Envelope Poems

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Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy―addressed to no one and everyone at once. The place sat largely empty until 2001, when its rooms were entered again, and found weathered but essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. The envelope poems suggest the current exhilarating paradox of Dickinson’s work: her unique actions of mind are bound in unusually dramatic ways to slips of paper a hundred and fifty years old or more, rarities whose near-perfect reproductions are nevertheless now widely and freely available online.

I almost felt a bit voyeuristic reading these poems, like I walked into a room and found these scraps on someone’s desk. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes—envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art.For too many years I’ve had an image of Emily as a perennial girl, never a woman, with genius of course but not emotions she showed in real life, only displaying them on the page; an image where she submissively sits behind her cross-barred bedroom window when she is not writing, imprisoned almost, perhaps by her father, occasionally looking out and ignoring the gawkers on the lawn below. The Evergreens was a private residence until 1988; that year, the last inheritor of the property, Mary Hampson, passed away. The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once. It’s an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both.

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. 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. The discovery of a new Dickinson treasure in the course of an attic cleanout or a basement purge is a perennial, if distant, possibility.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. Emily Dickinson cresceu num ambiente puritano e passou quase toda a vida confinada a um quarto onde redigiu cerca de 1750 poemas. Although a very prolific poet―and arguably America’s greatest―Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. The cover is beautiful, the pages feel luxurious, the photographs feel so special, and it's all put together with incredible care.

An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes — envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art.

The pleasures and the challenges of this kind of reading are impossible to ignore; next to a clear facsimile of these manuscripts, a print version seems, at best, a kind of crude trot. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period.