Last summer, I visited Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Mass. As I stood in the parlor, I noticed my reflection — and that of the rest of the tourists — in a mirror said to have hung in the home while Dickinson lived there. Our guide led us through the house, pointing out which objects were original, as if a mirror or a fireplace might somehow allow us to know the poet better. And yet that was why we were there: to see what she had seen, to walk the floors she had trod — all refracted, though, by our own experience of it. As the guide spoke, she mentioned pieces carted off to Harvard University, making clear her allegiance in a longstanding rift between Harvard and Amherst over Dickinson’s estate.
That rift has been somewhat abated by the recent launch of the online Emily Dickinson Archive, which allows open access to Dickinson’s manuscripts — the one set of objects that might indeed tell us something about Dickinson, or at least about how she wrote. 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.
Jennifer Day is editor of Printers Row Journal.
“The Gorgeous Nothings”
By Emily Dickinson, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, New Directions/Christine Burgin, 255 pages, $39.95