MM #2: fascicles
mabel takes a stroll down emily lane
First, a note from Mabel: Thank you SO much for subscribing to our newsletter. We are literally so excited about this. One of our greatest aspirations for Mandylion has been to share our little musings/inquiries/and research fancies, and to create a space where other people can share their ideas too. Once a month, we’re going to send out this little Substack with a major musing. I’m up first, talking about one of the first people to make me love the nineteenth century: Emily Dickinson. Enjoy and please let us know what you think!
My most loyal followers and friends will recall that for a brief moment in college my Instagram handle was @fascicle. Nowadays some guy named William Boling has the pleasure and privilege of owning that username, and I can’t help but wonder if William was brought to the handle the same way I was: through taking a graduate seminar at Columbia University with Branka Arsić. On the first day of “Whitman and Dickinson,” Professor Arsić revealed that she had originally wanted to teach a class just about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), but thought no one would sign up unless she paired Massachusetts’s most elusive nineteenth-century female poet with some gay dude from Brooklyn. After a few weeks in Whitman world, we dedicated the rest of the semester to caressing the small, powerful poems of Dickinson. Though I had a major Dickinson phase in high school (thanks to the best teachers ever, shout out to them), it wasn’t until college that I appreciated the material and archival context of her poetry.
Arsić compelled me and my fellow students to see Dickinson’s poems as more than lines typeset neatly on the page. Though we all lugged around the same hefty collection of her poems, we were ordered to reference the Emily Dickinson Archive when doing our reading so that we could look at the site’s high-resolution images of the original manuscript context. The archive unveils what a century of bad and bowderlized editing has obscured: that the physical manifestations of Dickinson’s poems were just as important as the words themselves.
Some 1,800 Dickinson poems survive, primarily in the form of forty “fascicles,” or little books that she made herself from stacks of folded paper crudely bound with string. The other poems were often epistolary in nature, sent in letters to her small circle of correspondents, or written on unbound sheets, scraps, and fragments of paper. An extraordinary trove of fifty-two poems was scrawled in criss-crossing, sideways lines on disassembled envelopes. In 2016, New Directions published The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, a coffee table book that documents all of the envelope poems (my copy was a gift from my beloved brother, Fag Tips). Flipping through this gorgeous something of a book is like rifling through someone’s diary, if that diary was written in faint pencil on tiny, ephemeral scraps of paper that seem liable to disintegrate at any moment. It is an almost holy, and highly aesthetic, experience. Each envelope is different and many are not whole, have rounded corners and torn bits, or look like misshapen stars.
“In this short life,” written on the triangular flap of a small envelope that is dotted with brown glue residue, is a particularly resonant example.
In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much -- how little -- is
Within our power
The poem’s four lines pack a powerful metaphysical punch when seen in their original context. The word “power” dangles precariously at the small end of the envelope flap. Life’s bounty, and its emptiness, roars out from the tiny page. This painful contradiction is emphasized by Dickinson’s insertion of the word “merely” in tiny script beneath the word “only.” Alternate word choices proliferate in the original Dickinson manuscripts. Many of her poems allow one to play a game of “choose your own adventure,” as scholar Sharon Cameron’s aptly titled Choosing Not Choosing, the first book-length study of Dickinson’s original manuscripts, reveals.
Dickinson’s envelope poems anticipate the “Mail Art” movement of the mid-twentieth century. Kicked off by artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995), Mail Art was informally practiced by Fluxus artists beginning in the late 1950s. Correspondents exchanged artfully prepared letters, postcards, and other epistolary objects. These often contained directions about things to do or people to correspond with. In the 1980s, Johnson declared that “Mail Art is not square, a rectangle, or a photo, or a book, or a slide. It is a river.” I see a place for Dickinson in the flowing, transhistorical currents of mail art. Her envelope poems, many of which may have never left her bedroom in her family’s Amherst homestead, evoke the power of words for words’ sake, of letters drafted and never sent, of poems read in their original handwritten scrawl. As always, I am reminded of my favorite poem of hers, “The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea –”. In this staggering work of heartbreaking genius, Dickinson is water, she is the Sea, she is the ocean. She is fighting for independence while being bound to immutable chemical properties. She is a woman drowning, in love, feeling alone, small, immeasurable, and deeper than the ocean itself (Johnson famously died in 1995 after he was seen diving from a bridge in Sag Harbor and backstroking out to sea). Read this poem immediately!
Now, back to the fascicles. Dickinson only published ten poems in her lifetime, and the fascicles, written and bound in a highly productive period stretching from 1858 to 1865, were unknown until after her death. The poems that she did publish while alive were heavily edited. Meanings were altered, alternate words were excised, conventional punctuation and capitalization were enforced, and poems were given formal titles. This editorial legacy continued after Dickinson died in 1886 and her family discovered hundreds of poems in a locked chest in her room. For decades, her poems were published in bits and pieces by different people (and warring sides of the family), out of original order and “cleaned up.” It was not until the 1950s that Thomas Johnson published the first comprehensive variorum that arranged Dickinson’s poems in rough chronological order and preserved her unique approach to grammar, language, punctuation, and titling. R.W. Franklin followed up with editions in 1981 and 1998. Like Johnson before him, Franklin presented Dickinson’s poems in a chronological sequence, but there remains a debate about how best to understand the poet’s work. In 2016, Cristanne Miller published Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, a monumental, 864-page book that breaks up Dickinson’s oeuvre into five sections: the fascicles, unbound sheets, loose poems, poems transcribed by others, and poems not retained.
After Dickinson died and her vault was unlocked, her sister Lavinia became obsessed with seeing the poems published. She appealed to her brother Austin’s wife Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Emily’s close friend, correspondent, and alleged lover, for help. When Susan faltered in the effort, Lavinia turned to her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd. Todd, whose stormy affair with Austin rocked Amherst in the 1880s, had never met Emily, but made spirited, albeit misguided, efforts to publish her lover’s sister’s poetry.
Todd is inextricably tied to the history of the fascicles. There is no evidence of what Dickinson called her hand-sewn books, which were made up of pre-folded stationery paper and bound not in signatures, but in stacks. Dickinson poked two holes at the corners of the stacks and tied them with string. Todd gave the fascicles their name. She was also the last person to see them as Dickinson left them. Todd’s editorial choices led her to disassemble many of the booklets.
“Fascicle,” like “fascism” and “faggot,” derives from the Latin fascis, meaning “bundle.” In anatomy, fascicles are bundles of skeletal muscle fibers. In botany, fascicles are clusters of flowers or leaves, like pine needles. In publishing, fascicles are installments of multi-volume works. Though scholars are still debating the merits of Todd’s term, no one has quite been able to shake it. And back in 2015, the word certainly made an impression on me and incited an Instagram rebrand. I am not sure exactly what compelled me to name myself @fascicle. Maybe it’s a Mabel thing. Maybe it’s the symmetry of the letter “c.” But I do know that at some point, I started to worry that my handle implied that I was a “little fascist” and I donned a new online identity.
The shared etymology of Dickinson’s poetry booklets and the right-wing political movement of the twentieth century is intriguing, to say the least. Scholar Mary Loeffelholz, in a 1999 essay for the Harvard Library Bulletin, speculated that Dickinson, a dutiful student of Latin, might have liked Todd’s term. And it feels worth noting that Emily—who is so often portrayed as the wispy, ethereal shut-in of a very distant nineteenth century—could easily have lived to see the founding of the Fasces of Revolutionary Action in Italy in 1915. She would have been eighty-five years old. Though she was certainly a recluse, she did live in the world. Susan Howe’s landmark 1985 book, My Emily Dickinson, rejects the image of Dickinson as a navel-gazing, insular homebody, and plumbs one poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” for literary references. Might there be a connection between Dickinson’s hand-sewn poetry books and the bound bundle of wooden rods that right-wing Italian radicals took from the ancient Romans as the symbol of their violent movement for collective power? I don’t know.
But many years and Instagram handles later, I am still in love with the material universe of Dickinson’s poetry. The intersection of the poetic and the material is one of our North Stars here at Mandylion. For decades, scholars have been trying to write, study, and lecture away the damage inflicted by Todd and other imprudent editors upon Dickinson’s literary legacy. As enriching and erudite as each new edition of her work may be, it seems unlikely that we will ever truly be able to understand how Dickinson intended her poems to be read, or if she even wanted them to be read at all. Looking at photographs of her handwritten poems reminds me of all the different ways that people wrote and read in the nineteenth century. I can’t wait for us to uncover more such precious jewels, and I hope that we edit them with love and care—revealing more than we erase.
XOXO Mabel
Further Reading:
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems
Anyone wanna host a fascicle making party...
A fascinating and beautifully considered first newsletter, especially for those of us whose relationship to Emily was unfairly stunted at the high school level (moi)!!! The envelope poems are now a new obsession :) can’t wait to see what else Mandylion reveals.