometimes feels as though Dickinson’s sojourn in print, so fraught from its inception, was a temporary measure, now nearing its end as it’s replaced by a better technology.The discovery of a new Dickinson treasure in the course of an attic cleanout or a basement purge is a perennial, if distant, possibility.

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. There are countless expressive features of a Dickinson manuscript, all but a few of them effaced when her poems enter a standard print edition. Este é o meu primeiro livro da autora, uma lindíssima edição da SAGUÃO 11, design e composição original adaptada por Rui Miguel Ribeiro e tradução a cargo de Mariana Pinto dos Santos e Rui Pires Cabral.Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet. Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. After a gregarious girlhood, it was said, Dickinson had gradually become a near-total recluse, known around Amherst as “the myth.