Emily’s Fascicles • Cakes and Emily
Some years ago, I read about Emily Dickinson’s fascicles. Fascicles is a word used to describe the groups of poems she had sewn into booklets. I’d begun at that time grouping my work into sequences — poem sequences and photographs arranged into sequences. So it was exciting to think Dickinson might have sequenced her poems.
I wanted to read the poems as she grouped them in the fascicles, but in 1995 there was no such edition. I could only find a list of the poems in each fascicle. So I bought two paperbacks of the complete Emily and on summer vacation took them apart and made myself a set of fascicles. Cutting and pasting pieces of her poems day after day was a strange immersion. When they were complete I made a slip case for the 40 unbound booklets and put them aside until my head was once more free of the sound of her.
After a few months I began to read them, one at a time. Scholars had debated whether her arrangement of the poems into fascicles was intentional. I doubted that the carefully sewn booklets of poems were anything other than intentional. But I needed to see for myself.
That fall I slowly read the 40 fascicles. I experienced them as entirely intentional.
I had read Richard Sewell’s wonderful biography, The Life of Emily Dickinson, and had once visited her house in Amherst where I’d gotten a little book of her supposed recipes. While I was reading the fascicles I was also making some of her cakes. At the same time, I began to write letters to her about the baking and the reading.
Writing to her was an odd impulse but it allowed me to formulate ideas about her writing and its influence on my own writing. I wrote to her about process, about the work and the thought involved in making things. And about the need to try again and again.
Eventually the letters became the prose poem, “Cakes and Emily.”
