Jen Bervin and her Silk Poems: The Hellerstein Lecture

Professor Cheryl Clark Introduces Poet Jen Bervin:

I first encountered Jen Bervin’s work in the book Nets, published in 2004, an erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets with the original poems faintly visible in gray and her selected phrases, caught there, appearing in black. In this weave of Shakespeare’s words, her selections, as if verbal embroidery, render new poems and readings, new utterances permeating with silence. In Nets, “Sonnet 20: “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted” becomes “master-mistress of my / shifting/ by/ adding nothing / prick’d thee out for pleasure.” In the latter, the poet reminds us of her taking pleasure in selecting these words. Risky and invigorating, the book reorients the mind: we may see Shakespeare’s sonnets as the substrate and her poem as an organism that obtains its nourishment from it.

At the end of Nets, Jen Bervin says, “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” It is no surprise then to find that she has also turned to Emily Dickinson, a poet of such precise and staggering language. Bervin, working with Dickinson scholar Marta Werner, in the book The Gorgeous Nothings, focuses on Dickinson’s poems written on envelopes, appearing as full-color facsimiles. They also dutifully transcribed each handwritten mark, and rendered thumbnail sketches of the multiple shapes that each envelope took because of the many ways Dickinson would take it apart. Bervin’s visual artistry makes her particularly attentive to all those shapes and textures in the manuscripts—the literary thus including its materiality.

Silk Poems appears not only in a petite, silky-paged book, but also in a biosensor of liquid silk implantable in the human body. Bervin is interested in the translated, transported, and transformed. In the book, a silk worm speaks to the one who is implanted with this biosensor that is monitoring essential life functions.

To read Silk Poems is to encounter the amplitude of the small and the brief; this insect that lives only six to eight weeks has a whole lot to say: of its body and its act of making, and of its habitat, and of the 5,000 year-old history of sericulture or silk breeding—and not to mention does so in a voice with so much personality and drama, erudite one moment, bawdy the next, sometimes with a swagger any mating ritual may enlist. Think even of the silkworm as rapper when it says, “IEMERGE / INMYFULLGLORY / SILKWORM / OFTHEYEAR.”  You will soon get to see the look of these letters on the page, DNA strand-like, a form slowing us down, setting down grooves in the mind. It is an elastic poem with the coalescing forces of the factual and the imaginative—and the accuracy that is demanded for both ways of knowing.

The poems are slender and brief on the page. The poet Marvin Bell says, and I quote, the “short poem need not be small”—and I add that it is a poem so compact that it must expand in the solvent of the mind or, in the case of this poem, in the landscape of the body. In the short poem, silence is charged, the “drama of the poem” the Objectivist poet George Oppen says. Maybe this silence is needed because the “poem listens to itself as it goes,” one more saying from Marvin Bell.

Literature  and art set flares to guide us in knowing what it is like to be alive in this moment, and what it is to imagine a future and to have a memory. Thank you, Jen Bervin (and your erudite and playful silkworm) for being so alive to us, for asking such expansive questions, and for all your inquiries that can give us new paths for wonder.