Silk Poems

by Jen Bervin

In conjunction with Tufts University's Silk Lab's cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.

Genres: Poetry, College, School, Nature

182 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2017

About the author

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist books, and large-scale art works. Her poetry/artist books include The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books 2010), The Silver Book (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010), The Desert (Granary 2008), A Non- Breaking Space (UDP 2005), The Red Box (2004), and Nets (UDP 2004). She has work forthcoming in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and Figuring Color (ICA Boston/ Hatje Cantz).

Bervin's work is included in the upcoming exhibition "Postscript" on 21st century conceptual writing and text-based art at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been shown at The Walker Art Center and is in many special collections including The J. Paul Getty Museum, Stanford University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the British Library. She has received fellowships in art and writing from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Centrum, The MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop, and The Camargo Foundation. Bervin has taught recently at Harvard University and Vermont College of Fine Arts, and will be a Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at The University of the Arts in 2012. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Kylie · Rating 5 out of 5]

UNREAL

[karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was such a beautiful book of poems! the physical book itself and its pages add a whole other level of experience to reading the poetry, and i love the simplicity of its metaphors and relaying of its research. more interested in silkworms now than i ever have been before!

[Malia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed. @Ellie you’d read this in the time it takes me to be sure I’m done sneezing.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading GoT is throwing a major wrench in my reading challenge goals, so I am raiding Kai's bookshelf for things I can read quickly while I slog thru GoT. I am really bad at reading poetry, as in I don't understand what enjoyment or what I am supposed to get out of reading it. I'm not sure how to rate or review this because I don't have a mental scale to weigh it against and I have no idea how to tell what is good poetry vs bad. I am rating this pretty high tho, because I had a good time reading it and I always award extra stars for format. This book combined a lot of my interests. I used to be very obsessed w/ book design and paper, so I loved the super super thin see through pages. Another lifelong obsession has been strings/filaments. I love braiding, knitting, weaving, knotting etc since I was a child and have recently been scouring reddit forums of ppl who make their own skeins and spending all my time on this part of the internet. I esp liked the part w the chinese character that showed that the beginning of words like paper and warp and weft are the same, because that was basically a list of things I am interested in. In addition to all this, yesterday I went down a rabbit hole of watching caterpiller coccoon time lapses. All of these things made for an enjoyable reading experience. I also liked the fact that she wrote the whole thing on a silk thread and the little squiggle on the page kept growing . Why do people get to have these cool lives and grants and go all about the world to do these projects. I'm jealous

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful work of wonderful and love..the way it is written forced me to take my time and slow down in order to parse the letters into the correct words. This book of love in the perspective of a silk worm is a work I shall treasure. It is a reminder of the inner and wondrous workings of the small.

[Elizabeth Branstetter · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful and innovative, a true masterwork of craft, research, and persona. I highly recommend for anyone with a great love for the smallest creatures.

[Colleen Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the way this book was written. It really made me slow down and take in every word.

[Isabelle✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty cool and experimental, but Bervin's other projects are more interesting to me haha. Super quick read though!

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long admired Jen Bervin. She's the kind of artist who pushes my sense of what's possible in writing into new territories, and when entering one of her books, I know I must be prepared to surrender to multiple readings, to discovery and astonishment.

Silk Poems takes up the long relationship between humans and silkworms in textiles, in language, and recently, in bioengineering. Bervin writes from the perspective of the silkworm, and in doing so, she anthropomorphizes, yes, but she also speculates on what it might be like to inhabit a silkworm body, what kind of language might be produced from that embodiment. The results are playful, humorous, aware of human exploitation and also amused by the mythologies we've created to conceal it:

INACOOL
DRY

PLACE
THEEGGS

CANGO
DORMANT

UPTO
TENMONTHS

TOBEREVIVED
INAPOUCHWARMED

BETWEENTHE
BREASTSOFAWOMAN

ORLETSBEHONEST
AHEATEDROOM

Everywhere, Bervin's meticulous research is evident, as she weaves the words of other writers and thinkers into Silk Poems. I learned so much and was returned to texts I'd forgotten, such as this gem from Confucius:

WHENIHAVEPRESENTEDONECORNER
OFASUBJECTTOANYONEANDHE

CANNOTLEARNFROMITTHEOTHER
THREEIDONOTREPEATMYLESSON

Silkworm knows what's up.

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poem(s?) itself did not really do it for me, which is a matter of such personal preference that I can't hold it against the writer. The concept is fascinating. When Jen Bervin discovered that researchers were using liquid silk to create biosensors that could be placed inside the body to, for instance, monitor glucose levels, she wanted to create a poem that could be written in the silk as a kind of talisman to protect the people involved. (They were previously using a clip art image as the foundation of the printed silk.) The resulting poem is written from the perspective of the silkworm, broken into six-character segments. It's such an ambitious and interesting project that you have to be glad someone thought of it.

[Connie P · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something magical about the crowding of space, about the incorporation of bioengineering and the history of silk that brings a concept of precariousness to the forefront of the mind. While seeing life through the perspective of a silkworm, the poems confront the temporalities silk inhabits and questions the mortality of a being and language. It’s brilliant.

[Katrine Graversen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Et udemærket læs. Det er nok mere formen end indholdet, der er interessant fra min synsvinkel. Digtstrengens form, der er skabt efter silkens DNA, som så danner grundlag for jambisk verselinjer og samtidig hele fortællingen om silkeormen og den her “produktion” af silke som en del af kroppen, der udskilles og lever videre - very cool 🐛🐛

[estel · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow i really loved this. i was skeptical before i began just from flipping through the pages but dont let that deceive you this is enchanting. the pov of a silk worm is such an interesting device. the use of language and the form of the lines is so impressive i had a lot of fun deciphering the meaning

[judy-b. judy-b. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intellectually rigorous, yet also quirky and playful, a brilliant work—especially the original, which was printed in 6-letter lines, DNA style, at nano scale, on an implantable biosensor made of liquefied silk—it bears many re-reads.

[nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“thisflyinggarment/forthesoul/ivedrawn/infinity/into/it” || Jen Bervin’s “silk poems” is something profoundly special. ||

Mary Ruefle said it better than I could: “I feel privileged to have been alive on earth while she was doing it.”

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

More compelling when read/discussed as a group. If [conceptualism] is a vector, Bervin's work occupies an either a very 'low' or very 'high' place. Would have to re-read to determine exactly where it lands.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

16 ‘SOAWING
IS A THING

THATGETSYOU
THERE

TOTHEBLISS
OFBEING

TAILTOTAIL
FORHOURS’

43 ‘TORELISH
THEFRESH

SELVAGE
OFLEAVES’

105 ‘YOUTHINK
IAMMORBIDIAM

IMAGINETHELANGUAGE
WRITTENINME’

149 ‘HERE
ISTHETHING

IMADEOFMYSELF
WITHOTHERS

ALIVE
INYOU’

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely incredible

[Kest Schwartzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The object is beautiful. So are the words.

[exequelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was tolerable at best; a nuisance if anything.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75 stars - maintains thread with material and mode which make it difficult to do so - loved this book

[Juli Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique intersection of topics, deftly interwoven.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and interesting book of intertwined silk worm and human history, drawing in biotechnology and spinning contemplation in short bursts of life and death through fragmentary poetics.

[jada alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 // i loved this book. i already want to read it again!!!

more research based art & poetry pls......

[Opeyemi Olagunju · Rating 4 out of 5]

so cool, want to reread when im less tormented by school so i can actually enjoy it

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just the loveliest little book.

[Lillian]

no thanks

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

awed+grinning+wide-eyed at this gracefully plush and prophetic biological declaration. startling literary art.

[Janel D. Brubaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a beautifully quick book of poetry. The poems themselves were very short, and the book was barely more than 100 pages, so it made reading this book somewhat of a breeze. I'm always fascinated by poets whose poems take up only a few short lines. I'm more of a verbose poet myself, and so I like to study those poems that say in only a few lines what it might take me several stanzas to say. Just that experience alone made this book interesting to read.

In terms of form, I was also captured. Not only are the poems short, but they're all written in caps with one space in between each letter, making the W O R D S L O O K L I K E T H I S. It was a kind of fluidity of language I had never seen before. Without uppercase and lowercase letters, without any punctuation to distinguish words or phrases, each word and each line bleed together in such a way that my attention was forced to be extra focused.

At times this form was highly effective, leading my eyes to the words and from line to line in such a slow, purposeful way, that even the act of reading this book became incantatory. It was as if my eyes, my mind, my consciousness was weaving these poems together, rather than merely receiving words written by someone else.

At other times, though, this form felt overbearing. Almost as though I was being beaten down by it, and not because of the language used, but because the act of reading the book become somewhat cumbersome as I neared the end. I don't know if this was simply my issue, as I read this book over the course of a mere two days, or if this was, in fact, because of the book itself. All I knew was that, by the time I closed the book, having finished it, my feeling was not so much one of edification as it was a feeling of exhaustion. Again, this could be that I read too much of the book at once, or that I was reading too many books at once. But it is this reason that I gave the book three stars.

The writing itself also left me somewhat dissatisfied. There were certainly some moments when I was struck by the writing: "Four / wings / of the future / folded / across / her chest" (pg 7); "Seeing her / everywhere / and badly wanting / to be seen / everywhere / by her" (pg 14); "So it begins / first in star / my own egg / trembles" (pg 27). The metaphors of moths weaving silk works incredibly well for this book. There is a great amount of medical terminology regarding the production of silk and her research in it, and so the theme of silk fills every point of this book. Sometimes it's metaphor. Sometimes it's literal. In both senses, it works to give the writing a sense of depth that goes beyond the emotional. There's an exploration of body here that truly does stand apart from every other book I've read.

I recommend this book, for sure. It was a fascinating read.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest books of poetry I’ve read in years. It’s a beautiful object, printed on “bible” paper with the text in all caps and no spacing between words, though the lines are short, so that “deciphering” the breaks between words is easier than deciding where sentences and phrases end and begin in Merwin’s unpunctuated poems. The lack of spacing creates alternate words, which one realizes aren’t the right ones, but which reverberate anyway. The left-hand pages are numbered, but on the lower outside corner of the right-hand pages there is a “squiggly” line which slowly grows as you work your way through the book—the thread of silk which the worm is creating.

Second reading October 2021. What a fine fine book.