English 619:002 / Spring 2004 / Susan Tichy / George Mason Univers/ity
/ Mondays 4:30-7:10
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Notes on Susan Howe
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From the Introduction: On the ‘Difficulty’ of Howe’s Poetry
The difficulty of the poetry of avant garde American poet Susan Howe and the demands it makes of its readers has led more than one critic to question the purpose of these language intricacies/conundrums, and of the (seemingly willful) concealment of meaning behind radical linguistic and visual experimentation, labeling her techniques "arch" or "elitist." Asked her opinion regarding the objection to experimental writing such as hers on the grounds that it reaches only "a very narrow, highly educated" audience composed of readers who have to have "tremendous intellectual confidence even to grapple with these texts," Howe names this objection a manifestation of "a really frightening anti-intellectualism in our culture." She continues: "Why should things please a large audience? And isn't claiming that the work is too intellectually demanding also saying a majority of people are stupid? Different poets will have different audiences Howe ends this exchange by emphasizing that what has been termed the difficulty of her work is not a chosen attribute but rather where she is led by language, where the process of poetry writing takes her (Kellr 1995: 23 24). In an earlier interview, Howe's response to the charge that her poetry is "inaccessible" is that "it's accessible to whoever really wants access to it" (Falon 1989: 4 1), rerouting attention from the difficulty of her work to the reader and his or her efforts and desires vis à vis her work. (4-5)
The insistence on multiple possibilities intrinsic to Howe's work does not translate into a poetic field open to random and wholly individual associations on the part of the reader. In terms borrowed from psychoanalytic literary criticism, Howe's work, "like the analytic patient, provides the terms of its interpretation and the reader has to learn to wrestle with this idiom rather than replace it with prepacked theories"; indeed, the reader must cultivate “the art of listening [in place of] the seizure of meaning" (Hellmann 1994: 10-11 my italics)." The linguistic and visual choices that Howe makes are not arbitrary, just as their meaning(s) is not open ended: her poetry is propelled by an inner logic that is determined, first and foremost, by sound associations, and then by the visual form of the unfolding text, its emotional dynamic and thematic concerns. The sometimes elusive and elliptical nature Howe's work may also be read as resulting from its poetic and political commitment to sustaining and incorporating "rival possibilities" (Perloff1981: 137), from its attention to and emphasis on language as itself dynamic, volatile, and protean, and from the very real difficulty -- experienced in the texts by writer and reader both of tracking (forgotten voices, lost footsteps) through overgrown and obliterating literary and historical landscapes.
The difficulty of Howe's poetry is also intricately connected to her vision of the role of the reader in the writer reader complex. "Reader I do not wish to hide / in you to hide from you," states Howe in The Nonconformist's Memorial (30), and in her most recent collection Pierce Arrow she writes: "Please indifferent reader you / into whose hands this book / may fall" (119), leaving the appeal open ended. These addresses to the reader foreground the centrality of the reader in the making of meaning - a centrality of which Howe is not only aware but also wholly embraces. Rather than a poetry of elitism, as some have maintained, I read Howe's work as a type of democratization of poetry, with the reader a full citizen of the textual terrain, with equal rights and obligations in the making of meaning. In fact, rather than intending to block entry and leave the reader without, Howe's work is at all times engaged in bringing the reader more deeply into the text, toward effectuating greater participation on the part of the reader in the process of making meaning from a poetic text. "I wouldn't want the reader to be just a passive consumer," states Howe in the Keller interview. "I would want my readers to play, to enter the mystery of language, and to follow words where they lead, to let language lead them" (1995: 3 1). Howe's imagery here suggests that the reader's role is a paradoxical one that involves both active engagement ("To follow words where they lead") and a type of surrender ("to let language lead them"); what unifies these two positions is their close and intimate relationship with the text. (5-6)
Howe's radical linguistic and visual strategies invite the reader to employ a "reading" process that is multifaceted and more varied than what is conventionally thought of as reading functions. The reader, first of all, listens to words and their musical patterns, which may, in fact, have no ready translation or interpretation. The reader then looks at the page's design, as one would I look at a painting, foregoing – momentarily - entanglement in the semantic level of a word in order to consider its visual features, its placement, and its function on the white canvas. Thirdly, the reader sometimes becomes tactually engaged with the physicality of the book - turning it upside down and around - as the conventions of top to-bottom or left margin to right margin line arrangements are abandoned, replaced by the sense of the page as a three dimensional entity whose depth has yet to be understood and of words as semiphysical (mythical) creatures liberated from the stagnancy and strictures of standard poetic usage. Finally, the reader engages the semantics and the narrative(s) (often in nonnarrative form) of the work, though always with the recognition that interpretive opportunities are multiple… (7)
From the Introduction: Howe’s Historical Project
Howe's poetic recuperation "from the dark side of history. .. [of] voices that are anonymous, slighted inarticulate" (Europe of Trusts 14) differs from that of many other mainstream contemporary poets committed to giving voice to the silenced. A formal distinction of great import is that in Howe's poetry - like that of other avant garde writers - the investigation into history's erased figures and the resulting critique of contemporary culture "takes places as and in language," through "various transgressions of form" (Naylor 1999: 9 11). Avant garde writer Nathaniel Mackey's incisive critique of other marginalized writers who place "far too much emphasis on accessibility" is relevant here (qtd. in Naylor 1999: 13). Like Mackey, Howe refuses to simplify the complex issues involved in history's silencing tactics or to obliterate or undervalue the great effort of retrieving lost voices. Thus, Howe's poetry - dense, difficult, resistant to easy penetration - formally enacts the arduous process of tracking back through thick and overgrown landscapes in search of history's missing. In addition, the radical language experiments of Howe's work present "a formal as well as thematic challenge to the structure of authority under which history has been written" (Naylor 1999: 14).
A second factor that sets Howe's revisionist historiography apart – this time from other avant garde writers engaged in historical retellings - is … the highly autobiographical nature of her work. The charting of her own childhood and, ancestral geographies, the uncovering of the points of convergence between biography and history, and the frank foregrounding of the intensely personal are foundational to Howe's poetry and poetics. The uncovering of each historical tale is propelled also by the wholly individual and idiosyncratic historical details of the poet's own life… And yet, Howe's poetry is fundamentally different from the personally charged work of mainstream contemporary poets whose lyric "I" dominates the poems' focus, obliterating all else. The speaking voice in Howe's work -- particular, personal, self revealing - is not authoritative or unified: as Parrott frames it, the perspective "is always shifting and ... the subject, far from being at the center of the discourse ... is located at its interstices" (1999: 432 2).
(11-12)
Finally, history as Howe reads and renders it is often characterized by scenes of violence, portrayed through visual and aural violence on the page: battles, beheadings, scalpings, banishment, abandonment to starvation, cold, and madness, crucifixions, and conquering forces are all abundantly present in her poetry. The violence, of course, is perpetrated in the justifying name of a god, a ruling ideology, or a religious framework, and Howe's poetry is committed not only to uncovering lost voices and tales but also, through those lost voices and tales, to investigating the roots of that violence in her society. Behind the most decorous and civil facades, she argues, lies "an in for murder, erasure and authoritarianism" (Talisman 1994:64). Howe's poetics of historical revision is propelled by a desire and a need to know “Why are we such a violent nation? Why do we have such contempt for powerlessness? I feel compelled in my work to go back, not to the Hittites, but to the invasion or settling ... of this place. I am trying to understand what went wrong” (Talisman 1994: 55) (13)
From the Introduction: Howe and Her Contemporaries
The violence that permeates Howe's work may be read as a consequence of the specific historical consciousness formed, in part, by her being born into the destruction and chaos of World War II and coming into first cognition with pictures of the Holocaust and the war's devastation imprinting violence on her mind and in her heart . Similarly, her father's sudden disappearance in 1941 into that war and his five year absence (in addition to her mother's consequent going off to work at that time [Falon 1989: 31]) certainly established radical instability, the insecurity of structures, and the ever-present threat of loss as constitutive elements in Howe's emotional and, hence, poetic identity. I begin this brief consideration of Howe's position among her contemporaries in experimental American writing with this biographical information as it is, in part, Howe’s year of birth and her resulting preoccupation with issues of history and violence that set her apart from many of the language-centered poets with whom she has traditionally been grouped. (13-14)