Review: Envelope Poems

Emily Dickinson. Envelope Poems. Transcriptions by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin, published by Christine Burgin and New Directions, 2016. 95 pages.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

How do we, as writers and readers, imagine writing in terms of its intended form? Perhaps this is a silly question, though in this day of unprecedented mechanical and digital productions, it's worth our wonder. Emily Dickinson's literary and canonical legacy has been impacted rather significantly by this, unfortunately not to the poet's own benefit. A very small fraction of her work was published during her life, much of it untouched for long after her death. This was in part due to a multi-generational institution of sexism that intentionally failed, as Susan Howe points out in her fascinating scholarship My Emily Dickinson, (New Directions 2007) to account for Dickinson's inventive prowess. Another reason, also noted by Howe (and related to the previous statement), was the placement of Dickinson's other manuscripts on the backs of letters and envelopes, pages one might consider literary detritus; yet for Dickinson, informed not just the writing's context but its content as well. Envelope Poems offers this other side of Dickinson, in which her precise, aphorismic poetics are found in the intimacies of personal correspondences.

This should not suggest that Dickinson's work is more meaningful or sensical through the personal and hyper-subjective world of letters, nor that her work is more "suited" to this place. If anything, the presence of her words on the backs of these envelopes illustrates just how luminous her writing was already. "Look back/ on Time/ with kindly/ Eyes--" she implores, "He doubtless/ did his best." Her writing retains its wistful and profound qualities, and now one cannot hope as well but wonder what other context these enveloping poems contained. Whether or not the reader discovers such context doesn't seem to impact the weight of her linguistic choices. Dickinson's poignant and imaginative linguistic choices seem to blossom like colours bursting from a prism, the multivalence of her cunning unfolding in different directions all at once.

Perhaps it's fitting, then, that Dickinson's handwriting is at times "so disorded it seems to have been formed in the dark." If Dickinson's envelopes reveal something beyond their transcriptions, it may be that the ambiguity carries into the shape of her language itself.  One tends to think of poor penmanship as obtrusive to meaning; though it works here to intriguing affect. The transcription of the last line of the poem quoted above is transcribed as "that/ trembling Sun/ in Human/ Nature's West--" The reading places Time into cosmological movements, as the sun sinking beneath the western horizon. Looking at the envelope myself, however, I could not help but interpret her cursive "W" as an "N," leading to a different reading. If the Sun travels "in Human/ Nature's Nest--" I'm lead to wonder how the celestial movements of grand entities like Time revolve in tandem to those of our own making, the gradual creation and destruction of our homes. Direct contact with the original document makes this reading possible, even if it is a misreading on my part. Nevertheless, I'm thankful that the editors allowed their transcriptions and the original scans to exist side by side, enabling the reader's own (dis)connections to the work itself. Can writing get to such different readings of the same line, when letters are uniformed by contemporary type and digital fonts?

The scans illustrate the sheer visuality of Dickinson's poetry. Every "original work" has a glamourous coat earned through age and hardship, visible here in the stains and tears of once-glued envelopes, as well as in the stamps and postmarks; but the visual mystique is not limited to these antiquarian indulgences, pleasing as they are. Dickinson's penchant for interchangeable words in the lines of her poems is now visible through the irregularity of her lines. "A great Hope/ fell/ You heard no/ noise/ crash," the proximity of noise and crash proposing a choice for the reader. The line that follows has another alternative. "The Ruin was/ within havoc/ damage," this time both havoc and damage being lifted into their own line independent of within. Of course any reader is likely richer for considering both readings, but the potential for selectiveness I think plays into Dickinson's respect for the reader's participation in the poem's meaning. Another poem posits that "Had we our/ senses/ tho'/But perhaps 'tis/ well they're not/ at Home," suggesting we as readers might be richer without the senses to discern any ultimate meaning. "So intimate with/ Madness... the eyes/ within our Head--s--" The deceptive simplicity of the reader's own gaze seems to grant the poem's movement across the page.

Envelope Poems restores for us Dickinson's ludo-poetic play with language. One cannot help but wonder how robbed our society was from confining this poet--her person and her papers--to her estate. How much could her letters and poetry have influenced Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés, had he known of them? "How much - how/ little - is/ within our/ power." Correcting the mistakes of history may not be possible, though our task of poetic rejuvenation. Given the times we live in, that leaves plenty for us to do as liberated writers, thinkers, and readers.

Review: The War Works Hard

Mikhail, Dunya. The War Works Hard (Trans. Elizabeth Winslow). New Directions 2005.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

War has preoccupied poets for millennia. Poets have meditated on war since Homer, and contemporary efforts scrutinize war so much as to create its own genre. Anti-war poetry sought to remove the aloof veil surrounding the poem and replace it with something hard, abject, impermissible. It was an attempt of the twentieth century post-war crowd to provide a jolt of ethics into the hearts of a crowd growing increasingly disillusioned. Regardless of how one judges the success of anti-war poetry, the project did succeed, more or less, to destabilize war's many faces. Thus, war has been examined and analyzed, glorified and justified, bemoaned and criticized; but has it ever been thanked? There is a somber, knowing tone that pervades most poetic ruminations of war. Marked by a love of tired polemics and starved images, countless reiterations have blunted this tonal point. Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard thus offers something fresh and poignant to a poetic body frequently lacking either. In an ironic voice and self-defacing images, The War Works Hard places its anti-war poetics neither above nor beyond the war it criticizes, but uneasily, at its side.

Review: Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972

Pizarnik, Alejandra (trans. Yvette Siegert). Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions 2016)
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

To speak and write casts the poetic brush upon the sprawling canvas of silence and the empty page. Since Mallarmé's book of blank pages, Rimbaud's elected silence, and Artaud's fixations with turmoil, the question of what picture this brush produces has turned from the poet's words to the gulf of silence. Poets must accept the groundwork laid by all their predecessors; yet looming over all of them is what may only be the predecessor to our language: silence. What to do with silence, how to incorporate its dark spectre into the discourse of illuminated images and enlightened words, has since become a preoccupying question in poetic discourse; a question never more thoroughly investigated than by Alejandra Pizarnik. In spite of her immense influence on immanent writers and poets, from Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, to César Aira and Italo Calvino, Pizarnik's work has largely gone untranslated, and thus unheard in English audiences. Yvette Siegert's translations of Diana's Tree (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014) and A Musical Hell (New Directions 2013) now follow Pizarnik's greatest collection of work in English, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972. Siegert's translations reveal Pizarnik's impassioned dedication shadows and madness and the destructive blossoms of this poetic enterprise.