Jen Bervin ~ New York

The Dickinson Composites
By Jen Bervin
New York City: Granary Books, 2010. Edition of 50.

11.5 x 15 x 1.5". A nested 16-page (unbound) color booklet containing an essay and sewn samples from The Composite Marks of Emily Dickinson's Fascicles, which are a series of six large-scale embroidered works based on composites of the punctuation and variant markings in Emily Dickinson's poetry manuscripts. Housed in a drop-front archival box printed with quilt-scale replica's of Dickinson's marks in red.

Each box includes:

• The unbound 16-page booklet containing an essay on the variant marks, images of Dickinson's manuscript poems*, and process and installation images of the quilts Bervin made by embroidering Dickinson's punctuation markings from her fascicles. The booklet is housed in a pocket printed with variant marks and sewn with a cotton tape lift.
  
• Two machine sewn and hand-embroidered samples – excerpts from Composites 28 and 38 – made at the same scale, in the same materials using the same methods as the quilts. Images in the booklet show the hand-sewn sample in relation to the full quilt, with the excerpt area marked.
  
• Large color prints of all six quilts: The Composite Marks of Emily Dickinson's Fascicle 16, 19, 28, 34, 38, and 40.
  

*The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, and the Trustees of Amherst College generously gave their permission and to publish specific works in the edition.

Jen Bervin: "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.

"Between approximately 1858 and 1864, Dickinson grouped her poems into small handbound packets, later called fascicles. They are very humble bindings: stab-bound with twisted red and white thread and tied off teeteringly near the folded edge. The stitch held the stacked folded sheets together but made them a harder to open. The poems are composed on stationery typical of the nineteenth century, vertically folded sheets, plain, laid, or ruled paper with a small embossed image in the upper left corner. The packets contain eleven to twenty poems per grouping. …

"Dickinson’s editorial legacy is complicated at best; her fascicles and fragments were dismembered, regrouped, scissored, and marked by her various editors as they changed hands and often her poems have been restructured and changed considerably for print. Even the current variorum edition of Dickinson’s work persists in defying her line breaks and removes or replaces her crosses with other marks (brackets and numbers to clarify, i.e. change, the system that Dickinson authored). By imposing conventional views of literary authorship (as expressed by book publication) and divorcing her poems from their formal integrity and its intended specificity, the implications of an unusual, complex, pervasive system are harder to understand.

"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. I scanned Dickinson’s manuscript facsimiles (about twenty pages per fascicle), edited them digitally to form composites of just the marks, and used a projector to transfer the marks onto cotton batting (to suggest a highly magnified page) prepared with a hand-sewn center line (a stand-in for the folio fold) and machine-sewn lines that replicated those of the light-ruled laid paper or blue-ruled paper. I embroidered Dickinson’s marks in with handspun hand-dyed red silk thread.

"The fascicles from which I made composites showed clearly identifiable shifts in the size, gesture, frequency, and distribution of the marks. In contemplating such an odd physical study, one naturally forms one’s own questions about the nature and meaning of the marks; it makes their presence on the facsimile manuscript page more striking, systemic, factual – and their omission from typeset poems more evident.

"I have never doubted Dickinson’s profound precision, however private, nor that the energetic relation of these marks and variants is anything but integral to her poetics. 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…. "
$2,000

the red box
By Jen Bervin
New York City: 2004. Edition of 10.

9 x 10 x 2" red cloth box. 18 x 30" fold-out poster of 16 original India ink drawings mounted on Japanese paper with linen tabs for mounting. 20 text fragments of varying dimensions made of over 90 separate layers of paper. Composed with India ink, typewriter text, opaquing film, ledger green correction fluid, red watercolor pencil, and machine-sewn marks with red silk or pale green cotton thread.

Jen Bervin: "The pianist Glenn Gould used the same small folding chair throughout his performing career. This chair that his father adapted for him was quite low, and afforded him positioning in relation to the keyboard that he could not otherwise have achieved on a standard piano bench. The chair drawings in The Red Box are based on photographs from performances and studio recordings that span Gould’s entire career. His chair becomes progressively distressed: first the paint chips, then the seat cushion deteriorates, then the padding falls away. The last bare chair, viewed in its entirety, is drawn from a photograph of the chair taken after Gould’s death.

"Gould’s writing, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettel (his last notes), and my own writing constitute the text fragments. I was drawn to Gould’s desire for machinelike artistic precision, Wittgenstein’s desire for linguistic specificity, and the way that sentimentality inevitably enters in and troubles those desires.

"I had questions about the outer limits of material specificity in editioning a project like this. I tried to edition this artist book project exactly as it was created, reproducing and incorporating every error, layer, edge, gesture, and all layers of written, cancelled, and revised text."
$5,000

The Desert
Further Studies in Natural Appearances
By Jen Bervin
New York City: Granary Books, 2008. Edition of 40.

8.25 x 11"; 148 pages. Digitally printed by Jan Drojarski in Brooklyn on handmade Twinrocker abaca paper. Machine-sewn by the artist and a team of assistants in Seattle. Bound in hand-punched abaca covers by Susan Mills in New York. Signed and numbered by the artist.

Prospectus: "In The Desert, poet and visual artist Jen Bervin continues in the tradition of poetic composition by erasure—by sewing. Taking John Van Dyke's prose celebration of American wilderness The Desert (1901) as a point of departure, Bervin has sewn, row by row, across 130 pages of Van Dyke's prose, creating a poem that forms its own elemental landscape and shares Van Dyke's poetic attention to visual phenomena. Thinking of the artist James Turrell, for whom the poem was first composed for a reading at Roden Crater, she writes: 'The great get on with the least possible and suggest everything by light.'

"Evoking Bervin's earlier work with the sonnets of William Shakespeare from which she culled her own minimal Nets, Bervin here uses atmospheric fields of pale blue zigzag stitching to construct a poem 'narrated by the air'—'so clear that one can see the breaks.' Ultimately, Bervin's poem is a reality that is sought, as many have wandered in deserts, in more abstracted landscapes—in the sharp physical, textual relief of sewing on Van Dyke's page, and in contemplation of deeper inward change, hallucinatory and bewildering.

"Each quietly monumental book has been machine-sewn 'readily as glaciers' with over five thousand yards of pale blue thread. The result is this beautiful artist's book."
(SOLD)