Sparrow Data: Dickinson’s Birds in the Skies of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract:Addressed to readers in and of the Anthropocene and composed in the wake of the archival and nonhuman turns, this essay considers how to make a “book” of Dickinson’s birds that will not turn into an exhibit or “specimen case” but will instead become a miscellany and a murmuration. Part I introduces Dickinson’s Birds (dickinsonsbirds.org), an ongoing experiment in sonic curation that imagines her bird-poems as both embodiments of ecological change and as lyric “strange strangers” while proposing Dickinson’s archive itself as an entropic space: a “flickering, shimmering field of forces without independent existence and in constant flux.” Part II traces the waxing and waning of Dickinson’s bird-poems in three textual and temporal zones—fascicles, bifolium sheets, late fragments—first taking the measure of each zone as a singular and vital soundscape, then gauging the distance between the dawn- and dusk-songs in Dickinson’s work.