Envelope Poems

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First, there is the question of how it was composed: all at once, at different times, in fragments. The handwriting differs depending on which sector of the document you are looking at, suggesting perhaps that it wasn’t composed in one sitting, although it could have been…. And the boundary lines in the manuscript also create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity. Poet and artist Jen Bervin understands this tension between past and present, as well as between text and object, better than most. Her own art practice beautifully explores this interplay. Her 2004 book of modified Shakespearean sonnets, Nets, is a classic in the world of erasure poetry, and strips the bard’s famous lines “bare to the nets,” chiseling away at the familiar sentences to reveal surprising new poems. We could read the text like this: “Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds - [ turn MSS 90 degrees to the right] Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [ pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment”

Conjunctions of the Literary and the Philosophical in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Writing By abandoning the idea of the manuscript as mirror and, with it, our search for depth, we may begin to traverse its surface and decipher the traces inscribed upon it. When we do this, we encounter what the textual scholar Louis Hay has called the “third dimension” of the text, the passage of writing traced through time, the multiple, contradictory decisions made during the process of composition and registered in part in the spatial play of the hand across the paper. But I do think she was writing poems with an awareness of their significance—and, in the case of the envelope poems, of their strangeness. A lot of questions swirled around these documents when I looked at them—and very few of them can be answered. I’ve spent almost 20 years helping thousands of successful artists of all disciplines and working to make the arts more accessible. (One friend likes to call me “the arts enabler.”)

La revue

Lccn 2015047826 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.8212 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1200429 Openlibrary_edition I’d love to. I tell this story in my essay “Itineraries of Escape,” and, I have to warn you, it sounds like a fairy tale from the archives!

Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments." — Marjorie Perloff, Times Literary Supplement Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us!Fifth, there’s the message it records and that flashes by us: a message about how day falls into night; a message about the moment when the world is overtaken by—engulfed in—birdsong. It’s a message—I’d call it a poem—about the instantaneous translation from one condition into another, an essentially ecstatic experience. What we have instead of these letters—if, in fact, they ever existed—are poems. It’s tempting to think that the poems have taken the place of the letters—perhaps, even, that they were the true messages she wished to transmit. But this is far from certain. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better— Montgomery , Will. The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority . London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Agamben , Giorgio. The End of the Poem . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. False impression” could easily be read as a pun here. Without detracting from its substance, it mu (...) Le buste di poesia sono dunque scritti sulle buste che, più che poesie, sono messaggi, annotazioni. I wasn’t at all sure that the bound volume of these writings published by New Directions could capture this feeling—but I think it has. The design is simply splendid. I don’t know how they did it! I’ll always be deeply grateful to New Directions for their vision of the book.tender’ is given with the variant “sovereign” but written in the margin up the side of the paper is “unsuspecting carpenters”. For Proust,” Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings,“a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present.”

Although the quote was perhaps not widely noticed until it was highlighted by the viral tweet, it appeared in academic publications as early as 1996. ‘… And Historians Thought They Were Just Friends’ These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark.From 1999-2012 I worked at The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest artist colony, but I've also done time at an arts magazine, a library, an art museum, and a raptor rehabilitation center. In May of 2012 I left MacDowell to pursue writing, speaking, curating, and creative projects full-time. Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different elements of its composition keep a fine balance between the visible and the legible, including for instance a “Visual index” classifying the envelopes according to their shapes. Poised on the limit between the two modes, Marta Werner’s transcripts of the facsimile manuscripts suggest how delicate their interactions can be, particularly by giving prominent visibility to the creases, folds and lines dividing the surfaces of the envelopes. I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. — Olson , Charles. “Projective Verse.” Collected Prose . Eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.