This huge hardback book The Gorgeous Nothings is rather breathtaking — despite the fact that really it consists of scribbles from Emily Dickinson. I had earlier flipped through it a bit confused — my mum had got it from the library so I had no fore-warning of just what it contained.
This is what a flip-through will show you, envelop poems on the one side, a careful and spatially exact transcription on the other:
Poems written on envelopes carefully undone and opened out, poems that spill out to fit the space allotted, even when it is tiny.
Scraps of paper covered with words.
They are profoundly moving.
This was one of my favourites, and is also subject to a lovely essay at the end by Marta Werner:
wheels of birds, afternoon and the west the gorgeous nothings
Werner writes
If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled. Although its brevity and immediacy place it outside the reach of conventional classifications, it bears a striking affinity to the genre David Porter names “small, rickety infinitudes.”
Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light. (199)
The pinpricks are from where Dickinson pinned her scraps of paper together. I think of her now overflowing with scraps of paper.
A view of the book with Pluto the guinea pig who poses with books (and there are reviews sometimes), one of my new favourite tumblr blogs.
There is little that can describe the cumulative effect of these scraps of paper, these scratches of writing that you become better at puzzling through, though too often relying on the typed transcriptions. They range from pointed, sarcastic responses to daily life to collections of words that seem to mean little to deeply moving fragments so evocative of beauty.
Not until reading this did I realise just how much the rhythm of Dickinson’s poems had been shifted, regularised upon the page by her editors. These fragments show space and irregular rhythms, the process of playing with words.
And oh, did I say they are impossibly moving?