Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches

New York – The Drawing Center presents Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches, bringing together Emily Dickinson’s original poem manuscripts and Robert Walser’s microscripts for the first time in an art museum setting. Although Walser, who was born shortly before Dickinson died, was most likely unaware of the latter’s work, both writers were obsessively private as well as peculiarly attentive to the visuality of their texts. Walser wrote in tiny, inscrutable script on narrow strips of paper using an antiquated German alphabet that was long considered indecipherable.

Only recently have these scripts been shown to consist of early drafts of the author’s published texts. Similarly, Dickinson fitted her multifarious poetic fragments to carefully torn pieces of envelope, newspaper and stationery that were discovered among her posthumous papers. (Walser once referred to himself as a “clairvoyant of the small,” and this description might apply to Dickinson as well.) In both cases, the form of these texts affects the language itself as both writers crafted their words in response to the form at hand. Rarely in literature has the manner in which words are made been so integral to the way in which they might be read.

Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches includes a selection of over 80 works culled from the Swiss National Library/Swiss Literary Archive, which houses Walser’s original manuscripts and first editions, and The Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College. In addition, photographs of Walser and a facsimile of the one extant daguerreotype of Dickinson will be displayed on the gallery walls. Among the many works in the exhibition by Walser are: Microscript 9 (1932), written on a card received from a literature editor at the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung who wrote to inform Walser that two prose texts would be published;

Microscript 337 (1926), a story written on a sheet of a tear-off calendar that was later published in the newspaper Prager Presse; and Microscript 54 (c. 1930–33), written during the period of Walser’s voluntary residence in the Waldau Sanitarium near Bern. Dickinson’s works include poems and letters written on pieces of envelope such as Twas Later When the Summer Went (c. 1873) and The Ditch is Dear to the Drunken Man (c. 1885); and scrap paper such as If It Had No Pencil (c. 1861), a passionate poem about wearing a pencil down to a stub by writing so many unrequited letters to a man she loves. Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator.