A Life Two-Fold in Thee—Paper Cycling in the Fascicles

Shifting from state practice to poetic practice, Dorri Beam explores the systems of relation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, arguing that the material base of the fascicles becomes a condition for how it works; the poetry meets... [ view full abstract ]

Shifting from state practice to poetic practice, Dorri Beam explores the systems of relation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, arguing that the material base of the fascicles becomes a condition for how it works; the poetry meets a new substrate that materially conditions its expression. In her paper, she will show that the maker of the fascicles is less interested in what makes a “poem” per se, less focused on the identity or boundary of a poem, than in how poems and sheets of poems might exercise different capacities when brought into the entirely different media ecology of the fascicle. Recycling—to put or pass through a cycle again; to reuse in a cycle—permits, Beam explains, an important new understanding of Dickinson’s poetic practice, one attuned to imaginative reassemblage and the rearranged rhythms of queered time.