One
of the principal objectives of Just Buffalo Literary Center's BIG NIGHT series
of readings, performances, music, and media art events over the past four years
has been to generate conversations across the boundaries of form and genre, and
to facilitate a kind of informal community setting where useful creative
interactions between writers and other artists might occur. If there's a kind of high-gloss sheen
surrounding the phrase "interdisciplinary arts," BIG NIGHT has
effectively dismantled the rhetoric and turned the "process" into a party.
No program in the series better exemplifies this intent than tonight's season
finale featuring leading conceptualist poet, textile and book artist Jen
Bervin, media artist and Associate Professor of Media Production at Buffalo
State College Meg Knowles, and music by the electro-dance duo UVB76. The festivities begin at 8 p.m. at the
Western New York Book Arts Center, 468 Washington St. (near Mohawk St.) and, as
always, feature the food creations of
BlazeVox Books publisher and gourmet chef Geoffrey Gatza. General admission is $5, $4 for students,
Just Buffalo members, and members of Just Buffalo's affiliate
organizations.
Bervin's capsule biography describes her work as bringing together "text
and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist
books, and large-scale art works," but even this summary is incomplete in
capturing the full conceptual range of her work, which might also be described
as exploring the spatial extensions of received cultural texts and revealing,
either through emphasis or material veiling, embedded variant readings
contained in texts and other cultural artifacts.
In a "process note" to perhaps her best known book project to date,
"Nets" (2004, now in its fifth printing from Ugly Duckling Presse),
Bervin wrote "I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the
"nets" to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a
divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us,
pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it
with or against this palimpsest."
And indeed, what the book contained was 60 of Shakespeare's sonnets raised on
the page but not inked--a kind of ghostly undertext--from which Bervin chose
only select words or groups of words (which she inked in boldface) to
"compose" or "derive" or "liberate" (what terms
one uses to describe the process reveals as much about the reader as it does
about the work) a new overriding text that resolved itself spatially and
syntactically into a recognizable poem, born, as it were, from Shakespeare's
looming absence.
Other notable Bervin projects have included "The Desert" (2008) from
Granary Books--a poem she wrote by
sewing row by row, line by line, across 130 pages of John Van Dyke's, "The
Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances" (1901) using atmospheric
fields of pale blue zigzag stitching to construct a poem “narrated by the
air”--and "Mississippi," her visually breathtaking installation that
is a ceiling-mounted 230 ft. panoramic scale model of the Mississippi River
composed of hand-sewn silver sequins to the scale of one inch to one mile,
showing the river mapped from the geocentric perspective, from inside the
earth's interior looking up at the riverbed.
The work that brings Bervin to Buffalo, however, is her most recent book
"The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems" (2012),
co-edited with Buffalo-based Dickinson scholar Marta Werner, an associate
professor of English at D’Youville College and published in a limited edition
by Granary Books.
An outgrowth of Bervin's acclaimed artist book "The Dickinson
Composites" (2010, Granary Books) based on her installation "The
Dickinson Fascicles"--a series of large-scale quilts she made by
embroidering Dickinson's unusual punctuation markings from her poems written
from 1858 to 1864, which the poet grouped into small hand bound packets, later
called fascicles, "The Gorgeous Nothings" is a limited edition artist
book based on Dickinson's late compositions on envelopes.
The edition includes a portfolio of 48 high resolution double-sided color
facsimiles with visual transcriptions, exactingly mapped and painstakingly reproduced
by Bervin along with Marta Werner's lyric essay, "Itineraries of Escape:
Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems," which places these previously
under-examined poems in scholarly, historic, and poetic context. In her
postscript, Bervin notes:
The title, 'The Gorgeous Nothings,' is an
excerpt from Emily Dickinson's manuscript A 821, 'the gorgeous | nothings |
which | compose | the | sunset | keep'. In choosing it, I was thinking of
Dickinson's own definition for nothing: 'the force that renovates | the World
–' and her definition for 'no': 'the wildest word we consign to language.'
Taken together with Werner's essay, both of Bervin's Dickinson books make a
compelling case for the reconsideration of Dickinson, if not as a visual poet
in the 20th or 21st century sense, then as a poet for whom the materiality of
her work, and its spatial arrangement across the field of the page, was significant in both its primary and variant readings. The normalization of Dickinson's poems to
conform with the formalisms of subsequent generations of her [male] editors, as
Susan Howe noted in quoting one of
Dickinson's letters ("The look of the words as they lay in print I shall
never forget") in her enormously influential "My Emily Dickinson"
(1985), confines the poet's work to a scale and range of possible readings that
is at enormous variance with what appears in her manuscripts.
While much of the critical language that has been applied to Bervin's
appropriation of literary texts as the genesis of her work speaks of
"erasure" and "defacement"--terms with a certain cache
amongst critical theorists--nothing one observes in her work can be read as
transgressive in the violent sense, as if she means to transform texts into
substrate. Instead her work, especially
in its sense of the physical presence of the trace, the ghostly silence of the
source text, partly occluded, partly raised in defamiliarizing emphasis, is a poetics
of displacement and regeneration: a way of beginning new sentences
again even as the gravity of the old language fades.
--R.D. Pohl
