Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings
If you teach Emily Dickinson, try to get hold of a copy of a beautiful book first published by Christine Burgin/New Directions in 2013. Used perhaps with a visualiser in the classroom, Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings provides a stimulating insight into the poet’s techniques during a particular phase of her writing life. It also directs attention to the central idiosyncrasies of this most idiosyncratic writer. Another interesting article: her niece Martha Bianchi Dickinson’s vivid 1932 memoir Emily Dickinson: Face to Face.
The book focusses on the so-called ‘envelope-writings’, since Dickinson quite literally was often a back-of-the envelope writer. As Susan Howe says in the introduction, this is ‘an exhibition in book form’. There is a smaller and shorter book with the same title, but I recommend the large format version, in which the paper scraps are presented in real size against expanses of whiteness, alongside printed transcriptions. A nice feature in the final pages is an ‘index of envelopes by page shape’, showing how many shapes an unfolded envelope can take. And envelopes were very much part of the poet’s household - what a letter-writer she was.
As Howe writes, these scraps ‘embrace contingency’, and it is valuable for pupils to see the extent to which Dickinson jotted down lines in the moment, often creating fragmentary forms that were shaped by the space on the envelope. The most obvious feature of her poetry - the extensive use of the dash - is not a mere matter of punctuation. It is central to the way she thought, and the way a kind of note-taking matched her moments of thought. As pointed out here, her earlier poetry was composed with a pen, then a pencil joined the pen, and finally the pencil pretty well took over, as if her writing was becoming more and more evanescent.
Amherst College has a digital collection which is well-worth exploring (you can easily zoom in to the details of individual manuscripts. Here for instance is ‘A Bird came down the Walk’.
Amherst College is home to the largest and most varied holdings related to poet Emily Dickinson anywhere in the world. The manuscript holdings include several fascicles and hundreds of letters, but the great strength of the collections at Amherst is the numerous rough drafts and fragments of Dickinson's poetry. She often jotted down single lines and raw snatches of poetry on whatever materials were close at hand.
Her writing materials range from slit open envelopes, such as "The way hope builds his house" (AC 450) shown here, to scraps of wallpaper and a chocolate wrapper. It is impossible for any transcription of these fragments to capture the important details of how Dickinson originally laid out her poetry on the page.
And as Marta Werner writes at the end of the book in ‘Itineraries of Escape’,
Although they may never have left her papers, Dickinson’s envelope-writings are still en route, their itinerary open. Their meanings of messages, dispersed to all, free of instructions, may be fleetingly intercepted by anyone with eyes to see, with ears to hear.
We should leave the last words to the poet herself. In the words of poem 1472,
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee—