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The Poetry of Susan Howe

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The Poetry of Susan Howe The Poetry of Susan Howe Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of twentieth and twenty-first century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, are pedagogic, concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued, as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifica- tions, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson The American Cratylus Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse H.D., Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form Andrew Mossin The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority William Montgomery The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority Will Montgomery THE POETRY OF SUSAN HOWE Copyright © Will Montgomery, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-62197-8 All rights reserved. From “Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards” by Susan Howe, in SOULS OF THE LABADIE TRACT, copyright © 2007 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-38375-7 ISBN 978-0-230-11309-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230113091 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montgomery, Will. The poetry of Susan Howe : history, theology, authority / Will Montgomery. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Howe, Susan, 1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and history. I. Title. PS3558.O893Z77 2010 811Ј.54—dc22 2010007414 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. For NB, AFM, & KVM. Contents Introduction ix Acknowledgments xxv 1 The Maternal Disinheritance 1 The Liberties 4 Scare Quotes (The Midnight) 17 2 The Ghost of the Father 27 A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike 30 The Nonconformist’s Memorial 41 3 Susan Howe’s Renaissance 55 Pythagorean Silence 57 Defenestration of Prague 68 4 The Poetics of American Space 79 Articulation of Sound Forms in Time 85 Thorow 98 5 Enthusiasm, Telepathy, and Immediacy 113 Melville’s Marginalia 117 Arisbe and The Leisure of the Theory Class (Pierce-Arrow) 130 6 The Late Lyric 145 Rückenfigur 148 Bed Hangings 154 Souls of the Labadie Tract 160 Notes 167 Bibliography 197 General Index 211 Index of Works by Susan Howe 217 Introduction his book gives an account of the unstable, proliferating sets of asso- ciative connection that are, for Susan Howe, mobilized in the act of Treading. It makes an argument about poetry that embraces lyric rep- resentations of war, occluded femininity, Renaissance theatre, the American landscape, religious nonconformism, and visual poetics. Over the course of three and a half decades, Howe has built a body of work that is attentive to the political and ethical infoldings of the minutest utterance and is, in the full range of the word, enthusiastic. The current study aims to pick out a pathway—one among many possible—through this endlessly surprising “word Forest” (Thorow, 49). Howe began publishing poetry with Hinge Picture in 1974 and was initially received as part of the amorphous grouping of experimental writers known as the language poets—writers such as Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. These authors, now very well known, drew on the classical avant-garde of the early twentieth century, Russian formalism, Marxism, and continental critical theory. They wrote against the expressivist lyric, the illusory coherence of narrative, and the narrow ambitions of confessional and academic verse.1 The “language” label, like most such tags, is unsatisfactory, as it masks an extremely diverse range of writing. Even given such reservations, however, it was clear from the start that Howe’s poetry was out of step with certain gen- eral tendencies within language writing. Although Howe was friendly with some of the protagonists of this grouping and was included in their defining early anthology In the American Tree, she has never fitted easily under the language banner.2 Howe shares with many language writers interests in the material text, the political ramifications of radical formal experimentation, and the vexed issue of voice, but her work from the outset contains coun- tervailing investments in mystical thought, American Romanticism, and a reappraisal of lyric. x ● Introduction Howe undeniably valued the radicalism and intellectual commitment of some among the language writers, forming close relationships with two of the protagonists, Lyn Hejinian, on the West Coast, and Charles Bernstein, on the East. Howe’s correspondence with Hejinian was one of her most substantial letter-writing relationships of the 1980s. However, she was also closely involved in a correspondence with John Taggart, a poet aligned with Robert Duncan, and one, like Duncan, explicitly in the anti-language camp. Early correspondence with Ian Hamilton Finlay and, a little later, with Norman O. Brown further testifies to the scope of her poetic and intel- lectual affinities.3 Since the late 1980s, her work has been widely anthologized and has drawn a great deal of critical commentary: books by Rachel Tzvia Back and Stephen Collis, and articles or chapters in books by such prominent commentators on American poetry as Michael Davidson, Peter Middleton, Peter Nicholls, Marjorie Perloff, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lynn Keller, Susan Schultz and Brian Reed. Howe is typically read as a major voice within the American late modernist tradition—an inheritor of the legacy of Pound, HD, Olson, and others. In the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, for example, Nicholls observes that the work bears “eloquent testimony to the continuing role of poet-as-historian.”4 Though her work differs in numer- ous important ways from that of Pound—not least in its attachment to principles of instability and uncertainty—they share a commitment to an intellectually ambitious mode of poetry that is rooted in close attention to history. Nicholls, one of Howe’s most perceptive critical commentators, also notes that Howe’s work implies a “fundamental reformulation of Poundian principle” because of its emphasis on the “unreadable” in history.5 The vari- ous implications of that unreadability—whether literal or in the sense of incomprehensible—provide some of the core themes of this book. Feminist scholars were among the first to respond to Howe’s writing. Critics including DuPlessis, Keller, Back, Kathleen Fraser, and Elisabeth Frost have produced valuable discussions of the treatment in Howe’s poetry of women as sidelined nonparticipants in history’s unfolding. Many have paid particular attention to the issue of silence and to the ways in which Howe’s experiments with page space and with an ethics of marginality have led to a poetry in which the effacement of the feminine is rendered. Some have drawn on the poems of Singularities and the criticism of The Birth- mark to situate Howe as a specifically antinomian voice—a development of a stuttering and marginalized strand of American speech that has its ori- gins in theological disputes among the early settlers of New England. This study is informed by this work but seeks to lead the conversation down new pathways, deriving a sense of permission both from the Nietzschean Introduction ● xi daring of Howe’s portrait of Emily Dickinson in her early critical work My Emily Dickinson and from Howe’s interest in male writers such as Melville, Edwards, Peirce, and Stevens. Issues of gender and power are, clearly, crucial to Howe’s writing, but in this study they are subsumed beneath the overall question of poetic speech. In recent years, it has become clear that there are numerous contexts in which Howe can be read. Her background as a visual artist with affili- ations to American minimalism and to artists such as Agnes Martin and Marcia Hafif, for example, is extremely significant. Marcel Duchamp is a repeated touchstone. She has often acknowledged a debt to Charles Olson, particularly his use of page space (an area discussed by Kathleen Fraser and others). A rarely heard but no less plausible approach would be to point to Howe’s Anglo-Irish ancestry and to look to poems such as The Liberties and The Midnight for motifs of non-belonging, Swiftian wordplay, Yeatsian enchantment, and Gothic unease.
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