Envelope Poems

Product Information

I’d love to. I tell this story in my essay “Itineraries of Escape,” and, I have to warn you, it sounds like a fairy tale from the archives! While writing or thought is reportless, the manuscript is the material trace of that process and, I believe, of the joy that attends it.

From 1999-2012 I worked at The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest artist colony, but I've also done time at an arts magazine, a library, an art museum, and a raptor rehabilitation center. In May of 2012 I left MacDowell to pursue writing, speaking, curating, and creative projects full-time. But I do think she was writing poems with an awareness of their significance—and, in the case of the envelope poems, of their strangeness. A lot of questions swirled around these documents when I looked at them—and very few of them can be answered.These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark.

Agamben , Giorgio. The End of the Poem . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different elements of its composition keep a fine balance between the visible and the legible, including for instance a “Visual index” classifying the envelopes according to their shapes. Poised on the limit between the two modes, Marta Werner’s transcripts of the facsimile manuscripts suggest how delicate their interactions can be, particularly by giving prominent visibility to the creases, folds and lines dividing the surfaces of the envelopes.