Internationally renowned visual artist, book artist, and poet Jen Bervin will be delivering the fifth Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry & Poetics, entitled “Measuring the Sun,” on Friday, November 3^rd, in the Poetry Collection, at 3:30pm (with reception to follow).

Measuring the Sun – A first glimpse from work in progress by Jen Bervin and conservator Debora Mayer: Measuring the Sun – pursues a conceptual, scientific, and literary investigation of the material history of poet Emily Dickinson’s embossed writing materials and their entangled relationships between text and textiles. Machine-made cotton and linen rag writing paper—an emergent, booming technology in the Berkshire mills surrounding Amherst, Massachusetts, came of age alongside Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century. The corresponding blind-stamped mill embossments—tactile, sculptural, nearly invisible—on Dickinson’s writing papers have become a research portal to trace and render visible underlying histories blistering the blank page: including colonial expropriation of native land, culture, and waterways; the machinations of the cotton empire encompassing the horrors of trans-Atlantic enslavement; the global rag trade in cotton and linen textile materials; and women’s labor in the paper and textile mills.

Space for this event is limited to the seating at the Collection, so each attendee is asked to please RSVP and bring their individual evite confirmation to the event itself, in order to protect the Collection space.

RSVP here

If for any reason you RSVP but find you cannot attend, please do let me know, as there will be a waiting list, and we would like to accommodate other potential guests.