TRANSCRIPT, 1:1:INFINITY, ISSUE 3

Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works 1997-2020 by Jen Bervin
DESCRIBed by melissa Johnson, December 2020

TRACK 1.

So, I’m walking down the street towards University Galleries to view Jen Bervin’s exhibition Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works 1997-2020. Even before I enter into the galleries I can see the piece River through the large curved windows installed on the back wall (the sequins and mirrors are winking at me). I can also see the paperwork piece, Pierced Light, hanging in the windows. And if I look down the block to the left a little bit, I can the silk banner from the installation of Silk Poems rippling in the window. I can only visually enter into those spaces from the street, though. To get to them, I need to go in through the lobby doors.

When I come into the galleries what I see is Bervin’s large wall installation, Concordance: No. University Galleries is large (it’s about 7500 square feet) and there are five gallery spaces with works in the show. This lobby space, a room just ahead of me and to the right, a large rectangular gallery to my left (that’s connected to the window gallery with Silk Poems I could see from the street), and then the large windowed gallery to the right where River and Pierced Light are.

Concordance: No is a really large wall installation with a typewritten concordance entry that Jen has made across the lower part. And above it, written in soft velvety graphite, are the words: “Dont you know that no is the wildest word we consign to language? You do, for you know all things.” Bervin made this piece after discovering that the word “no” had been left out of the published concordance to Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts and poems. I have to stand back to read Dickinson’s text that was hand-marked in graphite on the wall, but I have to walk up close to read all of the typewritten words in the concordance entry. The typewritten section starts at the left with a listing of words in Dickinson’s vocabulary that were omitted from the indexing. These include words like a, although, am, &, an, and, anothers, ant, are, art, and through the alphabet down to the last one - which (that’s w-h-i-c-h). And then to the left of this, the word ‘no,’ handwritten, with the number 395 above it, meaning that there are 395 instances of the word no that appears in Dickinson’s writing but were not documented in the concordance. To the right of this listing is the number 528 and below that starts Bervin’s concordance entry for the word no. There are one, two, three, four, five, six…. seven columns all together. And within each column, there are two columns. First, the phrase with the word no, and then the first line of the poem. And I’ll read a couple of these.

Where no breakers roar - on this wondrous sea.
Where no breakers roar - on this wondrous sea.
Will no one guide a little boat - adrift a little boat.
And he no consolation - I had a guinea golden.
Which walk no more the village street - there is a morn by men.
There is no more snow - to lose if one can find.
When there’s no one here - before the ice is in the
Amid no bells for bravos - when up a year this

I read through the first column (a small column down), and then there are six more columns that extend across the wall.  

TRACK 2.

From the position of concordance in the lobby I can look left and see Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere installation, but I’m going to go into the room off the lobby that holds the Emily Dickinson Composite Quilts and The Gorgeous Nothings.

There are three composite quilts hanging on the walls in this room (the room is square in shape) - one to my left, one in front of me, and one to my right. And on either side of the door are two flat cases - one holds the Dickinson Composites Edition, and the other holds The Gorgeous Nothings Edition. Next to the case with The Gorgeous Nothings trade book. It’s is on a bookstand attached to the wall. It’s open so people can page through it. The composite quilts are really big. They’re 6 by 8 feet, and they’re made with cotton and silk thread embroidered on an off-white cotton batting that’s been backed by unbleached muslin. They don’t really hang flat against the wall, but have waves in them, and they move slightly as I walk by. They’re hung and attached on the wall at the top left and right only.

I’m looking at the quilt on the left wall. Jen has machine-stitched horizontally across in blue thread, at about three inches between each stitching. These blue lines reference the lines on the paper that Emily Dickinson would have written on. And she’s stitched vertically in an off-white thread to reference the laid lines of the paper. These stitches are almost invisible because their color matches that of the batting. And because the batting is so very soft and a bit fuzzy the thread almost disappears into it. When I lift the quilt at the side to look at the back, the stitches are a lot more visible because of the smoothness of the muslin. I can see the blue horizontal stitching, but not the vertical stitching, and I realize that Jen has only stitched these lines on the batting. She’s hemmed the muslin on the sides with what looks like a whip stitch. And there’s a hem that’s about two inches wide. I look back to the front of the quilt and I’m struck by the fact that the blue horizontal lines that I thought were absolutely straight actually have these nice wavers to them, while the vertical lines are straighter. (This makes me think of Agnes Martin’s work.) There’s a line of stitching in light green that runs up the center of the quilt (these stitches are done by hand and they’re a lot longer; they might be about an inch each). This seems to reference the center fold of a piece of paper. And then there’s the stitching in a satiny, thick, and textured red thread for the variant marks that Dickinson used - the dashes and the plus signs - and Bervin has extracted these from one of the fascicle bundles that Dickinson created for her poems. So each quilt represents one fascicle bundle.

I’m moving over to the second quilt on the wall that’s directly in front of the door, and I realize that Jen has stitched the quilts quite differently. There’s no blue thread on this one, instead the vertical and horizontal lines are the same color - kind of off-white, an almost yellow thread. And here she’s stitched through both the cotton batting and the muslin with the vertical and the horizontal lines. This makes the lines stand out a lot more on the batting. She’s stitched the fascicle marks in red thread just like the first one I looked at, but she’s also stitched some horizontal lines in red, and I see other kinds of punctuation, maybe some question marks. And there’s text on this one that reads:

risk supplest lithest
stoutest place die  
thrust the she
could reach hold unfur-
nished [it’s hard to read] seraphic, gain
one  gets

 The third quilt is a little different again. It has the blue horizontal lines that are stitched across, and here again they’re stitched through the muslin on the back, and the off-white yellow lines that are stitched vertically, again seen on the back. But in this one there’s a piece of cotton batting that’s been attached somehow - I don’t know if it’s glued or it’s stitched on, and it doesn’t have any lines stitched on it. But it’s on top of the laid line paper, and then Jen has stitched more text on top of this in a gold colored thread. And it reads:

Much Billow hath the Sea
One Baltic they
Subtract thyself, in play
And not enough of me
is left - to put away
“Myself” meant thee -

Erase the Root - no tree
Thee - then - no me
the Heavens stripped
Eternity’s vast pocket, picked
wide.

I wonder what happened underneath the cotton batting that caused Jen to put this other piece of batting over it, or if, and this actually makes more sense to me, that at some point Dickinson covered over the paper on which she was writing with other paper when she wanted to alter something. I like that each of the three quilts has differences in terms of how they’re constructed. This third quilt has blue horizontal lines on it. It makes me think about how Emily Dickinson would have had different kinds of paper to write and work on, but also, as Bervin was creating these, that maybe she didn’t have everything worked out from the very beginning, but she was configuring and making different decisions as she made each of the quilts. There’s even a difference in how the cotton muslin on the back is attached and finished between the first, second, and third quilts. I’m calling them first, second, and third because of their arrangement on the walls, but that doesn’t reference the order in which she made them, I realize.

I’m looking at the Dickinson Composites Edition in one of the flat cases by the door. It’s an artist’s book housed in an archival box silkscreened with marks, and basically it’s kind of a mini-version of the larger composite quilts with documentation. That box is in the upper left hand corner, and then then there are two small quilt pieces (one at the top right, another at the lower right), and then a stack of six large color prints. The top print shows one of the composite quilts that’s in the exhibition. The smaller composite quilt pieces have the muslin backing and batting front, and they seem to be extracted fragments from the larger quilts rather than mini quilts that stand on their own. The archival box has a booklet inside of it that fits exactly in the box with a back cover page the size of the box, and the front cover is about two-thirds of the size, and when you open it up you see that there’s a pamphlet inside. It’s made of paper that has an incredibly heavy feeling to it. The pages aren’t bound, but they’re loose - they’re nested inside of each other. The booklet has a ribbon that’s been zig-zag stitched in the middle of the back cover with about 10 inches of ribbon at the top and at the bottom to help me to take out and then to place the pamphlet back into the archival box. I think about the zig-zag stitching knowing that Jen uses this a lot in her other pieces, and I really like the continuity here. The booklet has Jen’s essay called “The Dickinson Composites” in it, as well as some archival images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, a skein of red yarn, and images of the Dickinson Composite quilts. There’s also a list of the works at the back, notes, and then recommended reading, acknowledgements, and credits.

The case on the other side of the door holds The Gorgeous Nothings Edition.

The Gorgeous Nothings are the envelope poems that Dickinson wrote later in her life on fragments of envelopes. The text on the envelopes is written with the shape of the paper fragment, and this is a project that Jen Bervin did with Dickinson scholar, Marta Werner. But The Gorgeous Nothings Edition is inside the case and isn’t really accessible to viewers. People can see it, but they can’t touch the objects. There are four objects in the case: a sheet with a visual index to all of the different shapes of envelopes that Dickinson wrote on (and that’s at the bottom left), an archival box at the top right with a portfolio in it with the text “the gorgeous nothings” written across in a handwriting that’s probably Emily Dickinson’s, and there’s a cotton strip to help me pull the piece out. The cover is actually like an envelope fragment itself. At the top left there’s a print with a facsimile image of one of the envelope poems. There’s a small drawing of the poem at the lower right with the transcription of the text on the envelope poem (it’s a lot easier to read than Dickinson’s handwriting is). The trompe l’oeil of the digital image is so strong, that I actually believe that if I reach out to touch it I’ll feel the edge of an envelope, but it’s only smooth paper. This envelope poem is numbered 105, and it reads:

A great Hope / fell / You heard no / noise / crash / The Ruin was / within havoc damage /
Oh cunning / Wreck / That told no / Tale / And let no / Witness in // The mind was /
built for / mighty Freight / For dread / occasion planned / How often / foundering / at
Sea / Ostensibly, on / Land

 The last thing in the case, at the lower left, is a book that’s been placed on top of sage green colored paper. The book has a brown paper covering, that’s not in a standard shape, but is probably in the shape… some reference to the shapes of the envelopes. And then there’s a blue, very thin, kind of tracing paper, two sheets of it underneath… and then inside, when I open it up, there’s an essay by Marta Werner, “Itineraries of Escape: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems.” The title of the essay and Werner’s name has been typewritten, but when I turn the page I see text that has been printed in a font that reminds me of nineteenth-century books. This essay, it starts out, “1. The wheels of birds”, and I realize that that’s the text that’s on the cover of this small book. The book’s only about, oh maybe 7 inches by 9 inches? It’s not large. As I page through the book… actually I turn the first page, and I come upon a small facsimile of an envelope poem that’s been bound in, not tipped onto the page, but I can pick the facsimile up. The first one reads - “clogged only with music like” - is the largest text on that page. There’s a second segment of the essay called “Taxonomy of Paper Wings” and another “Gravity Fields.” As I page through it, I realize there are other small objects that are bound into the book that are Emily Dickinson’s writing, or an envelope addressed to Dickinson, and on the other side, the text of the poem she writes. There’s a Western Union telegraph that Dickinson has written on. And then at the very back, or not all the way to the back, a foldout page with facsimiles of envelope flap fragments. This is a beautiful book. When I hold it in my hands it makes a noise. (I hope you can hear that.) What I thought was just sage green colored paper is actually a folder. And on the folder is an image of an envelope penciled on it. And inside that is what looks like a book, but it’s actually a series of individual pages, letter-size pages. And this is a guide. It says guide on the front in typewritten letters, and then there are images of two straight pins, one smaller than the other. This is a visual index of the envelopes that Dickinson wrote on. There is an index of forms… index by address, envelopes addressed by Emily Dickinson, envelopes addressed by others, addressed by unidentified hands, the different variants, dividing lines, canceled and erased text, multi-directional text. And then an essay by Marta Werner called “Towards a Directory of Emily Dickinson’s Envelopes,” and a postscript by Jen Bervin. I start to think about the fact that, in the case, we find everything that’s also included in the trade book The Gorgeous Nothings, but it’s in an entirely different form and it feels very different. I’m paging through the larger book, and of course I’m going from front to back in a linear narrative form. … Getting to go through The Gorgeous Nothings Edition, with all of its parts, is kind of like being in an archive or manuscript library. I recognize I don’t have the actual envelope fragments in my hands, yet I’m still holding something really special.

I take the portfolio of The Gorgeous Nothings Edition out of the box. To do that I pull up on the cloth tape to lift it. I open it and I discover that in it are the facsimile pages of the envelope poems like the page that was to the left of the box. There’s a piece of what feels like wax paper over the top one that crinkles. I pick up the first image, first page, and I realize there’s imagery on both the front and the back. There’s the inside of the envelope with Dickinson’s poem, and then the outside of the envelope with the addressee. This one looks, says it’s addressed to “Miss Helen Hunt” or “Mrs. Helen Hunt.” There’s a piece of the blue… or, the bottom of the portfolio folder is a beautiful blue tissue paper, it looks like the blue of cyanotypes. The cover of the portfolio folder is shaped like an envelope, cut and glued and shaped like an envelope, with actually an almost triangular piece glued down on top of it and “the gorgeous nothings” is written across that.   

Track 3.

I’m walking out of the room where all of the Dickinson materials were and on my way to the large windowed gallery with River and Pierced Light. I come up to a vitrine with a new project by Jen Bervin, her Poems for Ruth Asawa. There are five pages of letter-size paper that overlap each other in the case. The top has an image of one of the famous photographs by Imogen Cunningham of Asawa working in her studio, lying on the floor and crocheting one of her beautiful wire sculptures. The other pages alternate; two have poems typewritten out in lines, and the other two have poems typewritten in cursive and in the shape of Asawa’s sculptures. I can read the text of the two poems that are typewritten, and I’ll read them aloud. The first one is:  

I realized
that if i
was going to make
these forms

 which interlock
& interweave
it can only be done
with a line  

because a line
can go anywhere.  

And then the second one:

at black mountain we went
from paper to paper to paper to paper

 to make paper do
what it hasn’t done yet

 when we are through
fold it and put it back

in the drawer
it’s paper again 

it’s the distance between
the effort and the effect 

and the closer it gets
that was what our job was

 to create a shape
that can only be done by that material 

another idea that will take years
to exhaust all its possibilities 

love to you and
“the rest of you” 

The text to the other two poems that are in the shape of Asawa sculptures is too difficult to read. In the case they’re overlapped by paper, but also the lines are so closely enjambed that it’s… it would be impossible to read.

Now I’m walking into the large room that has a huge curved window wall. I see Bervin’s piece River installed on the three other walls of the gallery. There’s a book, The Desert, in a vitrine. It’s not in the center of the room, but set off a bit to the left. On the far wall I see a green textile wall piece called Envelope Coverlet, and to the right of that, hanging in the windows, is Pierced Light, and to the right of that and along the windows is a flat case with five artist books.

I decide to look at The Desert first. It’s a poem that Bervin wrote based on a book of the same name by Jonathan C. Van Dyke that was published in 1901. We’ve taken the cover of the vitrine off so I can handle the book and it’s open to pages 72 and 73, with the headings “The Desert” and “The Silent River”. When I close the book to look at the cover, I can see the title of the book, “The Desert”, has been punched or punctured into the cover, with small holes. I wonder if she used a Japanese hole punch to make them? And I can see through the holes of the cover onto the next page, or the first page. The paper that Jen used to reprint Van Dyke’s book is a bleached abaca paper, and it has a kind of translucent quality (oh, you can’t really see through it), as well as a slight texture. The title page is a facsimile of Van Dyke’s 1901 publication but it’s adapted. So it reads: “The Desert: further studies of natural appearances.” And then underneath that to the right - “By John C. Van Dyke, author of ‘Nature For Its Own Sake,” “Art For Art’s Sake,” etc. etc. 1901”. And then to the left of that: “By Jen Bervin, author of “Nets,” etc. etc. (2008).” And next to the word “by” is a line of zig-zag stitching in light blue thread about an inch long. The book’s been published by Granary Books in NYC, so there’s a really nice meeting of 21st century with the second year of the 20th century. (I think this thread is the same as what I saw in the Dickinson Composites). When I turn the title page, I can see the zig-zag stitching on the other side, with loose threads at either end, and they move around the page. There’s no text on back of this page or any other page. Bervin has zig-zag stitched over most of the text of Van Dyke’s book, but she’s left certain words visible to create her own poem. The preface dedication page has three words visible; they read: “what a home.” For the “a” she’s stitched over the -nd of the word ‘and’. I’m interested in the poem Jen has written, but I’m just as interested in the materiality of the book, the texture of the zig-zag stitching that I can feel on the page. And I’m interested in the fact that on the backs of the pages you can see the zig-zag stitches that are so… that kind of march across the lines, in straight lines… but that she didn’t trim the blue threads, and so they kind of extend over the pages and sometimes up off the page. Sometimes, though, she’s stitched down the ends of them, so that even if the thread creates a loop off of the square or rectangle that the stitches create, it’s still attached down and can’t quite get away. On other pages, the ends are shorter and they jump off into the margins. I’m also fascinated by the fact that where the stitching ends you can see the double-backstitching, where the thread is stitched over itself, and is darker because it’s thicker. The paper that’s kind of translucent has a slight texture to it; it’s not really smooth, but it’s not rough either. The book is quite large. It’s 8-1/4 x 11 x 2 inches, and when it’s open it’s double that. It makes me think that Van Dyke’s book would have been much smaller and easier to hold. Bervin’s reproduced the marginal notes, or the little indices, that Van D had in his text, and I wonder if those are part of the poem that Bervin has written. As far as I can tell, that text is also in the body of Van Dyke’s text, but we can’t see it because it’s been stitched over. On pages 72 and 73 Bervin has left the text “half human and dissolution mouths come together all” - so, she’s left that text visible. At the very back of the book, under the flyleaf, is a colophon where Bervin writes about John Van Dyke. She writes: “John Van Dyke writes of the American deserts as necessary breathing spaces. My sewn poem is narrated by the air.” And then she goes on to talk about the book more. She writes: “All drafts of this book have been composed by sewing. The zig-zag stitching was inspired by Joshua Beckman’s There is an Ocean. The sewing here occupies a space of sewing, drawing, mirage and veil. I have sewn only seven chapters. Van Dyke’s book goes further.” Jen also writes about the support she received for the book, how it was printed, who printed it, and the fact that every page was machine sewn by the author and, she says, “a very dedicated team of seamstresses in Seattle.”

The Desert, the book, is nestled in one of the curves of Bervin’s piece “River,” and I’m looking now at River. It’s a wall installation: a 230 foot-long facsimile reproduction of the Mississippi River. It starts at the left hand wall of the gallery, goes along that wall to the back wall, and then two-thirds of the way along the right wall of the gallery. It’s made of silver foil, stamped cloth sequins stitched with metallic thread on silver mulberry paper, which is on top of mull (a kind of fabric), and Tyvek behind it. Bervin describes it as a geocentric model or a model of the Mississippi River from a geocentric point of view. So, we’re inside the Earth looking up at the riverbed, but here it’s not on the ceiling it’s on the wall. It’s been hand-stitched at a scale of one inch to one mile, and took twelve years to make. The wall text notes that Bervin points out that it took the same amount of time to sew each section of River that it would take to walk the real one. It starts out on the left wall high above me - well, me, I’m only 5’3” - with the delta south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. The metallic sequins are really shiny and the metallic thread creates a pattern on them. The sequins all overlap each other. The piece kind of sits out from the wall and I can see the shadows of each section on the wall. There are the sequins, but there are also mirrors, and so I can see myself reflected back. From the delta, the river emerges, snakelike, in a single strand or thread that squiggles or meanders its way across the wall. The sequins actually feel like chain mail. I’m walking along it looking up. I notice all of the little crisscrosses or crossovers of the river, of the meander across the central run of it. In the corner it starts to dip a little lower and then goes up higher, and then in the back of the center wall, it comes down to my level and then almost touches the floor. It looks like there are little islands in the middle of the river, that of course we don’t see, here in the piece they’re empty space. And then the piece moves up to the right corner of the wall. The sequins themselves are each individually smooth, but when they’re stitched down they create this really nice kind of snakeskin-like texture. If stretched out River is 230 feet long, but when it’s installed here it only takes up 100 feet of the wall space around the room, and is 20 feet high at its highest.

Where River ends, on the right hand wall, is the piece, Envelope Coverlet. Bervin made this in 1998 and so it’s one of the earliest works in the show. It’s made with cotton sheets, and she used machine-sewing and hand-sewing and number stamps on it. It’s 76-1/2 inches wide and 56 inches high. The wall text reads: “The coverlet quilt blocks in green reflect outlines and markings from correspondence sent by Hm Mirra to Jen Bervin in Bisbee, Arizona in the late 1990s. Bervin made this as a gift for Mirra.” It feels like cotton sheets that have been used a lot, and used smooth. Some of the sheets are a green and cream-white stripe, with the stripes anywhere from half an inch wide to a third of an inch wide. The other material is an olive green. It’s been pieced together like a quilt. The olive green areas of the fabric are in the shape of envelopes. Many are rectangles, but some are squares. And then machine-stitched in what looks like white, but might actually be a lavender violet thread, are the outlined shapes of the envelopes and then numbers stamped on them. There are six numbers, but they’re not zip codes. I don’t know what the numbers reference. Some of the envelopes have numbers stitched on them, not stamped. One has the number eleven. Others have shapes like circles, rectangles, and squares that are stitched, almost so it looks like the layout of a room. The lavender stitching feels really hard against the softness of the fabric. There’s the outline of a leaf that’s been stitched. And on another envelope, the number 1107. Maybe that’s an address. I’m trying to make sense of things when maybe that’s not necessary. After all, this is about correspondence between Bervin and Helen Mirra, and the piece is for Helen Mirra, and so the meaning of all of these might be quite private. There’s a pattern on some parts of the green and cream striped sheets with what look like Greek squared spirals. I know that’s not what they’re called, but I can’t remember the name of them right now.

To the right of Envelope Coverlet, hanging in the windows, is Bervin’s piece, Pierced Light (latitude 31.4482, longitude 109.9284). This piece also dates from 1998. Before I know anything about it I think of Korean bojagi, the textiles that are pieced together using felled seams so there is no front or back. But this piece is made of many pieces of paper. Some are sand-colored, others white, others off-white. They’re pieced together to make a rectangular whole, except there’s a central separation in the middle that makes it feel kind of like a book as well. Or a map that’s been folded. Bervin has made thousands and thousands of punctures, like pinpricks, once it was pieced together, to create a topographic map around the area of Bisbee, Arizona where she worked as a fire lookout in the 1990s. It’s a really beautiful piece. I love how I can see through the punctures to see the blue sky, the clouds, and the building outside the window. It’s situated directly above some vents, so it’s moving, kind of shivering or quivering in the air. At the lower right Jen has signed it with a B in punctured holes. The front of it is smooth, I can feel the stitching, she’s used a light green thread to stitch the paper together. It’s the same color thread as used in the Dickinson Composites. And on the back, it looks like the paper is all the same color. Has it been bleached out by the sun? I can feel the texture of the punctures here and see them entirely differently; see the different pieces of paper and how they’ve been pieced together more clearly on this side than on the front.

TRACK 4.

There’s a flat case in this large windowed gallery room, set against the windows with a series of books placed in it. At the top left is Jen’s book Nets. And right beside that is a small accordion book called Juniper Caesura, made in 1999. Then her artist book, Draft Notation. To the right of that, The Silver Book, and then in the very front center, a book called A Non-Breaking Space. And then to the left of that, another book called, Under What is Not Under. All these books date beginning in 1997 and go through to 2014.

Nets is a small trade book, made according to the process called “erasure poetry” (a term that Bervin doesn’t like because the idea of it erases the voices of other writers, in this case William Shakespeare and his sonnets). It’s placed next to two copies of Juniper Caesura. Juniper Caesura is a really small hexagonal-shaped accordion book. It’s only about 2 inches high by 2 inches wide. It has a snap closure, one on each side, which I love! It makes me think of a piece by Hannah Höch where she put snaps, hooks, and eyes around a frame. When I open up Juniper Caesura I can read the text, but it’s hard because it’s been enjambed across the fold of each hexagonal page as it opens out. I’ll try reading it anyways. “Juniper diatonic tone pollen hummer idean sol-i-tar…. Solitary - comb sting of light enter sound one cell concertina gallop juniper pelo…. Juniper tupelo sage and mesquite gather every wild note with-in and without.”

Under What Is Not Under is a small square olive green book. It’s bound with fabric, or the cover is made of fabric, and the title is typewritten across in black. It’s a little hard to read. You close the book with two pieces of brown fabric tape, and the cover flap is in the shape of a triangle. The title page is made with a translucent paper, and the title is typewritten there, too, this time in blue ink. I turn the page and see a sepia-toned photograph of a tent on a wooden platform. The tent flaps are open and I can see boxes and other objects inside. The photo’s been sewn onto the page in that same light green thread again that was used in Pierced Light and The Dickinson Composites. I turn the page and on the back of the page with the photograph I see a green square of stitching. And then the text of the poem starts. The text was typewritten on other pieces of paper, cut out and adhered to each page. I’ll read the book, or I’ll read the poem:

A sailor drops anchor // a pitch to the tune of the horizon // prays not for wind. // IS home. // canvas elbows the sashes. // carts an entablature of sky. // to the tune. to the turn of the earth. // beneath the floorboards, // green, hungry in the hold. fingers. // grow pale, wide-eyed, // openmouthed to crumb and trickle. // shadows of plants stake their ground. // earth ironed. flat. // as far as the eye can see. // two inches takes this. // a tent took tiro. // the irregular migrant surveys what needs are // too much, too many, too little to be // under what stands // the sky // for songs // heavy bellows strains of whistle // poems with toes, bird’s eyes and air roots. // breathing songs. gusty songs. // con semplicita. con spirito. // hums, pours, // scratches // under is thin under // and rain looses the least tent. // ink, singing long // hush, // ahush teary hum. // hold time. hold time under // till under what is // is // very still, still // a sailor // a singing // a tent.

 A Non-Breaking Space is an artist book that is square in shape. Bervin used a couple of different kinds of paper for it: a tannish-yellow onion skin paper, blue carbon paper, and white bond paper. She’s also painted with white-out fluid, or opaquing fluid, on the paper, and where she’s done that the texture… there’s a raised texture. She’s typewritten with a cursive typewriter on the onion skin pages and on other pieces of paper that have then been cut out and glued down onto the pages. The book is incredibly fragile, and it makes a noise as I turn the pages… it crinkles. Some of the pages are incredibly thin, I can see the text on the next page through them. Some of the pages are shaped like clouds. The clouds are made by painting the opaquing fluid on the onion skin paper, and sometimes the cloud pages are layered on top of each other. Some of the clouds have holes in them so you can see through to the next page, or see around the shapes of them. She’s drawn in pencil or pen onto the top of a cloud so it looks like a map. The text seems to be comprised of lots of little fragments of text, that when put together don’t make sense, or they’re not in a kind of continuous narrative. But amongst themselves create a kind of poetry or series of small poems, small cloud poems. The book is 56 pages entirely, so I won’t read it all, but I’ll read a few pages:

 enter the sleeping day by pull of the leash. New York clouds everything // Return to the dream a young boy at the crown of my head inhaling the smell of freshly washed hair … motherhood changes you, she said, I’d kill anything now // Perfectly maintained yet uninhabitable // unburdened, plainer two spoons. This much clarity is false.

Draft Notation is located just above A Non-Breaking Space and it’s an artist book made of many parts, all in its own box that’s been covered with cloth. The box is open in the case, and on one side there are small booklets, each made of an olive green handmade paper with a deckle edge that’s really rough. And inside the pages are small little typewritten diagrams based on Anni Albers’ pre-weaving diagrams that she made at the Bauhaus and then at Black Mountain College. Sometimes there are two to a page, but sometimes there’s just one. There are 1, 2, 3, 4 of these small books. Also in the box is a glassine envelope, with a series of larger, about 5x8 loose pages. There’s typing on these pages as well, both text and typewritten diagrams. But there are more diagrams to one page than the small contained diagrams found in the booklets. It seems like Bervin was experimenting on each of these pages as she was typing, rather than planning them out carefully, maybe seeing what a typewriter could do. Sometimes there’s white-out, sometimes there are editorial marks on the pages. This is book VI, I see. The page that’s open, reads at the top: “Silverettes”. And then there are around 25 typed shapes, all over the page, but in the middle is text. There are quotes in the text from Susan Howe and CB (who I know is Charles Bernstein). I’ll read it. Susan Howe says:

I was writing landscapes when I first moved out to Connecticut. I was trying to make landscapes with words.

CB: What does the blank space on a page mean for you?

SH: Freedom. Ah, I suppose ultimately freedom. The possibility of, anything. Anything happening. And every mark on that paper is an interruption, into some is, an insertion into a kind of insertion of peace I would think.

At the very bottom, there’s a small wax paper envelope with another book, book five, in it. Draft Notation. It’s red and it’s comprised of one small red square of paper that’s hard. It’s mat board with a typing diagram on it, made of many i’s typed across horizontal lines. There’s also a process note that Bervin wrote in May 2014 and then a description, a colophon of Draft Notation. These are on single… each on a page of letter paper, letter-size paper, and placed in the bottom of the book.

The sixth book in the case is The Silver Book… and it is a silver book. It’s covered in silver mulberry paper, the same paper that Bervin used in making River. It’s shiny, it’s textured… It’s absolutely gorgeous. The title of The Silver Book is typed across the cover in cursive typing. And this is a typewritten poem, typed in a cursive font, made with text selected from other people’s writing, along with Bervin’s own writing. You don’t know which is which. The poem feels kind of like a diary to me, but also a letter, or a diaristic letter to someone, because it’s addressed to you. And I’m going to read the poem to you.

date the paper - it’s your early work -
date the spaces - it’s late -
write - be late with you - // 

write to get lost in the day - get
the time from friends - make them a
memorable meal and forget what you made
- write - we are tasting new peaches
- all the time - write you waste
nothing - write nothing is wasted on
you - // 

write the time of the animals - the space
of the animals - write the dog who
stands on your foot and leans in - write
how you lean in - when you love -
write the gentleness there - // 

write what you said to me - how far
you went away from yourself - when you
stopped - noticing - write you lost
your way for a reason - write how -
you come back - how your body was not
made to do this - with you in it -
write stay in it - a little longer -
write what died for this space - and
only what will live in it - // 

tell me where you’ve been necessary -
the mercury in the snow - the river
in light - write you flow - humanly - // 

write the precise points that touch
the rivers of energy in the body -
enter them - and tell me - if they are
still wet - tell me - where they’ve been
-- tell me - who touched you all winter -
tell me who - you’ll remember - in
spring - //

 write where you were chosen - when you
were chosen - write - what calmness
was chosen in you -- write it on your
hand - write - you are not too old to
write on your hand - write - there’s
still space there - and you have been
in it - // 

how you unsettle me - how you go
infinite - how you come back - // 

write how our nature’s getting a lot
done - how the air gets fresh all over
us - write what tender leaves are back
- how they tassle and sway - write you
are spring - write - you - are
impossible - //

 write how you slouch over flowers and
mend things - write - you can’t
remember what you planted - but that
you’re certain some of them are
volunteers - write today - even the
garbage smells good - write it’s
spring - New York - and you’re not
done with me yet - // 

write - how you spill everything today -
feel listless and berate yourself -
write - leave yourself alone - write
you are the laziest girl in town - be
that girl - once in awhile - write
it was once plants and horses here -
write what you awoke to - the feeling
inside the thing you made - how you were
happy there - write - be there // 

write the day - you were here -
write the day you were most yourself
- write - i can thank you for that -
write you went the beautiful way -
you made time - you knew how to get
things done and it touched everyone
here at least once - // 

write how your friend’s yard - contains
a tulip tree - that looks like a
voluptuous girl falling out of a pink
dress - write she said that - and it
pleased you - write how easy it is -
to do that - write how you love your
friends - and what they think -
to say - write that’s you in the corner
pale green and fragrant - write your
friend said that - about a girl named
melanie - write how he included you -
how you are - in the world - // 

write the dog - pausing to shake -
the girl leaning in to smell that page
- the library - the river in light -
what you’re choosing - the view from
the window - every window - you are
choosing - now // 

write the body of the house shines
around the house - and you my friend -
were beyond -
you were ballast -
you were vast unto others - //

 Track 5.

Now I’m walking into the room with the installation, Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere. This piece is a collaboration between Bervin and her wife/filmmaker, Charlotte Lagarde. Before I even enter into the gallery space, though, I see a video of the poem being stitched on a freestanding wall, and I can see that this wall creates a second square room behind it. At the left I see the two facsimiles of the embroidered poem that Bervin and Lagarde commissioned from an embroiderer working in Suzhou, China, which is just outside of Shanghai. The poems have been embroidered in red, blue, yellow-gold, and silver-white on translucent silk. One of the embroideries has a character at the center, while the center is empty in the other facsimile. I remember Bervin and Lagarde saying that this Chinese character means mind/heart. The one with the character visualizes that, but the one with no character still references that. We’re still supposed to feel or embody mind/heart, because that’s where we’re placed in the poem. They’re absolutely beautiful. They’re square, they’re larger than 2 feet by 2 feet. The silk looks like frosted glass. I like that I can watch the video and look to the embroidered poems and see what sections are being stitched. The video is in real time. I don’t think there’s any sound to it, but I can’t be sure because I hear the sound from the videos beyond the wall being played. The camera for this video is positioned below the fabric on the embroidery frame and very close to the woman’s hand as she stitches. And I can see her other hand with her fingers, above it. She pushes the needle and thread down into the fabric from above very quickly. And then there’s this really nice, kind of staccato rhythmic motion as she brings the needle back up. She can’t see what she’s doing from below, so she has to tap, tap, tap the needle up into the fabric so she can watch for it to come up in the position she wants. It’s really lovely, it’s a kind of dance. Push down, go up, sometimes three taps, sometimes four, sometimes five. Maybe I do hear somebody speaking on this video, it’s hard to tell. The camera is so close to her hand, and maybe two or three inches away from the fabric. I can see the characters that have been stitched, as well as those that haven’t yet, but can see that they’ve been painted on to the surface of the fabric.

I’m walking around the freestanding wall into the room with the four screens. There are video projectors positioned above each screen. A woman speaks on one of the screens: Kate Yu, an art researcher; she’s talking about the poems. The video is tinted blue. I’ve come in in the middle of her speaking. I wonder where I am in the 28-minute sequence? The woman is speaking in Chinese and the English translation appears on the screen with her. The screen goes dark and then the screen to the left lights up and I see Qiaomei Tang, a literary scholar, talking about the poem and showing us an earlier version of it. She speaks in English and the Chinese translation appears on the screen next to her. When she’s done talking the next screen on the left comes on and another woman speaks. When she’s done talking, the screen on the left with another woman comes on, and so I find myself rotating in a circle, looking at each of the four screens as a different woman speaks. I know that there are eight different women who speak, but they don’t each appear on the same screen consistently. The room is really dark, and each of the screens is the only illumination in the room. There’s a curtain over the door at the back of the room that leads to the window gallery where the Silk Poems project is installed, and I can see a little light coming from under and around that. I’m learning from each woman a different aspect of Su Hui, her poem, its history, and how that history has been constructed over time. Each woman speaks from her own discipline. They don’t contradict each other, but what they’re each talking about isn’t necessarily the same narrative. My movement is determined by what’s happening on the screen. As an English speaker, I have to look at the screen to understand what’s being said. I’m dependent on the translation, except for the two women who speak English. But regardless, my position, the length of time I stand in one position, is determined by how long that woman speaks. And I’m thinking about a connection there between the movements of the planets and how long they stay in one area or quadrant or region of a celestial map, because that’s what the poem is structured around. Some women speak for longer than others, which makes me recognize that there’s not… it’s not consistently spaced. There’s not a single length, so that my movement is sometimes for a shorter duration, and at other times for a longer duration, just like the length of the planets in different areas or quadrants.

I’m walking out from Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere into Bervin’s Silk Poems project, which is installed in the smaller windowed gallery space. It was so dark in the other room, and now I’m in the bright daylight. The walls are painted a royal purple-blue. The silk banner I saw before I entered into the galleries, is hanging in the window; it’s still rippling (there’s an air vent somewhere near it that’s making it move). There’s a pattern on the banner that represents the filament pattern a silkworm makes when it spins its cocoon; it’s also the pattern of a beta sheet structure of silk proteins. The poem, Silk Poems, is printed on the banner. To the left of the banner is a window drawing Bervin made when she and Lagarde visited in October; the drawing is called Silk Line Performance. Bervin drew the same filament pattern that appears on the banner; and in fact, this pattern is present in many of the other works that are part of the whole project. On the far wall, to the left of the windows, the Silk Poems video that Charlotte Lagarde made to document Bervin’s research for the project is playing. On the wall to the left of this is a pedestal with a white microscope on it, and to the left of the microscope is a long shelf; on it is 7S, an artist book project. The microscope isn’t turned on because of Covid-19, but I can see a small circular film on the plate with the silkworm’s pattern on it. The pattern in all of the pieces in this project contains the poem titled Silk Poems. I can’t read it on the film, but I can see it in the video, on the banner, and in the book, which is also here in the room for me to read. It’s a part of 7S, and is on the shelf to the left of the microscope, along with three small vials. One holds a scroll printed on silk; there’s a skein of silk thread in the second vial; and liquid silk fibroin in the third. There’s also a jar that contains a silkworm’s cocoon. The jar and three vials are all protected by a vitrine. It feels like an art gallery space in here, but also a bit like a science lab. I pick up the book Silk Poems and open randomly it to a page, where I read:

we slip our skin / It is a function of poetry / to locate / those zones / inside us / that would be / free / and declare / them so / writes CD Wright / Are you surprised / I quote a poet / dont be / we invented language / In divinations / as early as / the Shang Dynasty / in 1050BC / youll find / oracle script / characters / written / on tortoise / shells for / silk fabrics and / mulberry trees