The Desert

by Jen Bervin

In The Desert, poet and visual artist Jen Bervin continues in the tradition of poetic composition by erasure—by sewing. Taking John Van Dyke's prose celebration of American wilderness The Desert (1901) as a point of departure, Bervin has sewn, row by row, across 130 pages of Van Dyke's prose, creating a poem that forms its own elemental landscape and shares Van Dyke's poetic attention to visual phenomena. Thinking of the artist James Turrell, for whom the poem was first composed for a reading at Roden Crater, she "The great get on with the least possible and suggest everything by light."

Evoking Bervin's earlier work with the sonnets of William Shakespeare from which she culled her own minimal Nets, Bervin here uses atmospheric fields of pale blue zigzag stitching to construct a poem “narrated by the air”—“so clear that one can see the breaks.” Ultimately, Bervin's poem is a reality that is sought, as many have wandered in deserts, in more abstracted landscapes—in the sharp physical, textual relief of sewing on Van Dyke's page, and in contemplation of deeper inward change, hallucinatory and bewildering.

Each quietly monumental book has been machine-sewn "readily as glaciers" with over five thousand yards of pale blue thread. The result is this beautiful artist's book, composed in France and Ireland, digitally printed by Jan Drojarski in Brooklyn on handmade Twinrocker abaca paper, machine-sewn by the artist and a team of assistants in Seattle, and bound in hand-punched abaca covers by Susan Mills in New York. The edition comprises 40 copies each numbered and signed by the artist.

148 pages

First published January 1, 2008

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

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

xi ‘And so it is that my book // The / desert // has a lover. I trust that you, // the poet will come / hereafter.’
1 ‘For days I have been // blue’
13 ‘it is not likely that // sound, or form, or color, / belong to / man // They / travel side by side // These dwellers’
28 ‘You have seen // the open field // one place was cut from some other / and always showing // a spirit of restlessness seizes them and’
35 ‘These are the poets. To tell the truth they are wretched little mud-holes; their pockets are strange catch-basins’
45 ‘Some / have / lost their identity. in the sea-bed // These are the only records that tell of the sea’s occupation’
48 ‘No one knows / the water / by passing through.’
77 ‘These deserts, cut through // All that one hears or reads about them // It is // precisely / that one feels’
98-9 ‘I / see the / firmament as black // and // can pass through it.’
123 ‘There are those / with more lively imagination / drinking/ along the margin’

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brooklyn poet and visual artist, Jen Bervin, is the author of several artists’ books. Some of her works include The Desert (Granary Books 2008), A Non- Breaking Space (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004), Under What Is Not Under (Potes & Poets 2001), as well as many other artist books. She works with mixed media, using scraps of cloth, discontinued thrift store thread, old photographs, and old course texts. She is interested in the in-between space and describes her process as “making a whole with pieces missing.” These missing pieces, the cracks and fissures left bare are the most remarkable parts of her work; she says these are the places where things happen.

Granary Books has recently published Jen Bervin’s new book, The Desert. This is not just any book; this is one of Granary’s many incredible art pieces. Bervin used John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901) as a source text, much as Tom Philips treated and transformed A Human Document by W.H. Mallock to create his famous A Humument. Rather than illustrating over the original text à la Mallock, Bervin painstakingly sewed with light blue thread over the “erased” words, to leave a texture-rich poem. She and a small team in Seattle sat at sewing machines and carefully sewed through more than one hundred facsimile pages of Van Dyke’s text in each book. The result is beautiful. The original text is still visible beneath the threads, obscuring but not obliterating Van Dyke’s prose.

Bervin leaves us with a sparse and poignant text. Reading this poem in its intended form is necessary, as the book is a reading and viewing experience. Still, here is a brief selection [perversion and distortion brought to you by the Almighty Word Processor:] to give a small sense of what Bervin is doing.

I mean the air
but I am not now speaking

-yet I believe
the
whole face
is always present,
one looks through it as
glass



The book was designed by Jen Bervin and bound by Susan Mills. It is attractively wrapped in cloth with trim to match the thread, and held in an archival box. The paper was handmade by Twinrocker Handmade Papers, for this limited edition of 40 books.