30 November 2011

Art I like - Jen Bervin's Dickinson Fascicles

Jen Bervin's "Dickinson Fascicles" are based on the punctuation (the "non-meaningful" marks) on the pages of the poet's manuscripts. She says on her website:
"I wanted to see what patterns formed when all of the marks in a single fascicle, Dickinson's grouping of poems, remained in position, isolated from the text, and were layered in one composite field of marks. The works I created were made proportionate to the scale of the original manuscripts but quite large—about 8' wide by 6' high—to convey the exact gesture of the individual marks."

These marks were omitted from typeset poems and only became available to scholars when a facsimile edition of the poems was published. Since then there's been a lot of literary theorising about them.

Bervin also says:
"I have come to feel that specificity of the + and – marks in relation to Dickinson’s work are aligned with a larger gesture that her poems make as they exit and exceed the known world. They go vast with her poems. They risk, double, displace, fragment, unfix, and gesture to the furthest beyond—to loss, to the infinite, to “exstasy,” to extremity."

She speaks about the work in the Threads Talks, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Threads.php.

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