VII. Narratives of Wings, Pinned and Unpinned

The nature of Dickinson's connection to the pinned, often fragmentary texts she left behind in her last, most precipitous flight remains mysterious. Here, I offer six different possible visual narratives of pinning/unpinning. Clicking on the clipped fragments that follow each narrative will take you to its fuller image.


1. The narrative of lost (pins)/provenance(s).

2. Narratives of closure. At times, two fragments, pinned together, carry a complete poem-draft. In the cases below, even the loss of the pin would not usually result in the permanent dissociation of text-fragments; rather, each text-fragment contains a clue linking it with the others, and making possible the re-association of even widely scattered fragments.

3. Narratives of openness. At times, the pinned documents are marked by more than one set of pin holes, evidence of multiple (conflicting?) sets of intentions, many of which remain unrecoverable.

4. Narratives of autonomy and intertextuality (poems and their variants). At times, the pinned slip carries a variant that, unpinned, could sue for autonomy from the poem "proper," for a new status as a brief, but electric lyric. The unpinned slips may realize the desire for autonomy implicit in the variant lines penciled below the poems of the fascicles like glosses or codas, extending the poems' limits but still held fast within their gravitational fields.

5. More narratives of intertextuality and autonomy. At times, the texts carried by two separate fragments may be lines or stanzas of a single poem, or lines of two autonomous poems--or both. The fragments and the texts they carry often appear symmetrical; they may be are easily, cleanly, bisected.

6. Narratives of collision or syncope: At times texts bearing no relation to one another are "suddenly" associated by pinning. Unpinned, the association between the texts would be permanently broken.

7. Last, a variant flight: collision or syncope, a gap between the wings.

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