I used to date a woman with exceptional taste in art. She kept a steady rotation of coffee table books in her living room, my favorite of which was an enormous hardcover filled with paintings by Lucian Freud. We would be watching television, or trying to have a conversation, or making out, and I’d inevitably find my eyes and my hands returning to that gorgeous book: the incredible depths of the flesh tones—portraits that, regardless of the model, straddled the line between the beautiful and the ugly in a way I found helplessly entrancing. It became a point of contention: “Why are you still looking at that book?” “Yes I have seen that one before.” “No. He doesn’t care. He’s a dog.” Coffee table books are a delicate matter: if you want to play it safe, go with Ansel Adams or a book of funny church signs—guests will flip quickly, get bored, and you will eventually seem interesting again. However, if you are cursed, like my friend, with great taste, then you very well might lose your guests to the gravity of an artistic genius.
As we discover in The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions, 2013), an entirely new breed of coffee table book, the artistic genius of Emily Dickinson is hardly debatable and absolutely singular. This huge, breathtaking book features high-resolution photos of various scraps of paper written on by Dickinson late in her life. This selection of what scholars have taken to calling Dickinson’s “Radical Scatters”—writings on paper without a discernible literary genre—is equal parts poetry and visual art, and, in a very important sense, neither: a hybridity that challenges the ways we have approached and thought about Dickinson’s work since it first found its way to our eyes.
It has been almost 130 years since her death, and we still don’t know how to read Emily Dickinson. It is now common knowledge that Dickinson was almost entirely unknown throughout her life: circulating poems to friends in the mail, managing to publish a small handful of poems in regional literary journals, and relegating herself to legendary (and somewhat exaggerated) solitude. It was only after her death—after her sister Lavinia discovered over 1800 documents in a locked chest—that her poetry was first published in book form. That volume was published in 1890, and Dickinson’s work hasn’t been out of print since.
There is no artist I can think of as widely admired and as thoroughly mediated as Emily Dickinson. In many regards, the history of her readership has been a history of problematic mediation, given that the 1890 edition was tampered with by well meaning (though aesthetically challenged) editors. For the next sixty-five years, Dickinson’s poems were read in heavily edited forms: words had been changed to even out rhymes and metrical patterns; punctuation and capitalization idiosyncrasies had been removed; entire stanzas were cut to make the poems’ “meaning” more straightforward and accessible. These early editors (and their successors) put great effort into smoothing Dickinson’s rough edges—to tame her verse into something comfortable—something more in line with our expectations of what poetry is and should be.
In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson published a monumental variorum that granted readers access to Dickinson’s unaltered verse for the first time. This stood as the most significant contribution to Dickinson scholarship until 1981 when Ralph W. Franklin performed unprecedented literary forensics to present Dickinson’s poems in an order that placed curatorial authority on the small manuscript “fascicles” that Dickinson wrote and bound by hand. Most importantly, Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson presented rough scans of the original documents for the reader to see for herself. In a fundamental sense, the history of Dickinson scholarship has been an incremental journey toward Dickinson herself: a series of attempts to return to the work in its most feral state. The most recent step in this progression came in 2005 when Virginia Jackson published Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, in which she persuasively questions the central assumption about Dickinson’s work: that the Woman in White wrote lyric poems. In masterful excavations of archival material, Jackson manages the most fiercely unmediated reading of Dickinson’s work to date, and in so doing places urgent emphasis on the writings in their original forms (with particular attention paid to the Radical Scatters).
In light of this, it is entirely possible that The Gorgeous Nothings is the most intellectually significant coffee table book in the history of coffee table books. By offering your guest direct access to what the book’s editors reasonably term Dickinson’s “Envelope Poems”—access previously reserved for a complicated network of archive-spelunkers that number in the tens—you more or less ensure that you will never make out on your couch again. And with a book so attractive in your living room, why would you want to? It presents full-color, high-resolution photos of fifty-two envelopes upon which Dickinson wrote something like poetry: texts that work with the unique shape and structure of the paper on which they are written, engaging the physical medium of writing in highly experimental ways. These photos are faced with a transcription of the words on the scatters, which is necessary only because of the difficulty of interpreting her handwriting. These photos, which are curated by the visual artist Jen Bervin, are introduced by Susan Howe and then followed by a scholarly essay by an expert on the Radical Scatters, Marta Werner.
While proposing a solution to the problem of mediation by granting the reader/viewer direct access to archival material, The Gorgeous Nothings also presents a new form of an old problem: domestication. It is, after all, an attempt to reign in a wild mind in its preferred habitat that has for so long kept Dickinson’s genius on the wrong side of the editorial fence. What makes Dickinson’s work absolutely singular is its radical insistence on liberty: liberty of form and feeling, of lyric impulse and rational digression; liberty in resistance to simple reduction or paraphrase, theological orthodoxy, received metrics, clean rhymes, conventional punctuation and unmixed metaphors. Dickinson’s genius is untaught and therefore (thankfully) untamed, which is what makes the problem of mediation so significant: editors who seek to make Dickinson palatable—accessible—blunt so much of the force that makes her singular.
The coffee table book, as a form, is preternaturally domestic: it is not designed to enthrall, but to decorate (or to serve as an expensive coaster). In recent years, the two major Dickinson archives (one at Harvard and the other in Amherst) have reconciled their historic differences to make digitally available an incredible amount of their contents. Accordingly, Dickinson scholars and enthusiasts can turn to the Internet to access hundreds of documents in high-resolution scans. What is the purpose, then, of publishing a small portion of these documents as a coffee table book?
In certain regards, The Gorgeous Nothings can be understood in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “Green Box:” the limited edition series of boxes Duchamp himself filled with paper scatters he consulted while constructing his Large Glass “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” Duchamp of course famously challenged the definition of art with his “readymades”—objects he would discover and then present as art installations without manipulation. His “Green Box” similarly presented as art the loose, unedited, superficially insignificant litter that functioned for the two decades over which he worked on the Large Glass as the collateral of his project—by changing the context of his trash, he turned it into art in a transubstantiation made possible, it seemed, by the artist alone. Dickinson’s Radical Scatters, when presented as visual art, take on an entirely new semantic apparatus: not only do we read the words, we read the handwriting, the scribbles, the folds and stains, the envelope adhesive, the postal stamps, the shape of the paper, its pinholes, its color, and countless other variables that cannot be transcribed. To encounter the “Envelope Poems” in high resolution is to experience some of Dickinson’s strangest work in its most undisturbed form, and the interpretive possibilities of this encounter are endless.
It is fitting that, in light of recent Dickinson scholarship, the only troubling implication of The Gorgeous Nothings relates to genre. The product of contradictory forces, it is on the one hand the private, esoteric, wildly unmediated scribbles of a mad genius, and on the other a coffee table book: the literary genre most functionally associated with the footrest. The problem, as usual, is the unavoidability of mediation. Though some of the most beautiful pieces in the collection resemble birds attempting to escape their page, the “Envelope Poems” are still, for the most part, presented as lyric poems (or, worse: failed attempts at lyric poems). While Werner’s essay brilliantly demonstrates a number of highly experimental readings of some of the texts—taking into account their visual arrangements around seams and folds, feeling out the possibilities of semantic application—it still suggests that what the viewer encounters in high-resolution is a series of notes-toward-something-else. Werner writes, “For while it is unlikely that [Dickinson] set out to record a series of poems, messages, and fragments on envelopes, once we have seen these documents, it becomes difficult to dissociate the texts from their carriers. Flocked together for a few moments before dispersing again into other equally provisional constellations, they remind us that a writer’s archive is not a storehouse of easily inventoried contents—i.e., ‘poems,’ ‘letters,’ etc.—but also a reservoir of ephemeral remains, bibliographical escapes” (207). She is, of course, right about the difficulty of identifying genre, but are these merely “ephemeral remains” and “bibliographical escapes?” Interestingly, the book presents the photos as “Envelope Writings” while Werner maintains the label “Envelope Poems.” Are they writings, or are they poems, or are they something else entirely? Fortunately, the book mostly allows us to decide for ourselves.
The Gorgeous Nothings achieves something similar to Duchamp’s “Green Box,” although the means by which it is realized is reversed: while it was Duchamp, as artist, who imbued his box with artistic merit, the Radical Scatters’ artistic merit is determined not by their author/artist but by their reader/viewer. In this regard—and its importance cannot be overstated—The Gorgeous Nothings acts as a kind of hermeneutic mirror, revealing to us the assumptions we make when approaching a genius as staggering and inexplicable as Emily Dickinson’s. We read the Scatters—the Scatters read us. The decision to print these “Envelope Poems” in a book that might appear next to reproductions of paintings by Lucian Freud makes this context both possible and necessary, as it emphasizes the materiality of and the process behind literary creation.
The “Envelope Writings” prominently display the genre-bending realities of Dickinson’s late work, and in so doing demonstrate an evolution of the forms, methods and vision of one of our most celebrated and least understood artists. In addition to presenting itself as a kind of visual art, The Gorgeous Nothings manages to capture the intellectual zeitgeist in a form that serves scholars and non-specialists alike. It displays what is most radical about the Radical Scatters: we see, at its roots, the working of a genius still beyond our comprehension.
Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).
