Thursday in Residence with Jen Bervin
+ Plus & non plus – in Emily Dickinson’s work

In her manuscript poems, Emily Dickinson’s experiments with the variants—the enigmatic + signs that direct readers to other possible words or phrases in her poetry manuscripts—surface and grow into a complex, nearly infinite system the poet uses throughout her writing life. Despite their ubiquitous presence in the manuscripts, the + variant marks and words integral to Dickinson’s poetics are omitted in print by editors who hold literary norms in higher regard than a writer’s authority to invent her terms.

Jen Bervin will present images from and discuss her work The Dickinson Composites, a series of thirty quilts in progress. The works map how Dickinson’s variant system begins and evolves in the poet’s fascicles. Bervin will discuss why and how variants matter in Dickinson’s process and inventive poetics, how they restructure reading, and further—how variants insert a space in language of possibility without closure.