Ecopoetic Antinomies: Inscription and Voice in Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems

Abstract

Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue—this texture—the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 64 The multi-formatted poem-object that Jen Bervin calls Silk Poems (2010–20) features an exceptionally charismatic speaker. “ok/embarrassedtosay/inmygreatexcitement/ifellasleep” it confesses upon waking from a mid-poem nap (61). From the urgent materiality of its growing body, the poem’s Bombyx Mori silkworm–speaker addresses the imagined human recipient of a biomedical liquid silk sensor—designed to be implanted inside the human body during illness—made from the silk it uses to weave its cocoon: “ithought/youshould/know/howitis/with/the/creatures/whomadethis,” it avers (1). What follows is a series of narrative scenes, diversions, distractions, and interruptions, as the silkworm weaves together the complex layers of cultural and linguistic history embedded in the materiality of silk from within its own bodily growth as it passes through “instars,” stages of insect development between moltings of skin, from birth to silk production to death. Both expansive in its knowledge of literary and silk history and intimately enmeshed within the demands of its body (“i’msohungryi/shuckmyskin/anddevour/it whole,” it remarks), the silkworm–speaker enacts and transcribes the material history and conditions of its existence (62). In doing so, the silkworm shows how silk’s historical and literary lives are entwined with its material ones. Bervin would seem to propose that the junction between writing and materiality is an embedded property of language: “The page is not quiet,” she writes, “It has been written endlessly” (“Text from Textile” 87).