This little book contains fragments of poems and prose written by Emily Dickinson on pieces of envelopes and scraps of old-paper. Which is fine—there is enough, in the end, to justify the material's interest, even if I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more actual writing (a number of pages simply contain pictures of bits of envelope addressed to or by Dickinson).

In the 1850 national census, Dickinson listed her occupation as “keeping house”; the scraps might have kept her as she did so. perhaps I was reading them wrong, but I read them in the way I saw most logical and they did not make sense at all. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Now that the Internet has destabilized the conventions of the printed page—in which a poem is a block of language so many inches wide and so many inches long, with pure white space surrounding letters and phrases set at fixed intervals—it is harder than ever to defend the translation of Dickinson’s wild, dynamic graphic surfaces into such confines. The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household.

It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously; publication was, as she put it, as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. Dickinson’s dashes are ubiquitous in all but the earliest editions of her poems, but fewer editions reproduce her plus signs, which mark an unfinished or provisory line, later to be filled in.

The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I came across this beautiful little edition of Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, which I couldn't leave behind. La busta postale è quella che contiene la lettera, è una sorta di scrigno, qualcosa che avviluppa, contiene, include qualche altra cosa.

For too many years I’ve had an image of Emily as a perennial girl, never a woman, with genius of course but not emotions she showed in real life, only displaying them on the page; an image where she submissively sits behind her cross-barred bedroom window when she is not writing, imprisoned almost, perhaps by her father, occasionally looking out and ignoring the gawkers on the lawn below.

Não sou uma leitora de poesia, ou melhor, sou leitora de poemas escritos em Língua Portuguesa, brasileiros e portugueses, pelo que atrever-me em Emily Dickinson foi navegar por mares nunca de antes navegados.

Her own transformative power, often frightful even for her to contemplate, is their presiding subject: the “still—Volcano—Life” she describes as ever churning under her daily rounds. 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. The discovery of a new Dickinson treasure in the course of an attic cleanout or a basement purge is a perennial, if distant, possibility.