In March 2020, in “the earliest ending of winter” and the long beginning of the pandemic, I spent more time than usual at my desk reading and watching the world outside. The variorum of Dickinson’s poems lay open before me; beside it, H. L. Clark’s 1887 The Birds of Amherst & Hampshire County. In the middle distance between laptop screen and windowpane, poems and birds and questions kept crossing. How could I make a book of Dickinson’s birds—that is to say, her poems, that is to say, the birds of her world—addressed to readers of the Anthropocene that would not be a snare? How could a book of Dickinson’s birds “conjure an awareness of what accepted categories cannot contain, what familiar taxonomies cannot order, what one medium cannot express”? How could an archive not turn into an exhibit, with all its ties to the old cabinet of curiosities and, worse, the specimen case, but become instead a miscellany and a murmuration? Dickinson’s Birds: A Listening Machine arose from these unsettled questions. A digital-humanities work of the “third wave,” it is necessarily a hybrid, combining elements of the documentary archive, the scholarly edition, and the environmental installation. Set quietly beside not only archive but also within the Anthropocene itself, Dickinson’s Birds is perhaps best described as a fragile mode of inquiry allied to a brief moment in the twenty-first century and the unthinkable stakes associated with it. It seeks to stir intensified concern with the smallest, most vulnerable, and most ephemeral of things—poems and birds—in the belief that these things, too, have their infinity.

Bio:

Marta Werner is the Martin J. Svaglic Chair of Textual Studies at Loyola University Chicago and author /editor of works including Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, The Gorgeous Nothings (with Jen Bervin), and Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours. In recent years she has returned to the archives in search of documents that seem to be outliers in the regions of literature and science. Her current work explores the land-, sound-, and weatherscapes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.