Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 ‘Visible Earshot’: The Returning Voice of Susan Howe

Edward Allen

I cannot murmur indifferently: ‘What matter who’s speaking?’ I emphatically insist it does matter who’s speaking.1

SUSAN HOWE IS NOT GIVEN to murmuring or indifference. Neither, though, is she much given to straight talking, and to witness this difficult, resourceful poet putting so plainly the matter of ‘who’s speaking’ repays another hearing. There is often something to be said for second hearings, of course, but we might aver an added incentive in the case of Howe, whose signature formal strategies have regularly hinged on a sort of textual eavesdropping. Among the most snooping of found poetries, her vocal collages catch the drift of literature’s more intrepid voices: some of them marginal and forgotten, suppressed (as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson were) for speaking their own versions of a chaotic, New England history; others rather too familiar, mainstays of the canon who might be held to account for the erasure of those slighter voices. So the matter of who’s speaking, as the opening quotation attests, requires special attention. You do not have to strain too hard to hear in Howe’s insistent dictum the influence of ‘What Is an Author?’, or to detect, beyond those

My thanks to Fiona Green, Sophie Read, and Flora Willson for their advice on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 Susan Howe, The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown 1993) p. 20. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfs020 © The Author, 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals. [email protected] 398 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY of Michel Foucault, the bleak overtones of Samuel Beckett.2 But there is a fainter echo here, easily missed, of a recherché authority, the Wallace Stevens of The Necessary Angel, who hears in Plato’s Phaedrus a determined voice. Socrates’ description of the winged horses and charioteer is ‘a moving statement and is intended to be so’, Stevens writes. ‘It is insistent Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 and its insistence moves us. Its insistence’–and here Howe retrieves the thread –‘is the insistence of a speaker.’3 As for Stevens, so for Howe, the matter of who’s speaking has proved remarkably suggestive. My focus here is one of her recent elaborations on this subject, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), whose title lyric sequence in some measure puts to rest the visual commotion of her early and most widely read work. In this, perhaps, Howe has found herself doing what poets tend to do in later life – putting things right, searching for those final, important words. In doing so, though, she has made good her claim to a lyricism of unusual integrity; one that reveals its author freshly inclined to the acoustic properties of her new-millennium language, and finally (or very nearly) at peace with her borrowed materials. That Howe’s poetry has never been too easy on the eye, or gentle on the ear, tells you a good deal about the company her poems have kept since their startling first appearance in the early 1970s. In reading lists, bibliographies, and anthologies, Howe’snameisusuallytobefound alongside those of a tricksy avant-garde, a generation of writers loosely related in their refusal to see poetic language merely as an ‘instrument of expression’, closed and sensibly coded.4 The qualms of her contemporar- ies, as we shall see shortly, did much to sharpen Howe’sapproachtothe problems of articulation at the beginning of her writing career. Before we do, though, it is important to say that forty years of writing in and to the margins of literary thought have not rendered the example of earlier poetic models any less attractive to this watchful poet. From the slanting utterances of an early chapbook like Hinge Picture (1974), to the ‘harmonic collision’ of paintings and hymns in That This (2010), Howe has followed her modernist predecessors in finding new things to say about poetic voice, while wary at all times of slipping into the inherited rhythms of ‘literary canons and

2 ‘What matter who’sspeaking’ is taken from ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY 1977) p. 138. Foucault takes his direction from Beckett: Texts for Nothing, trans. Samuel Beckett (London 1974) p. 16. 3 ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’,inThe Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London 1960) pp. 3–5. 4 Lyn Hejinian, ‘For Change’ (1982), repr. In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono 1986) p. 487. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 399 master narratives’.5 In sounding out alternative points of re-entry to the lit- erary past – by the stacks of neglected archives, through the happy coinci- dences of manuscript culture – Howe has alighted time and again on the ‘dark side of history’,where‘voices are anonymous, slighted – inarticulate’; a place where speaking, insistently or otherwise, is prone to falter.6 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 Reconnoitring old ground risks traipsing the usual interpretative paths, not least because the ‘dark side of history’ has been well illuminated by critical readers, the obscurities and fault lines of Howe’s literary geog- raphy brought to light. You do not have to venture too far into this itiner- ant poetics to notice Howe’s attachment to certain well-worn analytical categories, ‘voice’ and ‘singularity’ among them. Marjorie Perloff, for one, is in no doubt that we can do better than discuss Howe’s ‘voice’–‘a term that implies, quite inaccurately, that speech is primary and prior to writing and that … a poem is simply the outward sign of a spoken self-presence’.7 Perloff prefers the interpretative possibilities of ‘signature’, and you can see why. ‘[V]oice’ conveys a host of resonances that a reader schooled in poststructuralist critique will find especially jarring. Be that as it may, it is troubling to hear an argument of this kind pitched about a poet who has never quite given up on the ‘idea of a distinctive American voice’.8 Indeed, Howe’s is a poetry that has insisted on the possibility, not that we will find an alternative to ‘voice’, but that a regeneration of the term might be achieved if we are prepared to learn to read in a different way. Recent developments in the field of lyric studies indicate a relaxation of the usual tensions. Surveying the contribution of cognitive linguistics to formal literary theory, Sharon Lattig has written of a perceptual ‘lyric plateau’, at the edge of which a poet like Howe is prone to teeter, her con- ception of lyric subjectivity riskily suspended.9 To brave Howe’spoetryis not merely to notice, as Lattig is right to, that ‘Poetic articulation suggests neither a bounded, stable and self-assured subjectivity, nor the utter absence of one’.10 In fact, to perceive this subjective limbo might be to contribute more generously as a reader to the outcome of the lyric’s fine balancing act. Reading for, and at the same time in resistance to, a lyric voice edging into

5 ‘That This’,inThat This (New York 2010) p. 102; The Birth-mark,p.46. 6 ‘There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown | To Cover to Crown to Cover’,in The Europe of Trusts (New York 1990) p. 14. 7 ‘Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo’, Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999) pp. 405–34: 412. 8 ‘Talisman Interview, with Edward Foster’,inThe Birth-mark, p. 155. 9 Sharon Lattig, ‘Perception and the Lyric: The Emerging Mind of the Poem’, in Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell (eds.), Contemporary Stylistics (London 2007) pp. 168–79: 179. 10 Ibid., pp. 178–9. 400 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY papery consciousness could be vital to Howe’s late shift in style. If at one time her poetry appealed first to the sharp-eyed reader (for whom a graphic ‘signature’ might have sufficed), the textures of her recent work have led us, cognitively speaking, in quite another direction. Tugging us otherwise, by our ears, the title poem of Souls of the Labadie Tract asks that we consider Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 again the likely form and method of a thoroughly integrated mode of reading: one that may be alive to the insistencies of an emerging voice. The mode of reading I have in mind has to do with the free play we might associate with all experimental writing. A cognitive effort of the kind to rely on the ears as well as the eyes is certainly nothing new. Returning to old material with senses refreshed, though, is part and parcel of Howe’s often nostalgic poetics, and it is in this spirit that I wish to begin by returning to the occasion of an earlier poem, ‘Thorow’ (1990). To approach her current work in this way is to see where the play of Souls came from. It is to see, too, how eagerly conversant this voice-interested poet has been over the years with a group of writers for whom the habits of lyric speech had become, by the 1970s, the hang-ups of an emergent literary politics. Reading Howe, even now, begins by remembering her response to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. There remains something instructive about reproducing that name. Piecing the jigsaw of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E back together has rarely afforded a clear picture, but typing it (uppercase L, lowercase equals, uppercase A, and so on) brings one instantly into involvement with the sorts of verbal processes at issue when Language poetry (as it is usually identified) is prompted to show and tell.11 Reference, representation, and reproduction number among the complacencies cast off by an avant-garde that has consistently refused to toe the line of the more strictly versed ranks of the academy. And yet it is an avant-garde, like so many others in the modernist literary tradition, whose ‘explosive new force’ first required the touchpaper of a magazine culture.12 To t t e l ’s (1970–81) and This (1971–82) were smothered eventually by a run of anthologies and book-length mani- festos, but these small-press releases, however short-lived, provided the ma- terial forum in the 1970s for a poetics that may otherwise have remained a disparate tendency, unrecognised and unstudied.

11 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E owes its name to the magazine of that title, parts of which were reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale 1984). Along with In the American Tree, this anthology is among the best introductions to the writers and methods associated with Language poetry. 12 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Second World War and Postmodern Memory’,inA Poetics (London 1992) p. 200. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 401 Among the poets to surface at this time and from these materials was Susan Howe. Most of her poems come packaged these days in collections devised by the poet herself, and one may be forgiven on that count for taking her work solely on its own terms. That Howe once had to jostle for printed space with the likes of Bruce Andrews, however, is one of those Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 tantalising facts of bibliography that Howe herself would be hesitant to erase. The matter of how and why some words manage (when others fail) to achieve ‘print-perfect proof ’ has some claim, after all, to being the most arresting sticking point in this poet’s literary thought.13 How and why a piece by Howe found its way in 1980 into the company of pieces by Bruce Andrews and Barrett Watten is hard to say exactly, of course, but the chance result of that editorial decision is a valuable reminder that Howe’s has been a porous poetic history, necessarily infused by, and at times inspired to retain, the acidic politics of her war generation.14 The image of Language poetry has refined a little since 1980, and readers have been right, no doubt, to follow Linda Reinfeld’s lead in de- clining to mix Howe’s work too confidently into the ‘social project’ of her contemporaries.15 It will be clear, though, that one of the interests in doing so still is precisely because this poetic ‘outsider’ has so often found herself on the inside, making the idioms we have come to associate with Language poetry her own:

In prose and in poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader. Starting from scratch, she exploded habits of standard human intercourse in her letters, as she cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry.16

My Emily Dickinson (1985) was Howe’s first project in creative poetic criti- cism, and it confirmed her place on the literary map. Its great achieve- ment, as readers have come to see, consists in the recovery of its subject from the jaws of literary sensationalism. The way to understand Dickinson’s

13 The Birth-mark,p.9. 14 First published in 1979 and later reprinted in In the American Tree,Howe’s ‘P. Inman, Platin’ appeared in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 12 (June 1980) pp. 8–10. Charles Bernstein offers an alternative approach to formalizing Language poetry when he points out that his associates (Howe included) were children, and so learned to speak, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. See A Poetics, p. 214. 15 Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (London 1992) p. 11. 16 My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley 1985; reissued 2007) p. 11. Further page references, to MED, are given in the text. 402 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY writing, Howe suggests, ‘is through her reading’ rather than by the short- cuts of biographical hearsay (p. 24). But it is not always easy in My Emily Dickinson to discern whose words you are reading, or to say who has edged into the critical spotlight, Dickinson or Howe. ‘[B]reaking the law’, after all, accounts well for Howe’s own anarchic method, as it does for the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 mood of textual illegality of those at the forefront of Language poetry, from whom Howe frequently draws her combative expressions. Indeed, the thing most likely to strike readers about My Emily Dickinson now is how dated it sounds, and yet how carefully its author manages to refine the war-gaming vocabulary of the poststructuralist camp. Where, just a year before, Bruce Andrews had declared it the obligation of new writing to blow apart fixed meanings with ‘wild schizzed-out eruptions’, Howe could see in 1985 the value in keeping up conversation with the bombarded reader.17 The importance to her of a poet like Dickinson is not that the New Englander broke the law – for that, in some ways, is old news – but that she was alert to ‘the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader’. Just how short ‘just short’ it is possible be, as we’ll see now, became a matter of central importance to Howe’s lyric practice in the following decade. The second of three poems to appear in the slender collection Singularities, ‘Thorow’ begins by logging a journey:

I rented a cabin off the road to Bolton Landing, at the edge of the lake. … After I learned to keep out of town, and after the first panic of dislocation had subsided, I moved into the weather’s fluctuation. Let myself drift in the rise and fall of light and snow, re-reading re- tracing once-upon18

This reads like a sort of unmetered, off-road Dickinson – a poetry of inured ‘dislocation’, posted ‘out of town’; and it is certainly possible here to detect the mental steps of the adventurer of My Emily Dickinson,who memorably dares her reader ‘to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered and sovereign’ (MED, p. 85). But the journey of ‘Thorow’ also owes its opening moves to the author disguised in the poem’s mangled title. Following Henry David Thoreau’s survey of Walden Pond, ‘Thorow’ enacts the encounter of a remembered self with

17 Bruce Andrews, ‘Writing Social Work & Political Practice’, repr. in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, pp. 133–6: 135. 18 ‘Thorow’,inSingularities (Middletown 1990) p. 40. Further page references are given in the text. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 403 the great outdoors – the Adirondacks, in this case – and in doing so gives voice to a ‘transcendental subjectivity’ in the first throes of linguistic dis- orientation (‘Thorow’, p. 43). For this lyric traveller, as for her forebear, ‘mov[ing] into the weather’s fluctuation’ means hazarding her sense of place, beyond the town and off the page: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. … Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, – a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, – no gate – no front-yard, – and no path to the civilized world!19

Fence blown down in a winter storm darkened by outstripped possession Field stretching out of the world this book is as old as the people There are traces of blood in a fairy tale (‘Thorow’,p.44)

Howe’s boundless landscape bears the faint imprint of Thoreau’s passage in Walden – in the flimsiness of its borders (‘Fence blown down’ collapses into Thoreau’s ‘unfenced Nature’) and in its distance from the known world: ‘no path to the civilized world’ becomes, under Howe’s treatment, a ‘Field stretching out of the world’. Probing and straining such boundar- ies typifies the push and pull of Howe’s poetics, and here it means erasing the referential markers that might help to shore up a wayfaring discourse. The rhetorical strategies of Walden are themselves inclined to drift, its pro- nominal identities prone, as here, to waft about the generic ‘you’ form (‘your very sills … your house’), as if blown about by the inclement weather of New England. Playing, perhaps, on the blanketing possibilities of the borrowed ‘winter storm’, Howe yields to the sweeping white space of her page, the inky mark of her character (‘I’) no longer visible, but remembered in the macabre residue of its excision (‘There are traces of blood in a fairy tale’).

19 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Sounds’,inWalden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi, 3rd edn. (New York 2008) p. 90. 404 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

Figure 1. ‘Thorow’. Reproduced from Susan Howe, Singularities,pp.56–7. © 1990 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press

If ‘Thorow’ begins nostalgically, ‘re-reading, re-tracing, once-upon’, that trip down memory lane rapidly broadens into a busier intersection; one that sees, in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘the individual ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 405 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

Figure 1. Continued. open[ing] up to the multiplicities pervading him or her’.20 Borrowing these words performs the very ‘operation of depersonalization’ to which its authors draw sadistic attention, of course. In a poem ‘inhabited by voices’, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish one source from another, or to keep your eye on Howe’s articulations as they vie for position; a sense,

20 Howe quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’, from A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London 1988) p. 37, in ‘Thorow’, p. 41. 406 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY emphasised by the vanishing pronoun, that her voice has been subsumed as ‘part of their encroachment’ (‘Thorow’, p. 47), its tracks deleted. Aiming ‘not to set forth my Self, but to lose and find it in diligent search’,asHowe does in My Emily Dickinson (p. 46), becomes a question in ‘Thorow’ of losing yourself amongst voices that have themselves been loosed from their Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 original textual settings, their bibliographical codes dropped along the way. The epistemological challenges of ‘Thorow’ are, in one important re- spect, unlike those we would expect to encounter in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. A strictly nomadic methodology would resist the consistency of metaphor for which Howe finds room and use in her poem’s middle section, and which, in the case of a critical reading, provides a ready vo- cabulary. It may be that Howe is kinder to her reader than the authors of A Thousand Plateaus are to theirs. Even so, it is often difficult to know what she is getting at, or indeed to guess where her poem is going (when it’s not going round in circles). Howe imagines ‘a center | Wilder than this region’, and the ordinarily passable truth that ‘maps give us some idea’ is rapidly passed over as the poem opens out into an ‘expanse of unconceal- ment | so different from all maps’, where old-fashioned modes of naviga- tion are meticulously abandoned (‘I pick my compass to pieces’) and ‘scarce broken letters’ are taken up as the only typographical footholds (‘Thorow’,pp.54–5). ‘Dark here in the driftings | in the spaces of drift- ing’ aptly describes a reading experience that is very like drifting in the dark, and which relies for its moments of relief on the steadying effect of localised repetition (‘driftings … drifting’). Turning the page does finally turn up an alternative, but the violent collage to greet your eyes in the third section of ‘Thorow’ promises mixed rewards (see Figure 1). If, as we’ve seen, Dickinson aimed with each postal dispatch to ‘explode … habits of standard human intercourse’, here Howe borrows some of that lettered dynamite, taking her poem and reader to the ‘indef- inite limits of written communication’ (MED, p. 12). A system of water- ways runs through this verbal collage – a ‘wavelet’,a‘swamp’, ‘three Rivers’–and yet the linguistic fluidity of these pages is difficult to stop up. Unlike the bottom of Walden pond, which reveals to Thoreau’s surprise a stratum of ‘general regularity’, the surface of Howe’s poem is choppy, its materials wont to drift.21 The reader’s task on entering this ‘possible field of work’ (‘Thorow’, p. 55) is to put the pieces of the dispersed voice back together; a multifa- ceted exercise that takes its lead, as Fiona Green suggests of the earlier poem Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), from ‘what the eye first

21 ‘The Pond in Winter’,inWalden, p. 194. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 407 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

Figure 2. ‘Thorow’. Reproduced from Susan Howe, Singularities, p. 56. © 1990 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press encounters’.22 ‘Cannot be | every | where I | entreat | snapt’ unfolds in- vitingly at the top left corner of the page, though it might not be clear what this flustered voice is entreating us to do, only that we rotate the book as it snaps into a series of makeshift positions, at the confluence of ‘the three Rivers’, in a canoe, digging for arrowheads, caught in crossfire. For nothing here is ‘fitted to the paper’, the syntactical shrapnel of this ‘night siege’ too freshly embedded to permit an easy (linear) clean-up op- eration. Rather, it falls to the reader to notice semantic links and slippages as string-like vestiges materialise –‘lily root, swamp, Encampt canoes, wood, fires by night’–as if tracking the wandering thoughts of a subject stirring to action. Single linguistic elements, mostly nouns, are shot from page to page, and it is one of the lighter curiosities of the poem’s colonial drama that you might spot a ‘very deep Rabbit’ in the line of fire, picked off at the centre of each page. The rabbit, sadly, cannot be helped, but in the midst of this exploding voice, the cognitive effort of reading performs remedial work. Consider the word ‘squall’, isolated near the middle of the left-hand page (see Figure 2). The word is partly disfigured but remains recognisable as it wavers on the point of cleaving into its constituent phonemes, ‘squ’ and ‘all’. It hovers also between two syntactic possibilities, and the impulse might be to tether it, to employ it as a noun (‘Their Plenipo squall’)ora verb (‘squall Messages’) or as a means of connecting the two in a parsed verbal thread. This grammatical stringiness is aggravated by the internal semantic confusion of the word itself; one that connotes ‘a small or insig- nificant person’,a‘violent gust of wind’, and a ‘discordant or violent scream’23 – a reasonable response, you might think, to a poetics crafted with such care to frustrate. Happening upon Howe’s knot of materials is likely to evoke the geog- raphy of another rough-and-ready poem – Charles Olson’s ‘In Cold Hell,

22 ‘“Plainly on the Other Side”: Susan Howe’s Recovery’, Contemporary Literature, 42 (2001) pp. 78–101: 87. 23 OED,n.1–3. 408 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY in Thicket’–whose ‘congery of particles’ asks to be ‘isolated, observed, picked over, measured’.24 In the manner of that bitty lyric, ‘Thorow’ is lit- tered with the debris of a language uprooted, strewn across the page’ssurface (in Olson’swords)‘as nerves are laid open’.Howe’s nervy collage exposes and probes the same anatomy of readerly assumptions, but the challenge of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 her visual polysemy has to do also with scanning between bulkier linguistic units, from one page (and from one view of the siege) to the next, where the body of the collage is upended and, with a few changes, transposed to offer a different ‘resolution’. For this is a voice that must, in some sense, be seen to be believed. The ability to do so – to grasp with the eye a plane of signifiers under attack – is to catch sight of the lyric voice at its most telling. Interpretative foraging does not merely recover a voice from the wilderness; it reveals the internal wildness of a voice unable to quite compose itself: squall – not quite a squawk and not quite a call, but something of both, punctuating one page only to disappear amongst the materials of the next. More could be said of ‘Thorow’ and the sort of critical fieldwork its readers are encouraged to undertake. It is a poem to which Howe has remained curiously attached; fascinated, no doubt, to see what will become of it as readers continue to scout out its sources. My interest in the poem is rather different. While Howe was to lose none of her enthusi- asm for ‘Thorow’ and the textual politics tendered in its final pages, I want to suggest that the localised achievements of the poem came to seem somehow limited by the mid-1990s. As we shall see, Souls of the Labadie Tract revisits the thematic territory of ‘Thorow’–the early history of New England from an itinerant’s perspective. In the act of revisiting, however, Souls picks up some new materials, and in doing so proposes, in the ‘sharpest, most agile and detailed lyric terms’, a means of assuaging the graphic violence of Howe’s unsettled poetics.25 Before turning to her late poetry, it is worth pausing to note Howe’s position as she watched the afterlife of ‘Thorow’ (and the genesis of Souls) begin to take shape. The artistic framework for her visual experiments has been carefully sketched, particularly as regards the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Kasimir Malevich, and Ad Reinhardt on the poems collected in Frame Structures.26 It would not be difficult to situate the vocal collage of

24 Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley 1993) p. 17. 25 ‘Errand’,inSouls of the Labadie Tract (New York 2007) p. 9. Further page references, to Souls, are given in the text. 26 Kaplan P. Harris, ‘Susan Howe’s Art and Poetry, 1968–74’, Contemporary Literature, 47 (2006) pp. 440–71. For the ‘text-art context’ of Howe’s work in the 1990s, see Tony Lopez, ‘Susan Howe’s Visual Poetics’, Études Anglaises,61–2 (2008) pp. 202–14. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 409 ‘Thorow’ with the same eye for artistic precedence. That Howe learnt certain aspects of her written craft at the drawing board is unsurprising, perhaps, and what needs closer scrutiny is the cachet of her poetic designs amongst those who claimed to know, on the evidence of products like ‘Thorow’, what postmodern aesthetics stood for in the early 1990s. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 To speak of ‘a radical cultural politics’, as Fredric Jameson did at this time, was to anticipate what has since become a truism for Howe’s closest followers: the conviction that a visually disruptive poetics – like John Cage’s music, like Samuel Beckett’s Watt – is worth grappling with precise- ly because it resists easy decryption.27 Jameson’s sense of a ‘dominant cul- tural logic’ sounds rather too masterful now, but one of the lasting and more suggestive achievements of his essay on ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ consists in the attention he pays to the ‘schizophrenic frag- mentation’ of Language poetry (p. 28). You can almost hear the typo- graphical splutter of ‘Thorow’ in Jameson’s diagnosis:

Our own recent criticism … has been concerned to stress the hetero- geneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or organic, but now a virtual grab bag or lumber room of dis- joined subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds. The former work of art, in other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds by differentiation rather than by unification. … In the most interesting postmodernist works … one can detect a more positive conception of relationship, which restores its proper tension to the notion of difference itself. This new mode of relationship through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and original way of thinking and perceiving. … (P. 31)

Jameson’s feel for the ‘postmodernist experience of form’ aptly charac- terises the final pages of ‘Thorow’. The ‘raw materials and impulses’ of Howe’s poem are not ‘random’, of course, and yet there is a strong case for calling the text a ‘virtual grab bag’, crowded with voices on the point of disintegration, lapsing into ‘profound discontinuities’ of tone and timing. An ‘achieved new and original way of thinking and perceiving’ expresses well, if somewhat optimistically, the aesthetic reward of seeing your way through the lumber room of Howe’s poem.

27 ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’,inPostmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London 1991) p. 6. Further page references are given in the text. 410 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY Jameson and Howe would make an uncommonly good match but for their difference of opinion as to how valuable such an experience of form could be in the end. ‘Perceiving’, in Jameson’s critical vocabulary, has to do with one sense-impression in particular: the operation of ‘that supreme sense – sight, the visual, the eye’ (p. 7). He cites Nam June Paik’s work as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 an emblem of the favoured aesthetic experience: ‘winking down at us from a ceiling of strange new video stars’, Paik’s constellation of television monitors requires the viewer ‘to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference’ (p. 31). To do so might be to attempt the impos- sible, Jameson suggests, but it could also be to rise ‘somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name’ (p. 31). Properly visualised, the collaged artwork engages its viewer in a hermeneutics of the ‘sublime’ (p. 34). A similar claim could be made for Howe’s visual poetics. Like those winking television screens, the flashes of linguistic play in ‘Thorow’ en- courage one to privilege a ‘materiality of perception’ unequalled by any other mode of attention (Jameson, p. 27). There are, though, reasons for suspecting a change in attitude as Howe came round to the limitations of an eye-led poetry. A few years after the poem’s publication, she was prompted to explain her process of composition:

[I] try to match that chaos and violence visually with words. … with ‘Thorow’ I had done one scattered page and made a xerox copy and suddenly there were two lying on my desk beside each other, and it seemed to me the scattering effect was stronger if I repeated them so the image would travel across facing pages. The facing pages reflected and strengthened each other. … I’m trying to illustrate what I’m saying. … half-hidden phrase[s] represent identity trying to come out of all this violence of knowledge.28

Exegesis certainly can be trying. Howe remembers ‘trying to illustrate’ and ‘try[ing] to match’, but her struggle to express the mimetic gestures of ‘Thorow’ reveals, I think, the blinkered vision of a poetics caught in the service of graphic design, its formal complexities reduced (in the eyes of the reader) to the most basic special effects. The seductions of assessing a text according to the way it reflects, strengthens, illustrates, or represents a

28 Lynn Keller, ‘An Interview with Susan Howe’, Contemporary Literature,36 (1995) pp. 1–34: 8–11. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 411 supposed content are clearly difficult to resist; and readers of ‘Thorow’ would know. Jenny L. White stumbles a little when she alleges an equiva- lence in the poem of content and form, enticed by the mirror-like corres- pondence between the ‘linear narrative of American history’ and the imminent ‘breakdown of poetic form’;29 a similar charge, no doubt, could Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 be brought against my own rhetorical strategies for negotiating the night siege of Howe’s collage. Checking out a text so acutely committed to the expression of ‘radical difference’ may not be as thrilling as Jameson would have his starry-eyed readers believe. After all the talk of chaos and violence, Howe could have left it at that, her poetic voice in fragments, her readers expected to pick up the pieces. She might have done, had an alternative not come to mind:

in spite of all my talk about the way the page looks, and particularly in regard to these pages constructed as if they were a sort of drawing, strangely the strongest element I feel when I am writing something is acoustic. … We talk a lot about the shift from cinema to television and from silent movies to talking pictures but less about the shift from radio to television. In the days of radio you connected people with their voices, not their looks. It didn’t matter what they looked like – you could imagine that by simply listening.30

A mishearing of this last thought reveals a belated truth about Howe’s lyricism. ‘It didn’t matter what they looked like’, she confides, remember- ing the people on the radio; but how pertinent it would be to alter the ref- erent of that sentence and substitute (as you might in a spoken interview) ‘voices’ for ‘people’: ‘it didn’t matter what their voices looked like’ nicely anticipates the preoccupations of Howe’s late work, in its diminishing concern for the complexion of the printed voice, and in the excitement of connecting sound and presence, on the page as well as the radio. The pull of a sonic epistemology was, as Howe explains, crucial to the config- uration of her ‘childhood imagination’.31 Elsewhere, she recalls a striking sound-world, peopled by characters on the radio (‘The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Grand Central Station’), actors on LPs, and the soothing voices of her parents in the form of bedtime stories, ‘reading aloud the words of

29 ‘The Landscapes of Susan Howe’s “Thorow”’, Contemporary Literature,47 (2006) pp. 236–60: 257. 30 Keller, ‘Interview’,pp.13–14. 31 Ibid., p. 14. 412 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY others’.32 Only with the recent appearance of her own audio recordings has Howe’s acoustic sensibility drawn the attention of readers.33 Ye t we can detect here, as early as the mid-1990s, the pleasure of ‘simply listen- ing’; an inclination, especially apparent in her late poetry, to organise her poetic materials in such a way as to make sound-patterning a constitutive Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 feature of her rising lyric economy. Souls of the Labadie Tract begins with a short ‘Errand’. It describes the journey of the Connecticut-born preacher Jonathan Edwards, who for a spell in the 1730s conveyed the word of God from parish to parish, docu- menting what he found along the way in a series of travel notes appended to his clothes, ‘fixing in his mind an association between the location of the paper and the particular insight’ (Souls, p. 9). An errand, as the vi- gnette reveals in its depiction of Edwards’s ride through the woods of New England, is an admixture of mission and vocation: a prayer, a journey, a business affair, an expedition into the unknown.34 But this errand does something more. As well as conveying you forward, as if on the back of the missionary’s horse, into the poems that follow, the piece also trots out a familiar poetic terrain, partly borrowed from a colleague of Howe’s father, and variously peopled by the orators and poets who have frequently guided Howe’s passage through literary history – the by now familiar figures of Hope Atherton, Henry David Thoreau, and Wallace Stevens.35 The ‘gaunt and solitary traveller’ Jonathan Edwards himself transports the reader back to My Emily Dickinson, where he first appeared in the role of Dickinson’s ‘enlightened’ predecessor; a rhetorician whose ‘apocalyptic sermons’ spoke directly not to his parishioners alone, but also to later, attentive readers, who found themselves shocked into a ‘new way of perceiving’ by his ‘facts charged with meaning’ (MED,pp.47–54). To perceive his voice materializing again over twenty years later, calling Howe’s book into being, is to see a once violent poetics in the act of doubling back: sounding and

32 Thomas Gardner, ‘Interview with Susan Howe’ and ‘Words Sound Other Ways: Susan Howe’s Prose’,inA Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (Oxford 2006) p. 139. 33 For one of the first assessments of Howe’s recorded poetry, see Will Montgomery, ‘Appropriating Primal Indeterminacy: Language, Landscape and Postmodern Poetics in Susan Howe’s Thorow’, Textual Practice, 20 (2006) pp. 739– 57. 34 OED,1–3. 35 Howe’s ‘errand’ titularly remembers Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass. 1956). For Miller’s relationship with Mark De Wolfe Howe, see The Birth-mark, pp. 160–1. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 413 re-sounding voices of a familiar past, and reweighing the ‘felt fact’ of their sudden reappearance (Souls,p.9). The sense that you’ve been here before, in the company of these voices, is sharpened in the following excursion (‘Personal Narrative’), which begins to rework the history of one ‘phantom’ in particular, the Reverend Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 Hope Atherton, who first emerged from the ‘vocalized wilderness’ of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.36 Rather than re-voicing the origins of Atherton’s story in the terms provided by the earlier poem, ‘Personal Narrative’ recollects the technique and materials of montage that choked the prose introduction of ‘Thorow’. In that piece, as we have seen, Howe’s narrative voice instantly cedes the field of articulation to the reports of other itinerants. ‘Personal Narrative’ bears the visible traces of a similar attack of polyglossia: the congestion of voices – George Sheldon’s, Thoreau’s, Howe’s – is registered first by the eye, as the page-spacing, jus- tification of margins, and insertion of manuscript reproductions encourage you to see in Howe’sview‘each page [as] both picture and nonsense solilo- quy replete with transgressive nudges’ (Souls, p. 17). But where the initial transgressions of voice in ‘Thorow’ nudge the poem towards its collaged climax, ‘Personal Narrative’ foregrounds instead the acoustic repercussions of congregating a strewn chorus, its more cautious pagination prudently designed to ease the passage of the eye in favour of recruiting the ear as well. So the texture of these pages might come as a shock to the reader who expects typographical fireworks. Choosing to read them, rather, means lending an ear to a voice that seems just a little spooked by its own materiality:

My retrospective excursions follow the principle that ghosts wrapped in appreciative obituaries by committee members, or dedications pre- sented at vanished community field meetings, can be reanimated by appropriation. Always remembering while roving through centuries that, apart from call number coincidence, there is no inherent reason a particular scant relic and curiosity should be in position to be acci- dentally grasped by a quick-eyed reader in reference to clapping.

Hook intelligence quick dactyl Bats glance through a wood Bond between mad and maid anonymous communities bond and free

36 Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987), repr. in Singularities,p.17. 414 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

Perception crumbles under character Present past of imminent future

(Souls,p.15) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

In stark relief to the textual disruptions that characterise Howe’s early work, we see here an attempt to assuage that trauma by the means of a sort of talking cure. All the more strange, then, that we should discover the poet in therapeutic dialogue with herself – her present, prose voice giving way to that of her early poetic life (resurrected from Articulation of Sound Forms in Time). To read this passage, indeed, is to see and hear a lyric tongue slipping back into old habits. Howe encourages us to be ‘quick-eyed’, and the observant reader will notice correspondences, flitting from the lines of poetry back up the page to words embedded in the prose. On reading ‘quick dactyl’,youfind yourself nipping up to ‘quick- eyed reader’; and the mention of a ‘hook’ has exactly that effect, hooking and wiring the passages together as ‘hook intelligence’ seems to reel in the semantic sense of the previous line (‘accidentally grasped’). Springing from line to line in a kind of visual acrobatics, rereading and noticing correspondences, certainly bolsters the sense that a jumpy lyric intelligence is limbering up behind these utterances. But it requires a stretch of the critical imagination to suppose that the ‘reanimat[ion]’ of a lyric presence depends either first or wholly on a nimble eye. A ghost-hunting vigilance can take you a long way, but what this passage also requires of its reader is a sensitivity to the reverberations of a voice choosing and re-choosing its words. If you notice the reunion of ‘vanished community field meetings’ several lines below it in ‘anonymous communi- ties’,orifyoufind yourself doubling back with the voice as it glances back to ‘roving through centuries’ in ‘glance through a wood’, it is not because the eye apprehends these reiterations; the optical leap is too great. More likely in the case of a silent reading, I think, is the simulation of a speaking presence. Mutlu Konuk Blasing puts it well:

Even a written text addresses the ear, what Stevens calls ‘the delicatest ear of the mind’. The ear certainly hears more than the eye can see in a text because we have to sound out the words internally, silently imitating the muscular activity of producing sounds in order to recog- nize the visual data that the eye has registered as words. Perception of words in poetry depends on the mouth-ear circuit; even when words are not sounded, their ‘acoustic and motor images’ are invoked (as in ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 415 ‘interior speech’) to make for words … Groups of jumbled letters may be visually registered, but they don’t become words or sentences unless the ear can hear them said; they must be processed through the mouth-ear circuit.37 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

At a time when those interested in Howe’s voice will be tempted to turn to her audio recordings, Blasing’s argument for ‘interior speech’ is a useful reminder that a textual approach to a poetics of sound is still pos- sible and necessary.38 It is an argument, too, that helps in Howe’s case to clarify an occasionally vague and mystical praxis. Her synaesthetic fond- ness for ‘font voices summon[ing] a reader into visible earshot’ (p. 15) begins to sound more manageable, and indeed more precise, when you are alert to the workings of the ‘mouth-ear circuit’; an apparatus attuned, in Paul Rodaway’s words, to the ‘vibration and resonance of substances’.39 Reading may commence with ‘Groups of jumbled letters’–so many of Howe’s poems do exactly that – but her late lyricism depends, perhaps as her poetry has never done before, on permitting those letters to thicken, internally, into the substance of a recognisable voice. One of the challenges of Souls consists, then, in perceiving the frictions of a voice playing over and with our inner ears. Sounding the depths of Howe’s prose reveals more, indeed, than the smooth plot of a narrative. To return to the transition of prose into poetic voice (on page 15) is to catch the occasional sound cluster, as when ‘remembering’ appears to re- member some of the energy of ‘committee members’ from the previous sentence; or when the last sibilant phoneme of ‘coincidence’ instigates a musical pattern, first in ‘reference’ and then in ‘intelligence’. It may not be the ‘clapping’ Howe has in mind, but the last clicking syllable of ‘relic’ similarly ricochets from line to line –‘quick … hook … quick … dactyl’– a snappy stream of sound that registers, even in the act of silent reading, the pressure of a voice quickening to life on the page. The acoustic energy that propels the ‘Personal Narrative’ finds release in the central piece of the book, ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’. It is a poem concerned, as ‘Thorow’ was, for a voice caught between states:

37 Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton 2007) p. 39. 38 Howe has collaborated on disc three times with musician David Grubbs: Thiefth (2005), Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), and Frolic Architecture (2011), all on the Blue Chopsticks label. 39 Rodaway’s excellent Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London 1994) pursues in more detail the significance of internal speech and its ‘biorhythms’: pp. 90–1. 416 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY [The Labadists] settled in Bohemia Hundred, Cecil County, Maryland, where Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland meet. …

Jean de Labadie. His reach is through language hints; through notes Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 and maps. In the lapse of time the pressure of others. So it’s telepath- ic though who knows why or in what way. … When Samuel Bownas visited the site in 1727, ‘these people were all scattered and gone, and nothing of them remained of a religious community in that shape’. (Souls,pp.23–4)

The figure of Jean de Labadie is new to Howe’s poetic landscape, but the mention of ‘the members’ of his utopian sect briefly reunites the reader with the ‘committee members’ commemorated in the ‘Personal Narrative’. There, Howe speaks of ‘the telepathic solicitation of innumer- able phantoms’ rushing forward ‘under pressure of arrest’ (Souls, p. 18), and the rush of this poem also has something to do with registering ‘the pressure of others’. Here, too, the mode of telepathy is ghosted brieflyas a means of access to the quietists’ hushed history (‘though who knows why or in what way’), along with a series of more tangible materials, ‘notes and maps’, variously punctuated with the ‘language hints’ of Labadie and his followers. The ‘scattered’ fate of the Labadist sect, which the poem chronicles in a series of forty-four short lyrics, recalls the intertextual scatterings of ‘Thorow’. Will Montgomery has written persuasively of the Jamesian in- fluence in this poem, one that inches into the text in a series of lines from a concordance to The Awkward Age, and there are other borrowings, uncov- ered in my own digging, that go unacknowledged, like those from the archaeological history which provides the poem with a web rosette, a winged effigy and ‘the hard | dark slate of Pin Hill Quarry’, as well as a choice of tools (the pickaxe on page 36, perhaps) that will be of use to the Labadists as they resume their ‘manual labor’ (Souls, p. 24).40 Such bor- rowings take their place alongside allusions to Edward Taylor’s Christographia and Andrea Alciato’s book of emblems in a poem that sends us back, characteristically, to the library. Rather than offering a line-to-line reading of the poem and its sources, I want to track the most striking and pervasive of its borrowed voices. For among its polyphony of materials, ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’ boasts a

40 Montgomery, The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority (Basingstoke 2010) pp. 162–3. The source of Howe’s archaeological borrowings is Allan I. Ludwig’s Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650–1815 (Middletown 1966; repr. 1999) pp. 358 and 373. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 417 theatrical and less obviously graphic pedigree. If Howe hints in the opening ‘Errand’ at a kind of verbal asceticism (‘Words give clothing to hide our nakedness’), then the puritanical habit of making do is swiftly made up with some dramatic colour: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021

Greenest green your holy cope feigned cope and tinsel cap Green cloud conceals green valley nothing but green continually moving then (Souls,pp.28–9)

An unlikely guide for Jean de Labadie, perhaps, the voice to take charge of this opening passage is Thomas Campion’s, whose Jacobean masques provide throughout the poem a musical vocabulary with which to coax the Labadists out of their silence.41 The first page of the poem registers a voice fretting over ‘truth and trust’, a common enough topic for a religious sect concerned to establish what ‘we are come to’ (Souls, p. 27). They do not come to much, these first six spare lines; but an instance of ‘blunder[ing] in our blind | world’ unearths, over the page, the more promising circumstances of Campion’s ‘green valley’, described at the be- ginning of The Lord Hay’s Masque (p. 211). Whisking up the ‘tinsel cap’ from the finale of another of Campion’s pieces (the Somerset Masque, p. 272), Howe proceeds to give her voice some sparkle, though the interest here, with only a colour palette of ‘Greenest green’, principally consists in some delicate phonic shading. The trochaic skip of ‘Greenest green your holy cope’ cannot proceed beyond the next line, but small morphologies of phrase and phoneme indicate a voice chewing over its linguistic material. The ‘holy cope’ belongs to one of the Labadists, we presume, out and about, spreading his message. But if this cope sounds a little thickly trimmed (an ecclesiastical garment needlessly embellished with the ‘holy’ label), then it is instantly earmarked for a spot of restyling. From a ‘feigned cope’, through a well cut ‘tinsel cap’,toa‘skin coat’ in the poem’s final lines (p. 70), hardly a stitch is missed as Howe picks up and pulls the word apart, finding holes in the ‘holy cope’ of a voice torn between the business of church and the theatre.

41 References to Campion’s masques and poems in the text are taken from The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (London 1969). 418 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY Such rearrangements – of dress and style, but especially of the printed character on the page – speak for the guiding impetus of this thingly poetics, one whose words have found their way onto paper ‘with soil stick- ing to their roots’ (p. 16). ‘[C]ontinually moving’ expresses well the tex- tured sound-patterning of this poem, and so we move on as well, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 continuing to the next page to discover the music of a courtly masque:

Poetry you may do the map of Hell softly one voice with viol in green habit or consort of twelve Maniacs and Fantastics in measured epic dactyl Far back thinner coranto one Labadist one Cynic (Souls,p.30)

The ‘measured epic dactyl’ probably belongs to the poem that follows The Lord Hay’s Masque, in which Campion allows ‘Epicke Dactils’ their range even as he attempts some ‘smooth and gentle verse’ for the ‘soft eares’ of his audience (p. 228). Howe fluffs Campion’s adjective up into an adverb in an effort ‘softly’ to cushion her ‘map of Hell’, but these sonic grids are prickly to the ear. The ‘consort of twelve’ and ‘green | habit’ hail, once again, from The Lord Hay’s Masque, a troupe of ‘Maniacs and Fantastics’. The duet of ‘one | voice with viol’ gives way to a ‘coranto’–a dance, in The Lords’ Masque, to mark the passing regal train (p. 239), but which, here, verges on a royal noise, punctuated by a round of plosives (‘Maniacs … Fantastics … epic … dactyl … back’) and erratically stressed. If, for a moment, Howe’s sprightly consort seems to recall T. S. Eliot’s dancing figure (‘The complete consort dancing together’), then it is rapidly allowed to dwindle and slow, ‘far back’, and ‘thinner’ than the exacting refrain of ‘Little Gidding’.42 In this poem you are never allowed to forget for long which souls you should be listening to: alongside ‘one Cynic’, hired from Campion’s Lords’ Masque (pp. 235–6), ‘one Labadist’ pops up on cue. This is as it should be, perhaps, knowing what we do about the Labadists’ misguided

42 Four Quartets,inThe Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (New York 1952) p. 144. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 419 attention-seeking. T. J. Saxby explains that the sect, though eager to ‘spread the new oeuvre de dieu’ as Howe claims (Souls, p. 23), ‘had little concept of mission’, and felt called to preach to communities that were resolutely deaf to its teachings, unwilling to ‘heed … its message’.43 Howe’s poem memorialises the failed vocation of a missionary community Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 just arrived in Maryland, unnoticed (and unheard) by history. But it also fleshes out, this ‘loose ramshackle | extract poem’ (p. 53), an imagined and provisional genealogy for the community, which draws together, into one vast sound environment, the ‘Verbal echoes’ of various textual tradi- tions (p. 58). We have already noted Campion’s early intervention in the poem, but proof of his animating presence is scattered throughout its compact lyric divisions. As night descends on page 48, ‘wire | artificial bats and owls’ are revealed, lifted from The Lord Hay’s Masque (p. 212), and on page 33 a single ‘screech-owl feather’–plucked from Campion’s ‘Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes in the ayre’ (p. 154) – flutters into view. More than loaning a wardrobe of props, Campion thickens the poem’s atmosphere:

I’ll borrow chapel voices Song and dance of treble bass for remembrance Stilt- Walker Plate-Spinner air piebaldly dressed heart’s content embroidered note Distant diapason delight (Souls,p.31)

The trim blocks of text that seem in other parts of the poem to intimate a Dickinsonian neatness relax here into seven lines, providing a more ex- pansive acoustic for the ‘chapel voices’ on loan from The Lord Hay’s Masque (p. 211). The rich quality of the poetic space is concentrated in the word ‘air’, a breathable atmosphere, but also an environment laced with music.44 It is a difficult music, perhaps, and the cadence of these broken utterances does not always fall where you would expect. John Wilkinson complains of ‘little local satisfaction’ in these stilted lines, but

43 The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht 1987) p. 273. 44 OED, II, 10a: Air: ‘A tune, a melody’. 420 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY this is a matter of taste as well as scope.45 ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’ is a sequence guided, after all, by an appetite for foreign textual traditions, and if you can see beyond its narrow prosodic interest there is a certain pleasure in witnessing the interludial activity of a poem open to other voices. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 The rhapsody, here, is transposed from Campion’s Lords’ Masque (p. 241), where a hectic ‘Song and dance of treble | bass’ counterpoints a voice of intricate disguise, ‘piebaldly dressed’ in the fashion of the garden- er in the Lords’ Masque (p. 240), performing to its ‘heart’s | content’. There is a hint, too, of the carnival about this procession (‘Stilt- | Walker Plate-Spinner’), and a leaning in the final line for a theatrical flourish, as each alliterating syllable registers the percussive beginning of its attendants (‘Di … dia … de’). In carrying a ‘rich, full, deep outburst of sound’ into this line, the ‘diapason’ of The Lord Hay’s Masque brings with it a precise musical significance: ‘the combination of parts or notes in a harmonious whole, properly in concord’.46 Howe’s poem refuses to coalesce so neatly, and it would be a surprise, in any case, to find this poet suddenly in harmony with her materials. And yet a sensitivity to the lyric’s sound deposits might find you in wholesome concordance with this voice as it progresses along its short, dense line, ascending through the vowel scale and climaxing in the word ‘delight’: ‘Distant diapason delight’. To under- take the ascent with it – to feel the sound clusters rising in your mouth, one word calling the next into being – is not merely to find your mouth-ear circuit fully operational. It may also be to feel the full, insistent pressure of a lyric voice rising off the page, delightfully, into visible earshot. The sensation of grappling through Souls offers a peculiar sort of satis- faction. Some readers will find little to choose between the difficulties posed by Howe’s early work and the challenges, broached in this essay, of her late style. And if her recent poetry has explored more keenly the mys- terious bind of ear and eye – the notion, suggestively put to an interview- er, that ‘the mind is a theatre’–it does not follow that Howe has given up entirely on her visual experiments.47 You need only look to the last piece of Souls, ‘Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards’,to witness the artist-poet still playfully engaged with her ‘alphabetic charac- ters’, restlessly searching for a new point of view (p. 122). Even so, as the

45 ‘The American Tract: Susan Howe. Souls of the Labadie Tract’, Notre Dame Review, 27 (2009) pp. 241–7: 244. 46 OED, n. 4 and 3a. 47 Gardner, A Door Ajar, p. 141. ‘ VISIBLE EARSHOT’ 421 volume’s title poem reaches a close, it is difficult not to feel that Howe has put something more considerable to rest:

“America in a skin coat the color of the juice of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/41/4/397/326978 by guest on 28 September 2021 mulberries” her fantastic cap full of eyes will lead our way as mind or ears Goodnight goodnight (Souls,p.70)

To the Shakespearian ear, this could sound like a premonitory leave- taking, the end of the line for a voice concerned, like the crazed Ophelia, to bid ‘good night, good night’ to its attendants and audience.48 But that familiar parting expression also gestures to the closing air of Campion’s Somerset Masque, a song to wish the newlyweds ‘goodnight, goodnight’ as they sail off to sleep.49 It is in picking at the materials of this masque that Howe finds a way to wrap up her poem: a mixture of Curiosity, who appears at the beginning of the masque in ‘a skin coate full of eyes’, and of another allegorical figure, America, who dances into the nuptial feast in the colour of mulberry (pp. 271–2). And so, with some curious assem- bly work, Howe finally finds her voice, distinctly imprinted with the name of her home. The eye might skim over it, but if you pause to allow the mind’s ear its proper freedom, you can hear in that perfectly weighted measure –‘of eyes will lead | our way as mind or ears’–a quiet, heroic departure.

48 Hamlet, IV. v. 73, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston 1974) p. 1221. 49 The musical setting of Campion’s song by Giovanni Coperario follows the text in Works, pp. 282–3. The masque was first performed at the wedding of Frances Howard and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset.