'Interdisciplinary' Is Too Narrow a Word for Jen Bervin's Silk Poems

Jen Bervin's Silk Poems (Nightboat, 2017) is reviewed by Martha Ronk at Constant Critic! The long-awaited book may be in a "small, delicate package," but it's "monumental in scope," writes Ronk. "Like all of Bervin’s projects, this one is based on the fusion of text and the material world, and on careful, extensive research (a short bibliography is at the end) and travel. She makes 'interdisciplinary' seem too narrow a word to describe the scope of the work, and her singular fabrication of wonder." More:

For the structure of the poems, Bervin mimics the form silk itself takes at the DNA level, a shape that moves back and forth in the looping drawn at the bottom of the pages. Silk worms, almost unbelievably, move in a similar pattern when inscribing a silk cocoon. She explains that the form of the poem strand is modeled on silk at the DNA level— “the six-character repeat in the genome is the basis for the six letter enjambed line of the strand.” Wanting silk to inform the poems, Bervin created a bi-directional text common in Ancient Greece known as boustrophedon, and thus writes from the point of view of the worm, immersing the reader in the process of creating silk-and-poem at the intersection of language and biological form:

ITHOUGHT
YOUSHOULD

KNOW
HOWITIS

WITH
THE

CREATURES
WHOMADETHIS

The series of poems takes the reader through the various stages of the silk worm, a history of silk, the creation of language, the significance of the I Ching, and its relation to weaving. The opening poems move from a description of the pupa stage to a moth struggling to get free: “SHEWANTSJUST/ TWOTHINGS/ TOGETOUTOFTHERE/ ANDTOHAVESEX.” Responding to pheromones, the males gather, the poetic lines enacting both the way a compound word is created and sexual creation (“ATREMENDOUS/ FLUTTERINGENSUES”) :

RIDICULOUSLYEAGER
THEYMAKETHEIRWAY

USINGCOMPOUNDEYES
KALEIDOSCOPIC

FROMKALOSBEAUTIFUL
ANDSKOPEINTOVIEW

The mother produces 500 eggs that hatch the tiny worms just as the mulberry leaves begin to form.  The worms must be fed leaves of the same age . . .

Read the full review at Constant Critic.