Emily Dickinson wrote on scraps of paper, in an idiosyncratic notational style with her own system of punctuation. She later transcribed these noticings into good copy using ink. The papers were put into drawers but ungathered, unordered, unbound until late in her life when Dickinson stitched some papers together into fascicles. After the poet’s death, Dickinson’s sister and publisher selected the opus we know as the Collected Works – The Final Harvest.

Recording the intimate engagement of readers with Emily Dickinson’s text, the work transcribes and superimposes all readerly inscriptions from single volumes (sourced from holdings at the Lenton Parr Library, University of Melbourne and via interlibrary loans in Australia) into polyphonic, complex authored annotative drawings. Isolating readerly notations and dropping out the main text, the record of readers’ engagement remains, taking the form of mostly illegible, annotative drawings that shift the mode of address from a personal often solitary experience into something communal—a shared public fiction. This spatial imaginary com-position conflates or transposes two or more (many) spaces. It offers ways of holding different views and temporalities that extend the singular.

The work connects to memory and transcription; processes in which losses and divergences figure meaning. The looping, compositional movement and marked uncertainties in Emily Dickinsons’ handwritten drafts are also diagrammed in annotations made by readers. Circled words and underlined sections make felt connections between images or parts of the text that the reader has understood or feels the need to question. These marginal notes are a form of irretrievable indirection. Read by further readers they bring a tangle of meanings and multi-voiced quality to the text that opens it as an intersubjective and intertextual continuous, fluid form.

Made material on the printed page, they mark the movement of attention.