Copy to Clipboard. Add italics as necessaryCite as: Toby Altman, ‘‘So Clear That One Can See the Breaks’: Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin’s The Desert’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 209–33 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.37050/​ci-30_09>

‘So Clear That One Can See the Breaks’Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin’s The DesertToby Altman

Abstract

This essay places Jen Bervin’s 2008 artist book The Desert in conversation with lyric theory. It argues that Bervin disrupts the lyric as it has developed since the nineteenth century, restoring its suppressed materiality and contesting the imbrication of the lyric in colonial practices of land use. By doing so, the essay argues, Bervin restores the social world of material production and communal labour on which the lyric depends.

Keywords: lyric theory; colonialism; materiality; Bervin, Jen; Van Dyke, John C.; Mill, John Stuart

Introduction

‘All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy’, John Stuart Mill proclaims: ‘It may be said that poetry, which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress, and upon the stage.’1 If it is not quite a mixed metaphor, it is a mixed message. Mill’s metaphor isolates the poem, dematerializes it. The poem becomes as evanescent as an actor’s voice as they step out into the footlights. Yet Mill also acknowledges that poems exist as material objects. In doing so, he restores the social world which his metaphor takes away. The solitary actor vanishes; the communal space of a noisy print shop takes his place. If there is a contradiction here, Mill seems untroubled by it. The materiality of the poem is sandwiched between two versions of the same metaphor: we begin with soliloquy and end ‘upon the stage’. The metaphorical solitude of poetic performance seems to disguise the material circumstances of poetic production and circulation. As Virginia Jackson writes,

the circulation of poetry ‘on hot-pressed paper’ is exactly what the generic conventions of the lyric cannot acknowledge — that is, the lyric can no more acknowledge its literal circumstance than can the actor, and is at the same time no less dependent than the actor on the generic recognition of the audience it must pretend is not there.2

The lyric relies on print, and the whole world of historical, political, and economic relations that print implies. But it cannot acknowledge its reliance on that world — otherwise it would cease to be lyric.

Describing the fate of what she calls, circumspectly, ‘Dickinson’s texts’, Jackson warns us, ‘we cannot go back to a moment before they became lyrics’.3 Instead, she suggests, ‘we must try to keep both their material and contingent as well as their abstract and transcendent aspects in view at the same time’.4 There is no way out of lyric reading — but we can work to recognize what the lyric represses. Jackson is addressing scholars, whose concern with the lyric is methodological. What might happen if a poet wrestled with the same question — if a poet tried to restore the material and social world to her own lyric discourse?

In this essay, I turn to Jen Bervin’s artist book The Desert, reading it as a response to the dematerialization of the lyric.5 Published in 2008 in an edition of forty copies, The Desert is a facsimile of the first seven chapters of John C. Van Dyke’s 1901 travelogue and aesthetic treatise The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances, printed on large sheets of abaca paper.6 Working with a team of Seattle seamstresses, Bervin sewed over the reprinted text with blue silk thread, leaving isolated patches of Van Dyke’s language unsewn (Figure 1).7

Figure 1. Jan Bervin, The
              Desert, taken from the back of pp. 54–55, and the front of pp. 56–57.
Figure 1. Jan Bervin, The Desert, taken from the back of pp. 54–55, and the front of pp. 56–57.

One might read the unsewn language as a poem by Jen Bervin. But Van Dyke’s original language remains legible, if veiled, under the thread. It interacts with the language that remains unsewn, creating unsteady composites of voice. The Desert is intrinsically dialogic. It refuses the solitude that, for Mill, defines the poetic. Further, the labour of the seamstresses is evident and often meaningful — their mistakes and corrections add to the text’s meaning. They are labourers, charged with producing the text, but they are also its authors and first readers. The Desert not only foregrounds its materiality; it centres the communal labour that produces it. The Desert is an exceptional, unusual object. But it hopes, through its exceptionality, to return us to the humdrum world of communal labour in which poems get made.8

In the first section of this essay, I turn to that world, tracing a set of apparently unrelated discourses — early colonial encounters with the American West, John C. Van Dyke’s aesthetics, John Stuart Mill’s account of the lyric as the product of an ‘uncultivated’ poetic mind. Each of these discourses relies, differently, on John Locke’s theory of improvement, in which working a piece of land for profit turns it into property. Each of these discourses positions its object as the exterior of capitalism and colonialism. The desert and the lyric cannot be improved, cannot become property. Zebulon Pike, Van Dyke, and Mill rely on the lyric or the desert (or both) to reinforce the integrity and identity of the interior of capitalism and colonialism.

This essay thus contributes to a recent turn in scholarship on the lyric. Earlier studies, such as Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, focus on the genre itself: when it came to be, how to define it or limit it, whether it is an impingement on the historical plurality of poetic genres.9 In her recent monograph Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, Jackson acknowledges and addresses some of the limitations of the debate. Reflecting on the critical anthology she edited with Yopie Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, she admits,

the truth is we should have seen then what has become much clearer to me […]: modern lyric theory — and especially modern lyric reading — has been racist, and a great deal of the whiteness of lyric theory can be traced to the history of American poetics.10

Jackson’s new work does not abandon her commitment to tracing the history of what she calls ‘lyricization’. Instead, it aims to ‘retell the history of American poetics as the history of gendered and racialized lyricization’.11 This essay remains agnostic on the generic questions raised by Jackson and Culler; I do not provide a new theory of the lyric or comment on the genre’s historical or cultural expansiveness. Instead, I supplement Jackson’s account of the racialized development of American lyric with an account of its colonial development, exploring the way that nineteenth-century lyric and colonial discourses repeat — and, arguably, constitute — each other.12

The conjunction of such discourses creates opportunities for poets working in the present. In the final section of this essay, I return to The Desert, showing how the material complexity of Bervin’s text disrupts both colonialism and the lyric. In The Desert, I argue, Bervin does more than restore the repressed materiality of the lyric. She demonstrates how an expanded poetics which incorporates the communal circumstances of its own production can challenge the logics of capitalism and colonialism, indeed of property itself. Before we can join her in this utopian aspiration, however, we must make our own journey into the desert.

1. Three Colonial Encounters in the American West

The desert occupies a paradoxical place in the discourses of colonialism and capitalism.13 It is dismissed as abject emptiness; simultaneously, it is imagined as a necessary absence whose negativity secures the continued productivity of colonized spaces. Take, for instance, Zebulon Pike, one of the earliest Anglo-American explorers to enter the desert South-West. Like his better-known peers, Merriweather Lewis and William Clark, Pike was dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson in 1805 to survey vast tracts that were — on paper, at least — the property of the United States, following the Louisiana Purchase. In an 1811 report, he observes, ‘the country presents to the eye a barren wild of poor land, scarcely to be improved by culture’.14 Surveying the region’s resources, Pike complains that it ‘appears to be only capable of producing sufficient subsistence for those animals which live on succulent plants and herbage’.15 The land fails to generate more than what is sufficient for subsistence; it does not have the capacity to produce profit. Nevertheless, it is not simply useless. From the desert, Pike continues,

may arise a great advantage to the United States, viz. the restriction of our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the union. Our citizens being so prone to rambling, and extending themselves on the frontiers, will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the west […] while they leave the prairies, incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized Aborigines of the country.16

The desert forms a natural limit to the ‘rambling’ of the pioneers. It protects the integrity of the colony against entropic decay, its otherwise ineluctable tendency toward cultural and political dissolution. Pike further imagines that the desert might serve as a zone of exclusion for indigenous peoples.17 He proposes to make the desert a space of abjection, a zone of otherness whose borders maintain the integrity of his young nation.

Pike’s proposal reflects the logic of colonialism as it has developed since the sixteenth century. Note an apparently innocent word that infiltrates his report, ‘improved’: the desert is ‘scarcely to be improved by culture’.18 Pike uses the word in an obsolete sense: ‘to enclose and cultivate wasteland or unoccupied land in order to make it profitable’.19 The word emerges in the fifteenth century as part of the legal apparatus that justifies the enclosure of common lands.20 By the seventeenth century, it had worked its way to the centre of English theories of property, providing a justification for the appropriation of land in Ireland and the Americas. In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke admits that ‘God […] hath given the world to men in common’.21 This primordial communism lasts only as long as the world remains unworked. Land becomes the property of the person who works it. ‘Nor is it so strange’, Locke insists,

that the property of labour should be able to over-balance the community of land: for it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing; and let any one consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common, without any husbandry upon it, and he will find, that the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value.22

Improvement transforms land into private property; without improvement, there is no property. As Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, ‘Locke’s whole argument on property turns on the notion of “improvement”’.23

Locke regards the refusal to improve land as wasteful. He complains in particular about the way indigenous peoples manage their land, noting that ‘there cannot be a clearer demonstration’ of his theory

than several nations of the Americans […] whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty […]; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniences we enjoy.24

Indigenous peoples, Locke suggests, forfeit their rights to their lands because they fail to improve them. As Wood concludes, ‘this redefinition of occupancy and waste means that land in America is open to colonization because an acre of land in “unimproved” America has not produced exchange value comparable to that of improved land in England’.25

When Pike encounters the desert, he does so through this Lockean frame, asking whether it can be improved. If, as he fears, the desert can ‘scarcely be improved’, then it can scarcely become property. It remains in that primordial communism which capitalism encounters only as its own abjection. Within the frame of a Lockean encounter, the desert — its beauty, its ecological richness, its status as a sacred space for indigenous peoples — is illegible.

It has not been easy for subsequent travellers to break that frame. Take John C. Van Dyke, who arrived in the West in the winter of 1898. A professor of art history at Rutgers University, Van Dyke was the leading American champion of l’art pour l’art, and a close friend of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Van Dyke travelled to the desert — according to his own dubious self-mythology — to seek treatment for asthma. He took his treatment in the roughest way, heading out into the desert alone, with a horse and a rifle. After three years wandering the backcountry, he returned with the manuscript for The Desert.

The Desert, Zita Ingham and Peter Wild write, ‘marks the first work to celebrate the country’s arid sweeps. […] For up until Van Dyke’s time the nation all but uniformly considered its deserts as wastelands, as God’s puzzling mistakes in Creation.’26 Unlike Pike, Van Dyke recognizes that the desert has value beyond its capacity to generate profit. He writes rapturously of its beauty: ‘the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all colour, a dream landscape’.27 He expresses concern about the encroachments of capitalism: ‘it might be thought […] that its very worthlessness would be its safeguard against civilization […]. But not even the spot deserted by reptiles shall escape the industry or the avarice (as you please) of man.’28 He proposes permanently protecting the desert from capitalist agriculture — that is, from improvement:

You cannot crop all creation with wheat and alfalfa. Some sections must lie fallow that other sections may produce. Who shall say that the preternatural productiveness of California is not due to the warm air of its surrounding deserts? […] The deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever.29

His argument for protecting the desert repeats Pike’s proposal for abandoning it. Like Pike, Van Dyke imagines the desert as exterior to capitalism. Like Pike, he imagines that the desert secures the continuance of capital. Pike treats the desert as a space of abjection; Van Dyke celebrates its beauty. The difference is one of emphasis, not substance. The Desert translates Pike’s colonial framework into the language of aesthetics.

Likewise, Van Dyke offers an obverse version of Pike’s proposal to treat the desert as a space of containment for indigenous peoples. Van Dyke assumes that the desert is separate, sequestered from European history — and that it is beautiful because of that separation. In his ‘Preface-Dedication’, he rhapsodizes about western air:

When you are in Rome […] look out and notice how dense is the atmosphere between you and St. Peter’s dome. That same thick air is all over Europe, all around the Mediterranean, even over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the Ganges. It has been breathed and burned and battle-smoked for ten thousand years. Ride up and over the high table-lands of Montana — one can still ride there for days without seeing a trace of humanity — and how clear and scentless, how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun-shot atmosphere!30

In Van Dyke’s account, the pollution of a European city does not disperse across the globe; it accumulates, intensifies. The air becomes a register of human industry, a writing surface upon which history is inscribed. In the West, Van Dyke suggests, the traveller encounters uninscribed air: air that has not — not yet — been smudged with human history. Although Van Dyke occasionally breaks his reveries to acknowledge indigenous populations in the desert, he evidently regards them as outside of history; nor does he reckon with the genocidal history of the spaces through which he travels.31 This erasure is not accidental. In his previous book, Nature for its Own Sake: First Studies in Natural Appearances (1898), Van Dyke admits: ‘In treating of this nature I have not considered it as the classic or romantic background of human story, nor regarded man as an essential factor in it.’32 Van Dyke’s aesthetics requires the wilful removal of human history; he might be said to define the aesthetic against the presence of the human.

At the close of his ‘Preface-Dedication’ to The Desert, Van Dyke comments on his own relationship with the desert. Noting that the beauty of the desert has been ignored, he imagines the landscape calling out for someone to appreciate its beauty: ‘The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover. […] Perhaps the poet with his fancies will come hereafter.’33 In insisting that he is a ‘lover’, not a ‘poet’, Van Dyke may be said to clarify the genre of his text. Although his prose is lyrical, he does not understand himself to be writing a poetry of the desert. Rather, he is creating the conditions under which a future poetry of the desert becomes possible.

What kind of poet does Van Dyke imagine arriving ‘hereafter’? He imagines a figure much like himself: a solitary traveller, wandering under no direction but that of his own aesthetic appetites, consciously (or not) erasing the history of the spaces he moves through. The poet Van Dyke imagines is, in other words, a lyric poet — almost a caricature of the lyric poet. Jackson argues that Emily Dickinson’s texts become lyric when they are ‘taken out of their sociable circumstances’ — the communal networks for and in which Dickinson wrote and circulated her work.34 Van Dyke’s poet does not have that luxury: isolated from the first, he has no sociable circumstances from which his poems might be removed. Likewise, Culler argues, ‘the fundamental characteristic of lyric […] is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the performance of an event in the lyric present, a time of enunciation’.35 Culler’s poet has the capacity to choose whether to speak in the present or describe the past. Van Dyke’s does not. Occupying a landscape without history, he has no time but the time of enunciation.

Van Dyke is not the only nineteenth-century figure whose account of the lyric emerges from the epistemic framework of colonialism. In ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’, Mill distinguishes ‘the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind’.36 He offers Shelley as an example of the former and Wordsworth of the latter. Mill principally uses the word ‘cultivation’ in its figurative sense.37 But he also invites its literal sense into his essay. After admitting that ‘there are poetic natures’, he concludes:

There is a mental and physical constitution or temperament peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament will not of itself make a poet, no more than the soil will make the fruit; and as a good fruit may be raised by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry from naturally unpoetical minds.38

The poetry of the uncultivated mind does not require labour. It either bears fruit or not. Before the cultivated mind can bear fruit, however, labour is required. Mill reprises the metaphor in his evaluation of Shelley and Wordsworth, noting: ‘Culture, that culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is precisely what was wanting to Shelley.’39 Wordsworth, the metaphor suggests, has, through the diligence of his husbandry, extracted profit from an unpromising piece of land. He has applied what Locke calls the ‘improvement of labour’ to his own temperament. Before it can produce poetry, the cultivated mind must be improved.

Mill aligns the lyric with the uncultivated temperament: ‘Lyric poetry […] is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature.’40 There are limits to what cultivation and improvement can accomplish. A poet like Wordsworth may be able to coax a harvest from an unpromising soil, but he cannot attain to the lyric. The lyric is, like the desert, a country that can ‘scarcely be improved by culture’. When a poet like Wordsworth — a poet who lacks a poetic temperament — strays into the country of the lyric, he does so as a tourist, a visitor, or, indeed, as a colonist. There are those, Mill writes,

in whom poetry is a pervading principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and superinduced; something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not dwellers.41

The lyric poet, then, is a dweller — indigenous to the country of the lyric.

Elsewhere, Mill is disdainful of non-European societies, and he uses poetry as justification for his disdain. Children prefer stories to poems, he notes in ‘What Is Poetry?’, before asking:

In what stage of the progress of society, again, is storytelling most valued, and the storyteller in greatest request and honour? In a rude state; like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and […] almost all nations in the earliest ages.42

In adulthood, both individuals and societies turn to poetry:

Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchildlike age — the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take the greatest delight in poetry.43

In Mill’s account, the maturity and superiority of European civilization is evident in its love of poetry; the poem consummates the teleological progress from childhood to maturity, personal or civilizational.

The lyric poem is excluded from capitalist production and land management, yet it is also evidence for the superiority of European — capitalist — modernity. It is situated within and against its own culture. Mill’s account of the lyric is homologous with Pike’s and Van Dyke’s account of the desert. We might describe the desert as a lyric space. Or we might say that the lyric is a desert: the unproductive exterior which secures the identity of the culture that produces it.

2. Jen Bervin’s Hereafter

‘Perhaps the poet with his fancies will come hereafter’, Van Dyke imagines at the close of his ‘Preface-Dedication’. There is something reticent about his fantasy. If, as Culler writes, the lyric is as an ‘active form of naming, which performatively seeks to create what it names’, then this is a profoundly unlyrical moment.44 Van Dyke longs for a poet to follow him. But he forgoes apostrophe; he resists performativity. He does not raise the poet from the desert sands through the autochthonous power of his rhetoric. He imagines, meekly, that the poet might come in some unspecified ‘hereafter’.

Figure 2. Jan Bervin, The
              Desert, p. xi.
Figure 2. Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. xi.

In The Desert, Jen Bervin reprints the entirety of Van Dyke’s ‘Preface-Dedication’, including the passage quoted above. But she and her team of seamstresses sew over much of its language. When it reappears, it is both recognizable and transformed (Figure 2). Who, exactly, is speaking here? The words bear Van Dyke’s uneffaced signature. But they diverge from his original. Gone is his reticence, his refusal to assume the mantle of the lyric. Bervin’s version engages in flagrant acts of apostrophe and performativity, addressing the reader and entreating them — if not ordering them — to become the poet the text imagines: ‘I trust that you, | the poet will come | hereafter.’ Bervin’s sewing transforms Van Dyke into the lyric poet his text otherwise imagines. Because the original remains legible beneath the screen of blue thread, the reader is invited to measure the transformation that has occurred. We witness the moment when Van Dyke goes from describing the lyric to embodying it.

Bervin’s version of the ‘Preface-Dedication’ might be said to issue a caution to its readers. The Desert is an ambivalent, composite object. As I will argue shortly, The Desert wrestles with — and critiques — Van Dyke’s image of the poet. Likewise, it contests the habits of colonial thinking that underlie his engagement with the desert. But it does so by working within, occupying, Van Dyke’s voice. Bervin may critique Van Dyke’s vision of the lyric. But she also creates Van Dyke as a lyric speaker. She may disrupt his colonial fantasies. But she also reprints and recirculates them. The Desert, then, is not unequivocal in its engagement with lyric — or with colonialism. Rather, it is a critique of the lyric that emerges from within the lyric, a critique of capitalism that employs the tools of capitalist industry.

The Desert wears its complexity proudly. Looking at a page of The Desert, with scattered unsewn phrases surrounded by ridges of blue thread, the reader is always aware that they are encountering at least two voices at once, that their task as a reader involves negotiating between those voices. The Desert and other books like it in Bervin’s catalogue are often described as ‘erasure’ poems.45 Bervin does not use the word. In a conversation with the book-artist Dianna Frid, she insists: ‘I dislike the term. […] I’m trying to make poems that point to the fact that many voices can be present in a text.’46 Bervin’s poems resist becoming soliloquies. They are polyvocal, the products of communal and historical engagement — rather than, in Mill’s terms, ‘solitude and mediation’.47 In this sense, Bervin’s poems are not lyric. But they can expand to contain the lyric within them, one of the many voices that resonate within them. When Bervin reconstructs Van Dyke as a lyric speaker in the ‘Preface-Dedication’ of The Desert, she does so through a dialogic engagement with his voice. The circumstances in which he becomes a lyric speaker violate the terms of the lyric.

If The Desert is polyvocal, it is also polymaterial: a printed book and a sewn object, text and textile. Bervin has recently deepened her critique of erasure to incorporate the material complexity of her work. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in which ‘matter [is] a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than […] a property of things’,48 Bervin notes:

I do think of my activation of this approach in sculptural and textile terms — as additive or subtractive, open work or lacemaking ground. Or perhaps in The Desert, where the method is more literally textile, I think of it more as a veiling, mirage, or weathering of the text […]. Instead of erasure, let’s definitely call it ‘entanglement’ — in the quantum and enmeshed senses of the word.49

Bervin suggests that her work should be read through the entanglements it produces — of voice and history, of thread and paper. ‘Matter and meaning are not separate elements’, Barad argues.50 To read The Desert — to attend to the text’s full meaningfulness — one must reckon with the specific matter from which it is composed: abaca paper, blue silk thread. One must think the presence of the women who created it, the hands of the many seamstresses who worked the text, creating the entanglement of voices we see in Bervin’s version of the ‘Preface-Dedication’.

If matter and meaning are not separate elements, neither are matter and genre. The polymaterial of The Desert interrupts its assimilation to the genre of erasure; in Bervin’s work, material entanglement shapes poetic genre. What happens to the lyric, then, when it encounters the polymateriality of The Desert? We have already seen how Bervin’s reworking of the ‘Preface-Dedication’ restages the lyric, breaking its seal of solitude. The isolation of the lyric gives way to the polyvocality of communal life.

Figure 3. Jan Bervin, The
              Desert, p. 2.
Figure 3. Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. 2.

In the main body of the text, Bervin engages directly with the history that Van Dyke (and the lyric) represses. In the note that closes the poem, Bervin observes: ‘John Van Dyke writes of the American deserts as necessary breathing spaces; my sewn poem is narrated by the air.’51 For Van Dyke, the air is a surface upon which — some — civilizations write. Bervin proposes to speak as that surface. She takes up a paradoxical position: within the colonial framework of Van Dyke’s account, her voice is silence itself. The poem speaks as the exterior of colonialism and its aesthetics, the exterior colonialism creates for itself (Figure 3). As the passage begins, the air declares its independence: ‘no- | body’s hills, no man’s range’. It positions itself as an exterior: an ‘unknown range’ which, in turn, solidifies the position of the known within property and patriarchy.

If this is a repetition of the kind of colonial thinking we find in Pike, Van Dyke, and Mill, it is a repetition with a — material — difference. In Bervin’s version, the desert air has the purity and clarity that Van Dyke ascribes to it. But that purity accentuates its historicity. Its materiality is evident in its brokenness, the damage that it has sustained: ‘so clear that one can see the | breaks’. In the austere clarity of desert air, nothing else is visible: ‘Have we not seen | The sky slashed to pieces | Have we not seen | the “practical men” | practice | flaying’, the poem demands.52 For Bervin, the desert is not an uninscribed space; rather, it is a space where the conditions of inscription become visible.

What are the breaks The Desert asks us to see? It asks us to see the breaks that it produces: the punctures in the page through which thread travels; the long swathes of muted sewing; the columns of Van Dyke’s text, which are framed and separated from each by a wide gutter. Bervin’s pages are broken, punctured, divided into plots. She links the book’s materiality to the history of colonialism in the desert — sometimes explicitly, as in the passage in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Jan Bervin, The Desert, pp. 8–9.
Figure 4. Jan Bervin, The Desert, pp. 8–9.

The passage enlists Van Dyke’s language to describe the physicality of Bervin’s text, the 11 × 8.5 inch rectangle of its page: ‘I make out | a | great rectangle | There is no doubt about | one corner of it’. It is a telling moment to encounter this kind of metapoetic (or metamaterial) reflexivity. In Van Dyke’s text, the passage recounts an encounter with indigenous people — or rather, with their absence. Climbing a desert mountain range, Van Dyke discovers the remains of an isolated fort at the summit, partially erased through long abandonment: ‘these are the ruins of a once fortified camp […] a great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed about two feet apart’.53 We are, at this point in Van Dyke’s text, ten pages removed from his theory of air, a theory which erases native peoples from history; he has already discovered persisting marks of their history, inscribed into the landscape. Or, he has invented these traces. Given the suspicions that critics like Teague harbour about Van Dyke’s trip to the desert, it seems likely that the scene is a fabrication — of his imagination, of the colonial imagination writ large. Bervin’s Desert locates itself within this imaginary space: the ‘rectangle’ of the fortification becomes the rectangle of the page she sews upon — the space of her composition, the space of colonial false consciousness and fantasy.

Figure 5. Jan Bervin, The Desert, front cover.
Figure 5. Jan Bervin, The Desert, front cover.

As she writes on and in this colonial rectangle, Bervin also punctures it: she writes by puncturing its surface. It would be tempting to over-read this gesture: to delight in the way that The Desert inflicts punishment on the, notably, white substrate of its writing. This would be to imagine a distance between Bervin’s text and the colonial landscape in and on which it is written — a distance that The Desert does not imagine for itself. Rather, The Desert treats the small-scale violence of the sewing machine’s needle as indexical: of the larger violence of colonialism, of writing itself. Indeed, Bervin gives title to her text by perforating the heavy stock of the book’s cover (Figure 5). Elsewhere in The Desert, the punctures of the sewing machine serve to obscure Van Dyke’s language. Here, the act of puncturing produces language. Writing would seem to be — if not violent itself — metonymic of the larger violences that are requisite to Van Dyke’s aestheticized experience of the desert.

In restoring the historical complexity that Van Dyke denies to the American West, The Desert insists that the history of colonialism is not history. It persists in and as the present. Yet The Desert also suggests that the present can be transformed. ‘There is no hour composed of equal parts’, the unsewn text announces, a reminder that historical time is plural and — to use a word key to Bervin’s poetics — porous.54 As Enggass observes, The Desert is itself a porous text: ‘the abaca fibre […] is famous for its twin properties of strength and porousness’, and ‘the perforations made by sewing machine render the paper literally porous’.55 If the punctures in The Desert are metonymic of the violence of colonialism, they also remind us that poetic making can transform, rework, renew the spaces in which history has etched its wounds.

Figure 6: Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. 33 (detail).
Figure 6: Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. 33 (detail).

Let us turn to one such moment of porosity — admittedly a small one, measured against the scale of colonial violence. Yet, in a text that encourages one to ‘see the breaks’, it’s worth attending to such breaks, wherever they emerge. Each copy of The Desert differs slightly from the others. For instance, in the copy of The Desert held in Special Collections at the University of Iowa, the line quoted above, ‘There is no hour composed of equal parts’, is itself composed of unequal parts (Figure 6).56 Evidently, the seamstress has mistakenly sewed over part of the poem. Instead of throwing out the mistake and replacing it with a corrected sheet, someone — perhaps Bervin herself — has pulled out the thread, leaving a series of punctures on the page. The page is inscribed, then uninscribed; unwritten, then written. It is palimpsestic, containing discrete moments — and kinds — of textual and textile labour.

Encountering these moments of error, one is reminded that the seamstresses who produced the book were also its first readers — and necessarily so: to sew the text, they would have to read it carefully, handling the great rectangles of unsewn pages. They would need to read — as Bervin encourages us to do — both Deserts side by side, comparing them to produce their difference. They would need to read again, checking their work — the corrections we find in copies of the book are evidence that they have done so. The scene of their reading would not be solitary or meditative, but communal and noisy. They read the poem and they made the poem in a shared space, sewing machines clattering around them, other hands and other eyes reading and working alongside them — including Bervin’s (she sewed some copies of the text herself). In some places, the mistakes seem to echo, gloss, or critique the text they accompany. For instance, in the copy held in the Art Library at the University of Wisconsin, the word ‘predecessors’ is framed with a tell-tale set of holes (Figure 7). The unsewn text affirms its singularity: ‘its faults | and breaks are many’, but its ‘predecessors. | are few’. We might read this as an expression of the aesthetic autonomy Van Dyke champions, a lyric voice separating itself from the social world that produces it. In sewing over, then removing the thread from the word ‘predecessors’, the seamstress — is it Bervin herself? — reminds us that such solitude emerges from and requires the labour of others.

Paying such close attention to small defects in individual copies of The Desert may raise the spectre of what Virginia Jackson calls ‘lyric reading’ — that is, a reading which transforms its objects into lyric by projecting intentionality, personal voice onto them. Of Susan Howe, for instance, Jackson complains that ‘she reads the smallest aspects of Dickinson’s handwriting not just as graphic marks, or even as performances of Dickinson’s literary personae but, literally, as “Emily Dickinson”’.57 I would suggest that something different happens when we apply our attention to the smallest aspects of The Desert. Examining any given copy of The Desert, it is impossible to say who is responsible for what. Did Bervin sew this copy herself? Or did one of her seamstresses? Did Bervin correct this error, or did a seamstress pull out her own stitching? Because these questions cannot be answered, the text asks its readers to imagine the scene — and the contingency — of its own production, the dispersal of its authorship. Its communal materiality interrupts the progress of lyric reading, resisting the reader’s inclination to ascribe lyric intention to the text.

Figure 7. Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. 50 (detail).
Figure 7. Jan Bervin, The Desert, p. 50 (detail).

Attending to these details, the reader experiences a break in the logic of improvement. The more The Desert is worked, the less it belongs to Bervin — or anyone who worked on it. It is a text which refuses to become (literary) property. Instead of producing property, The Desert proposes that the communal labour of poetic making might restore the world to its original commonality — even if only a 11 × 8.5 inch rectangle of it. The text is not naive or utopian. It locates itself in the symbolic and historical centre of capitalist production — the garment factory, with its exposed, precarious labour force.58 It also locates itself in the abject exterior of capital, the desert, ‘scarcely to be improved by culture’. As it reminds its readers, insistently, of the circumstances of its own material production, it also reminds us of the conjunction of these two extremes: the way that the centre produces its own exterior and vice versa. In the noisy, communal space of the garment loft, Bervin’s seamstresses produce the austere silence of the desert — but only because those austere silences precede them, waiting, embedded, in Van Dyke’s prose, for a poet with all her fancies to come hereafter.

Notes

  1. John Stuart Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’, in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Plymouth, MA: Broadview Press, 1999), pp. 1212–20 (p. 1216).
  2. Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 56.
  3. Ibid, p. 116.
  4. Ibid.
  5. For a more extensive review of Bervin’s career, see Toby Altman, ‘“What Beauty Was”: Jen Bervin’s Untimely Sonnets’, English Literary History, 89.2 (2022), pp. 489–522 (pp. 492–93).
  6. John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 2nd edn (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1976).
  7. The image in Figure 1 is from Bervin’s website, <https://www.jenbervin.com/projects/the-desert> [accessed 3 November 2023]. Unless otherwise noted, the images of The Desert in subsequent figures are of the copy held at the University of Iowa. Images appear courtesy of the artist.
  8. In attending to the materiality of Bervin’s text — and treating it as a critique of Van Dyke — this essay builds on a previous ecocritical reading of The Desert by Dale Enggass, ‘Cropping The Desert: Erasure and Reclamation in Jen Bervin and John C. Van Dyke’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 28.2 (2021), pp. 563–86.
  9. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
  10. Virginia Jackson, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 54; emphasis in original. See also The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
  11. Jackson, Before Modernism, p. 54.
  12. This essay’s contribution to that project is necessarily limited and gestural, but it aims to contribute to a broader project of thinking the lyric in relation to the legal categories of the capitalist and colonial state. See Birte Christ and Stefanie Mueller, ‘Towards a Legal Poetics’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 62.2 (2017), pp. 149–68. More particularly, this essay attempts to build on the work of Black scholars who have read literary genre and form through land use in and around plantation economies. See Sonya Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), as well as Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, Savacou, 5 (1971), pp. 95–102, among others.
  13. I alternate between these terms in the discussion that follows. When discussing the American West, it is possible to indulge such slippage. In the landscapes of this essay, capitalism is always colonialism and colonialism always capitalism.
  14. Zebulon Pike, Exploratory Travels through the Western Territories of North America (Denver, CO: Lawrence, 1889), p. 728.
  15. Ibid.
  16. Ibid., pp. 428–29. Pike use of the word ‘desert’ encompasses the whole arid zone of the continent west of the 100th meridian.
  17. Pike’s proposal anticipates the official policy of the US government under President Andrew Jackson’s administration. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), pp. 109–14.
  18. Pike, Exploratory Travels, p. 728; my emphasis.
  19. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘improve’ <https://www.oed.com/dictionary/improve_v2?tab=meaning_and_use> [accessed 31 August 2023].
  20. The Oxford English Dictionary first notes the relevant sense in 1473, where the word appears in a legal settlement for a property dispute in the north of England.
  21. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. by C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), §26.
  22. Ibid., §40; emphasis in original.
  23. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2017), p. 110.
  24. Locke, Second Treatise, §41; emphasis in original.
  25. Wood, Origin of Capitalism, p. 158.
  26. Zita Ingham and Peter Wild, ‘The Preface as Illumination: The Curious (If Not Tricky) Case of John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert’, Rhetoric Review, 9.2 (1991), pp. 328–39 (p. 329).
  27. Van Dyke, Desert, p. 56.
  28. Ibid., p. 57.
  29. Ibid., p. 59.
  30. Ibid., p. ix.
  31. He also suppresses the circumstances of his own journey. David Teague notes: ‘Van Dyke most likely sat on the front porch of his brother’s ranch house [and] rode the train to locations across the countryside.’ Further, Teague suggests Van Dyke made his initial trip to the desert not to seek treatment for asthma but to pay off John McLuckie, former mayor of Homestead, Pennsylvania, on Carnegie’s behalf. David Teague, ‘A Paradoxical Legacy: Some New Contexts for John C. Van Dyke’s “The Desert”’, Western American Literature, 30 (1995), pp. 163–78 (pp. 166, 172).
  32. John C. Van Dyke, Nature for its Own Sake: First Studies in Natural Appearances (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1898), p. ix.
  33. Van Dyke, Desert, p. xi.
  34. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, p. 21.
  35. Jonathan Culler, ‘Lyric, History, and Genre’, New Literary History, 40.4 (2009), pp. 879–99 (p. 887).
  36. John Stuart Mill, ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’, in Broadview Anthology, ed. by Collins and Rundle, pp. 1220–27 (p. 1221).
  37. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘cultivation’ <https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cultivation_n?tab=meaning_and_use> [accessed 31 August 2023].
  38. Mill, ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’, p. 1221; emphasis in original.
  39. Ibid., p. 1224.
  40. Ibid., pp. 1223–24.
  41. Ibid., p. 1221.
  42. Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’, p. 1213.
  43. Ibid.
  44. Culler, ‘Lyric, History, and Genre’, p. 887.
  45. For a more in-depth survey of the history of erasure poetry — and Bervin’s contentious relationship with that tradition — see Altman, ‘What Beauty Was’, pp. 493–94.
  46. Jen Bervin, interviewed by Dianna Frid, Bomb Magazine, 15 September 2016 <https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jen-bervin-and-dianna-frid/> [accessed 31 August 2023].
  47. Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’, p. 1216.
  48. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 35. Bervin is not alone in recognizing the utility of Barad’s framework for describing polymaterial feminist textile-poetry; see also Adele Bardazzi, ‘Textile Poetics of Entanglement: The Works of Antonella Anedda and Maria Lai’, Polisemie, 3 (2022), pp. 81–115.
  49. Claudia Rankine and Jen Bervin, ‘“We Have Always Been in Conversation”’, in Jen Bervin, Shift Rotate Reflect: Selected Works (1997–2020), ed. by Kendra Paitz (Normal: Illinois State University, 2022), pp. 56–85 (p. 69).
  50. Barad, Meeting the Universe, p. 3.
  51. Jen Bervin, The Desert (New York: Granary Books, 2008), unnumbered end pages.
  52. Bervin, Desert, pp. 60–61.
  53. Van Dyke, Desert, p. 9.
  54. Bervin, Desert, p. 33. My formulation here is intended to echo the working note that closes Jen Bervin, Nets (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004): ‘I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible — a divergent elsewhere. 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’ (unnumbered end pages).
  55. Enggass, ‘Cropping The Desert’, p. 571.
  56. The copy of The Desert held at the University of Wisconsin does not contain the same error.
  57. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, p. 177; emphasis in original.
  58. For a sustained reading of Bervin’s relationship with factory work — and capitalist production more broadly — see Kathryn Crim, ‘Marx, Silk Poems, and the Pretext of Qualities’, Representations, 151 (2020), pp. 96–126.

Bibliography

  1. Altman, Toby, ‘“What Beauty Was”: Jen Bervin’s Untimely Sonnets’, English Literary History, 89.2 (2022), pp. 489–522 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1353/​elh.2022.0018>
  2. Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctv12101zq>
  3. Bardazzi, Adele, ‘Textile Poetics of Entanglement: The Works of Antonella Anedda and Maria Lai’, Polisemie, 3 (2022), pp. 81–115 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.31273/​polisemie.v3.813>
  4. Bervin, Jen, The Desert (New York: Granary Books, 2008)
  5. interviewed by Dianna Frid, Bomb Magazine, 15 September 2016 <https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jen-bervin-and-dianna-frid/> [accessed 31 August 2023]
  6. Nets (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004)
  7. Christ, Birte, and Stefanie Mueller, ‘Towards a Legal Poetics’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 62.2 (2017), pp. 149–68
  8. Crim, Kathryn, ‘Marx, Silk Poems, and the Pretext of Qualities’, Representations, 151 (2020), pp. 96–126 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1525/​rep.2020.151.5.96>
  9. Culler, Jonathan, ‘Lyric, History, and Genre’, New Literary History, 40.4 (2009), pp. 879–99 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1353/​nlh.0.0121>
  10. Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.4159/​9780674425781>
  11. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014)
  12. Enggass, Dale, ‘Cropping The Desert: Erasure and Reclamation in Jen Bervin and John C. Van Dyke’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 28.2 (2021), pp. 563–86 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1093/​isle/​isaa091>
  13. Ingham, Zita, and Peter Wild, ‘The Preface as Illumination: The Curious (If Not Tricky) Case of John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert’, Rhetoric Review, 9.2 (1991), pp. 328–39 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1080/​07350199109388937>
  14. Jackson, Virginia, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.23943/​princeton/​9780691232805.001.0001>
  15. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)
  16. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, eds, The Lyric Theory Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
  17. Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, ed. by C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980)
  18. Mill, John Stuart, ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’, in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Plymouth, MA: Broadview Press, 1999), pp. 1220–27
  19. ‘What Is Poetry?’, in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Plymouth, MA: Broadview Press, 1999), pp. 1212–20
  20. Pike, Zebulon, Exploratory Travels through the Western Territories of North America (Denver, CO: Lawrence, 1889)
  21. Posmentier, Sonya, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)
  22. Rankine, Claudia, and Jen Bervin, ‘“We Have Always Been in Conversation”’, in Jen Bervin, Shift Rotate Reflect: Selected Works (1997–2020), ed. by Kendra Paitz (Normal: Illinois State University, 2022), pp. 56–85
  23. Teague, David, ‘A Paradoxical Legacy: Some New Contexts for John C. Van Dyke’s “The Desert”’, Western American Literature, 30 (1995), pp. 163–78 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1353/​wal.1995.0013>
  24. Van Dyke, John C., The Desert, 2nd edn (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1976)
  25. Nature for its Own Sake: First Studies in Natural Appearances (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1898) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.5962/​bhl.title.28563>
  26. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origin of Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2017)
  27. Wynter, Sylvia, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, Savacou, 5 (1971), pp. 95–102