“Could you tell me what home is [?]”

Emily Dickinson’s poems search for home alongside their creator. In her mid-career, Dickinson hand-binds her poems’ homes, creating her fascicle booklets with care. Her late work written on scraps of paper, scraps of envelopes, and other found materials reconsider the poetic home: the late, loose sheets explore the unbound boundlessness of a fragment.

Throughout her life, Dickinson’s poems move throughout time and space, coming undone and redone in various rewriting. Like the elf of plants, lines of poems sprout up across letters (both sent and unsent), unbound sheets, and on the back of envelopes – a medium which inherently suggests movement and re-contextualization.

After her death, various editors publish Dickinson’s poems, asserting final versions, poem-homes that Dickinson never suggested.

This project attempts to trace the various poem-homes of Dickinson’s verse both throughout her life and after her death. Through visualizations of the various homes and facsimiles of the texts, it becomes clear that the concept of home is never quite stable, that meaning changes based on each home the lines find.

Additionally, through a curated selection of texts, this project argues that the poems are reflexive of their own construction, as represented in the site’s logo: the envelope of “The Way Hope builds his House” – written on an envelope cut open to resemble a house; and, that Dickinson’s conceptions of home are linked with her conceptions of the cosmos – the relationship between the universal and the particular is at stake in the process of constructing a home. I discuss these relationships at length in the “research” portion of the site.

The goal of this site is to expose the ways in which the poems written by Emily Dickinson exist in unstable homes, and that an exploration of those various homes gives us twofold insight: firstly, insight into her poetic process of construction (both de- and re-construction) and secondly, insight into the history of representing this process since her death. We, as readers, find our home in the poems of Dickinson, too, and understanding the history of the poem-homes unearths, like Michael Cohen claims, not a deeper understanding of the content of the poem but of the aegis of the editor and the time the poem was edited. This project enables users to read Dickinson both as she preserved her poems, and through the eyes of various poets and writers who came after her.

Taking the call of Dickinson’s question – “Could you tell me what home is” – we discover that “Home is Not –”.