{"id":520704,"date":"2010-04-08T15:41:11","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T19:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=42867"},"modified":"2010-04-08T15:41:11","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T19:41:11","slug":"emily-as-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/520704","title":{"rendered":"Emily as art"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 15, 1862, poet Emily Dickinson<\/a> began corresponding with critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Their fervent and revealing letters, written over 23 years, are now considered a landmark of American literature.<\/p>\n

Reclusive and shy, Dickinson was rarely published in her own lifetime (she died in 1886), and seldom left her family home in Amherst, Mass. But she is world-famous today for an oblique, vivid style whose interiority and unconventional punctuation anticipated the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot<\/a>, Ezra Pound<\/a>, Mina Loy<\/a>, Marianne Moore<\/a>, and others.<\/p>\n

Dickinson, 31 years old when she began writing to Higginson, included four poems with her first letter. It began with a now-famous question: \u201cAre you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?\u201d<\/p>\n

At Harvard, her verse is alive all over again, courtesy of \u201cFugitive Sparrows,\u201d an exhibit of Dickinson poems rendered as visual art. It is on display in the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library<\/a> through May 2.<\/p>\n

The creator of the installation is Adams House art tutor Zachary Sifuentes<\/a> \u201997-\u201999. \u201cHer lines behave like large flocks of sparrows,\u201d he wrote in one exhibit card, \u201cfugitive from apprehension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, Sifuentes, who is also a preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard<\/a>, was reading an index of first lines, which is the only way to access Dickinson\u2019s untitled works. He discovered that the first lines, read together, \u201ccreate new poems by themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

With many of her poems, added Sifuentes, \u201cYou can read the lines out of order, and they still make sense \u2014 to the extent Dickinson makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

He attended an opening reception for the installation on Tuesday (April 6). With him were about 30 other people, old and young. Unlike many other forms of art, said Poetry Room curator Christina Davis, \u201cPoetry is something you can age into.\u201d<\/p>\n

In brief opening remarks, Davis \u2014 a poet herself \u2014 said the exhibit had inspired her to reread Dickinson\u2019s letters. She quoted the poet\u2019s famous opening question to Higginson, then reminded listeners of Dickinson\u2019s not-so-famous following line, which itself anticipates a modernist literary sentiment: \u201cThe mind is so near itself \u2014 it cannot see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dickinson employed dashes abundantly in her poems, said Sifuentes. This graphical oddity of expression was like the poet \u201cskipping a stone across a pond,\u201d he said, not \u201cdelving into a subject so much as grazing it from different angles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sifuentes used different angles of his own \u2014 lenses, telescopes, a large-scale drawing, audio, a computer \u2014 to renew a reader\u2019s experience of Dickinson\u2019s poems.<\/p>\n

Three poem fragments, on placards under trees outside, are only seen through telescopes set up in the Poetry Room, whose windows overlook green space outside Houghton Library. \u201cWe noticed smallest things,\u201d one fragment reads, peered at from afar. \u201cThings overlooked before \/ By this great light upon our Minds \u2026 .\u201d<\/p>\n

Two other poems, set in miniature type, can only be read through two vintage lenses in a display case. Included is a favorite of Sifuentes, one that \u201cstill terrifies me,\u201d he said. \u201cDrowning is not so pitiful,\u201d it begins, \u201cAs the attempt to rise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Dickinson poem, the familiar \u201cThis is my letter to the World \/ That never wrote to Me,\u201d was set in type by Sifuentes, who teaches letterpress classes at Bow & Arrow Press in Adams House. The result is a \u201cmetal book,\u201d he said, that can only be read in an accompanying mirror.<\/p>\n

The old lenses and spyglasses on display in the exhibit are on loan from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University<\/a>. Sara Schechner \u201979, A.M. \u201982, Ph.D. \u201988, the collection\u2019s David P. Wheatland Curator, was on hand for the opening, ready to give a stand-up lesson on the old instruments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like my collaborations with other parts of Harvard,\u201d she said of the first-time project on Dickinson. \u201cIt was fun to mix with poetry here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schechner, a historian of science, said the vintage lenses were variously meant to gather in, magnify, and project light. Pointing to one, she said, \u201cit takes a lot of light and puts it in a small place,\u201d acknowledging the apt analog to a great poem.<\/p>\n

One of the spyglasses belonged to the late Frances W. Wright, who taught astronomy and celestial navigation at Harvard from 1928 to 1971. Dickinson, a close observer who wrote 200 poems that touch on science, probably would have liked the idea of lenses and scopes being turned on her elusive work \u2014 so little spied in her own time.<\/p>\n

But unlike science, Dickinson\u2019s poems hold back from an attempt at full revelation. Schechner observed that, as with telescopes so it is with poems: \u201cOne can get close \u2014 but only so close.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scholars say her poems use science to amplify the wonder of nature, not to define its reductive essence. To Dickinson, that essence remained ineffable. \u201cThis World,\u201d she wrote in one poem, \u201cis not Conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The technical intercessions in \u201cFugitive Sparrows\u201d are intended to interrupt \u201cour normal ways of approaching and reading a poem,\u201d said Sifuentes. The telescopes bring \u201cyou close, but you still have to focus and work and strive to actually read.\u201d<\/p>\n

He focused and worked and strove on his own to complete the exhibit\u2019s most ambitious rendering of Dickinson into visual art. It\u2019s a 90-inch by 45-inch drawing made entirely from her 1,775 poems \u2014 all 160,000 words and 450,000 letters, with each line handwritten separate and apart.<\/p>\n

The project, said Sifuentes, cost him four months of effort \u2014 three or four hours a day, seven days of every week.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became an impressionistic process,\u201d he said, and one energetic enough to use up 73 pigment pens. The completed work resembles \u2014 well \u2014 a flock of sparrows. The result, Sifuentes wrote on an exhibit card, has a way of \u201cturning sight into a metaphor for reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lines in the drawing \u201cbehave the way her poetry does,\u201d he also wrote of Dickinson, \u201ctangential, acoustic, dwelling in a long and layered conversation. They take the form of hubbub on the eye.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starting April 14, the Dickinson exhibit will get a kind of second life, with lines from her poems printed on the colorful plastic chairs that are scattered over Harvard Yard in good weather as part of the University\u2019s \u201ccommon spaces\u201d initiative.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can shuffle her lines around, and still create a poem,\u201d said Sifuentes, who plans to record the rearranged chairs\u2019 found poems every day.<\/p>\n

In the preface to an 1890 volume of Dickinson\u2019s work, published posthumously, Higginson wrote that \u201cshe habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFugitive Sparrows,\u201d funded with support from Lori Gross, associate provost for arts and culture, may help to reveal what Dickinson has concealed, and may make the shy poet a few more friends. Besides, the secret of Dickinson\u2019s genius is well out, impossible to conceal again.<\/p>\n

Making that point, Davis quoted another of the poet\u2019s incisive lines: \u201cNo bird resumes its egg.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Poetry Room is open during Lamont Library hours, but is only staffed Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 15, 1862, poet Emily Dickinson began corresponding with critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Their fervent and revealing letters, written over 23 years, are now considered a landmark of American literature. Reclusive and shy, Dickinson was rarely published in her own lifetime (she died in 1886), and seldom left her family home in Amherst, Mass. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-520704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}