Accession number
PML 196475
Creator
Bervin, Jen.
Published
New York : Granary Books, 2010.
Credit line
Purchased on the Harry S. Morgan Fund, 2016.
Notes
Title from unbound booklet.
Edition of 50 copies and 5 hors commerce.
Library's copy is 37. NNMP
"Emily Dickinson avoided publication, calling it 'the auction of the mind, ' but penned nearly 1700 poems in her lifetime. Readers are familiar with her characteristic dashes, but fewer have seen her equally ubiquitous crosses (+ marks) or the variant words to which they correspond because they are rarely reflected in print editions. The variant words are preceded by the + mark and often appear listed in clusters after the poem but before the horizontal line Dickinson drew to signal the end of a poem. To read the variants, you move backwards through the poem trying to find the point of insertion, the corollary word, or phrase (preceded by a +) that the variants refer to in the poem. They are sometimes quite close in meaning to the marked word, but in other instances, they are as far ranging as " + world, + selves + sun"--Artist's statement.
Edition of 50 copies and 5 hors commerce.
Library's copy is 37. NNMP
"Emily Dickinson avoided publication, calling it 'the auction of the mind, ' but penned nearly 1700 poems in her lifetime. Readers are familiar with her characteristic dashes, but fewer have seen her equally ubiquitous crosses (+ marks) or the variant words to which they correspond because they are rarely reflected in print editions. The variant words are preceded by the + mark and often appear listed in clusters after the poem but before the horizontal line Dickinson drew to signal the end of a poem. To read the variants, you move backwards through the poem trying to find the point of insertion, the corollary word, or phrase (preceded by a +) that the variants refer to in the poem. They are sometimes quite close in meaning to the marked word, but in other instances, they are as far ranging as " + world, + selves + sun"--Artist's statement.
Description
1 box : color illustrations; 30 x 38 x 4 cm
Summary
"The Dickinson Composites is an artist book that focuses on a series of large-scale quilts Jen Bervin made by embroidering the poet Emily Dickinson's unusual punctuation markings from her fascicles. The box, printed with enigmatic red crosses and dashes, contains two sewn samples (excerpts made at the same scale, in the same materials using the same methods as [her] quilts), large prints of each quilt, and a nested booklet. Like Dickinson's manuscripts, the box and the works therein are encountered entirely without titles. In the booklet, an essay by Bervin elucidates Dickinson's variant marking system in her poetry manuscripts and provides further context for the quilts."--Publisher's web catalog.
Binding
Publisher's light tan printed archival box, decorated with quilt-scale fascicle marks in red.
Classification
Catalog link
Department