James McCorkle

mccorkle@epix.net

 

The work of the contemporary experimental poet Susan Howe undertakes the formation as well as retrieval of a prophetic poetics. By shifting the attention from writer to reader there is a similar shift from prophet to prophesy, from the one who prophesies to the oracle’s graphesis–its condition for reading. Howe’s poetics underscores not only the importance of writing, but also the consequences of reading, and the necessity of developing a pluralistic, participatory–hence prophetic and visionary–modality of reading. Prophecy entails not an appropriation or consumption of the language nor the reversal, the swallowing up of ourselves. Rather, prophecy agitates the space of language: it opens rifts, insists on waywardness, to be unhoused in and by language.

 

Howe signals the importance of prophecy as a process of pre-figurement and indicates her own engagement with that process. The prophetic word, like the poetic, signals something coming, the advent or arrival of event, effect, or experience. Writing in The Birth-mark of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, Howe states, “this captivity narrative is both a microcosm of colonial imperialist history and a prophecy of our own contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness” (B 89). Howe’s prophetic poetics, as exemplified by her Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, depends upon a retrieval and re-habitation of history and puts into question our position in history: “Collision or collusion with history” (S 33). History, arguably, possesses us; Howe offers a poetry that foregrounds the interpretive process by which we read our identities and positions within history.

 

Howe’s poetry offers what Heidegger, in his Discourse on Thinking, would call an “openness to the mystery” [Offenheit für das Geheimnis]. Heidegger proposes a way of maintaining a meditative, not calculative, mode of thinking that involves a “releasement toward things” [Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen] implicitly informed by early German mysticism (54-55). Heidegger’s argument describes a comportment of being and thinking–that is, an interpretive process. Gerald Bruns explains:

 

what happens in the hermeneutical experience is that we are placed in the open, in the region of the question.... The hermeneutical experience in this respect is always subversive of totalization or containment... this means the openness of tradition to the future, its irreducibility to the library or museum or institutions of cultural transmission, its resistance to closure, its uncontainability within finite interpretations (tradition is not an archive). (8-9)

 

This approach eschews any normative, disciplined method of exegesis.

 

Contact with the otherness of history involves what Heidegger called in Identity and Difference the “step back” [der Schritt zurück] (59). Rather than the recuperation of old positions, by stepping back instead one faces an ainigma or dark saying: “it is not to be penetrated or laid open to view,” writes Bruns, “there is no way of shedding light on what it means in the sense of a content or message that can be conceptually retrieved” (69). This contact with history parallels Bruns’s description of poetry as the “renunciation of meaning as that which grasps and fixes, that which produces determinate objects” (106). Introducing Heidegger, particularly through Bruns’s inspired reading, gestures toward many of the concerns of Howe. Heidegger’s thinking on poetry insists upon poetry as the “giving up of refuge in the familiar or the same” (185) and “exposes us to that which manifests itself as alien and inaccessible the way… language speaks as that which withholds itself” (184). Poetry refuses to be mastered, nor does it master others–it remains outside control. Poetry, then, as exemplified by Howe’s work, becomes a language marked by extremity and crisis.¹

 

If poetry is this renunciation and estrangement, working against the unified and foundational, then we must confront a “re-visioning” of ourselves as readers, to use Adrienne Rich’s term (Rich 35), to pose the question what we read for, that is to pose the question of linguistic mastery. First published as a chapbook in 1987, Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, a representative text of hers, prophesies and acts as a radical didactic process. Readings that seek to provide a literal outline or narrative, such as those by Marjorie Perloff and Linda Reinfeld, quickly acknowledge the difficulty of such an endeavor: Perloff begins by attempting to trace a narrative–and indeed that is our first response as readers–but she quickly breaks off that line of exegesis and notes that not only “does Howe frequently decompose, transpose, and re-figure the word… she [also] consistently breaks down or, as John Cage would put it, ‘demilitarizes’ the syntax of her verbal units” (305). Reinfeld argues that “[t]o the degree that language makes sense, to the extent that it forges connections, it risks falsity and bad faith: it becomes regimental, the enemy. Only those chosen are saved and only the poet–specifically, the poet set apart by a capacity for visionary experience–can hope to emerge from chaos with something like self-possession (‘My voice, drawn from my life, belongs to no one else’). As we move toward meaning, ‘deep so deep my narrative’, we move into a language so fluid that the rescue of reason becomes impossible” (140). The poem, in Reinfeld’s view, becomes an emptying of meaning and order from language and a movement toward innocence and renewal. By concluding that Howe’s poetry folds into the great Western cyclical myths, Reinfeld diminishes the localized displacements of order Howe explores simultaneously in a specific language and history. By casting the interpretive process into solitary communion, Reinfeld further undercuts Howe’s performative position as prophet, which has an implicit social role. Prophecy requires an audience: the source must have its seer, yet the seer must also have listeners.

 

Perloff interjects a specific polemic in her argument by seeing in Howe’s text a rebuttal to the packaged sentiments of a workshop poem and the need to re-vision history in poetry. Such a reading does locate rifts and locates Howe in particular contexts and lineages–but it also pulls away from any hermeneutical consideration, which I think the poem brilliantly offers. Reinfeld suggests a recuperative reading: that we do move toward “meaning”–implying that there is a point or final destination and that “self-possession” can be attained. Though the sense of self is left unclear, there is implied a unity of self–a movement from chaos to light or enlightenment?–that the poem, in fact, swerves us away from. Indeed, Reinfeld falls prey to that “regimental” exegesis–the belief in a final dwelling of meaning–that she otherwise argues against. As useful as Perloff’s and Reinfeld’s readings are–and they are very useful, for they do overturn the charge that Howe’s poetry is elitist and nonsensical–they also point to the entrapments reading confronts and the difficulty of eluding those traps.

 

The title, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, poses and exemplifies the difficulty of reading. “Articulation” is both linguistic practice as well as muscular kinesis. “Sound” implies not only vocality, but also safety and value, particularly in regard to financial risks, as well as a body of water and the plumbing of that depth (as Thoreau did, seeing the ruins beneath the water’s surface). “Forms” engages both as noun and verb. Lastly, “in time” suggests a border or margin, an extreme edge, a crisis averted. Howe presents the reader with a series of choices, not meaninglessness, but a series of choices whose reading will be dependent upon the cultural and historical positioning of the individual reader. Howe does not re-invoke the Emersonian ideal of the self-reliant individual, but re-visions the significance of that individual as mediated (or disciplined) by her or his culture.

 

To read becomes a series of retrievals: Howe’s own reading of Dickinson’s poetry, particularly “My Life had Stood–a Loaded Gun,” brilliantly defines this process. To begin her discussion of Dickinson’s poem, Howe generates a list, “Possibilities”:

 

My Life: A Soul Finding God.

 

My Life: A Soul finding herself.

 

My Life: A poet’s admiring heart born into voice by idealizing a precursor poet’s song.

 

My Life: Dickinson herself, waiting in corners of neglect for Higginson to recognize her ability and help her to join the ranks of other published American poets.

 

My Life: The American continent and its westward moving frontier. Two centuries of pioneer literature and myth has insistently compared the land to a virgin woman (bride and queen). Exploration and settlement were pictured in terms of masculine erotic discovery and domination of alluring / threatening feminine territory.

 

My Life: The savage source of American myth.

 

My Life: The United States in the grip of violence that threatened to break apart its original union.

 

My Life: A white woman taken captive by Indians.

 

My Life: A slave.

 

My Life: An unmarried woman (Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw) waiting to be chosen (unidentified) by her Lover-husband-Owner (Edgar Linton).

 

My Life: A frontiersman's gun. (MED 76-7)

 

This list subverts the dominance of any single theory or interpretation: reading becomes inclusive; there is no authoritative reading. The anaphora my life fuses the poem’s phrase with the colloquial and autobiographical writing of “my life” as well as with Howe’s possessive title My Emily Dickinson and its various implications, from interpretation to reading to Howe’s own poetry. “My” marks not only possession but also the transfer of possession. This list does not attempt to provide a summation or an ordering, for if a poet “is to be true to vision and possibility, to the continuing exertion of vision’s power, then all the hierarchies and closures of criticism must be resisted,” writes John Taggart on Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (172). Howe’s reading of Dickinson, like her reading of Melville or Rowlandson, puts our versions of our selves, histories, and world into question. To read prophetically is to read against realization, not toward an indeterminacy, but, to invoke Wallace Stevens, in a state of imaginative inquiry of the evidence or the real.²

 

Texts allow memory and limit memory: in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the opening documents seek to limit memory, to sum it up and thereby dismiss or contain memory. The first is Howe’s prose description of some of the conditions in May 1676 that led to the rout of English force, including the clergyman Hope Atherton, on the Connecticut River. At its conclusion, Howe asks, “In culture Hope is a name we give to women. Signifying desire, trust, promise, does her name prophetically engender pacification of the feminine?” (S 4). The second is an extract of a letter written a century later, seeming to discredit Atherton’s story. Placed in conjunction with Howe’s description and her concluding questions, we see a repetition of history and a failure to inquire of history; this is underscored by the resonance of the date of the Falls Fight 1676.

 

To unleash one memory is to release other voices, thus delimiting sources and origins. In her My Emily Dickinson, Howe states,

 

Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century. (MED 51)

 

To re-order the “forward process of reading” is a central element in Howe’s poetics and visionary reading. Slowing the consumption of text, resisting the emptying of language and the packaging of intellect and imagination becomes the task of the poet, then, in turn, of readers. As prophecy, Howe’s text re-orders our sense of time by stepping back, or re-visioning, so as to enter “an old text from a new critical direction,” which for women is “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (Rich 35). Prophecy locates one in history: Howe inserts herself into the lineage of Rowlandson, Dickinson, and Melville as well as letting the reading of one moment–Hope Atherton’s wanderings and rejection–prefigure, supplement, and reveal another cultural and historical moment.

 

Howe’s reading of Dickinson is a radical didactic, for in it she demonstrates the degree to which our reading of Dickinson has been policed, confined, and violently pacified. Her demonstration works as instruction, yet it does not assume the voice of master or authority; instead, the voice is relative yet possessed, as indicated by the word “my” in the title My Emily Dickinson. With each word, each of Howe’s texts necessitates choice, as the opening segment from the second section, “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time demonstrates:

 

Prest try to set after grandmother
revived by and laid down left ly
little distant each other and fro
Saw digression hobbling driftwood
forage two rotted beans & etc.
Redy to faint slaughter story so
Gone and signal through deep water
Mr. Atherton's story Hope Atherton  (S 6)

 

As many readers note, the opening word “Prest,” plays upon soundings of oppressed, pressed, impressed, and the sense of set after. However, read with the segment’s final line, the word suggests an urgency in maintaining an identity as an inviolate object–an “I”–rather than as a subject: the pres–sure of being (still) Hope Atherton, of being not reduced to someone’s (Mr. Atherton’s) story. The risk is to become story and then become marginalia, a curiosity discovered among one’s cluttered papers. Although this segment is most transparent, for the narrative of ambush, escape, and survival are apparent, so is the fragmentation and decomposition of the word. This is most apparent with ly. As Perloff notes, this little suffix can join with any number of words and works as well as a decomposition of lie, itself an ambiguous word (305). The reader must address each word as a signal coming “through deep water,” hence wavered, distorted, and transmuted.

 

Hope Atherton becomes a mirror for ourselves as readers. Harried both by Indians–in their war for survival–and the British militia, he is the prey of military actions. What he has seen must be confined, obliterated, or rendered silent. Only a certain reading is allowed, hence Hope Atherton is ostracized from his community, who do not believe his story. Our condition as readers then is resolved by and reflects our condition as a community. “Mythology,” writes Howe, “reflects a region’s reality” (MED 43). As the poem continues with Hope Atherton’s wanderings, the lines, writes Peter Quartermain on another of Howe’s poems but applicable here, “seem to register a process of perception and thought subject perpetually and continuously to re-casting, re-seeing, re-vision. They register a process of cogitating, meditating, and exploring an old enigma, endemic perhaps to all human culture but especially acute in the history of New England, perpetually evoked and invoked by the complex of the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the cultivated and the wild: The relations between the real and the visionary” (187). Quartermain’s comment, echoing Heidegger’s proposal of stepping back and exploring the enigmatic or the otherness of history, emphasizes the local in terms of geography and language. Quartermain, however, affirms a binary structure that Howe, in her visionary capacity, seeks to avoid. For instance, Howe does not negate the opposition of “the cultivated and the wild” but rather finds it inadequate. That we allow language to fail by re-enacting such dualisms, indeed by becoming through our words purely oppositional, demonstrates our crisis.

 

Howe does not accommodate the reader: Atherton’s wanderings become our own as we construct readings–and question their foundations–from the gatherings of words. Words reveal their localness, habitation, or sited-ness:

 

scow aback din

flicker skaeg ne

barge quagg peat

sieve catacomb

stint chisel sect  (S 10)

 

In this ninth segment, with its fourth line crossed out but not erased, Atherton finds himself re-counting the miasma of his wanderings, yet we are drawn back to foundational words. For example, “ne” appears fractured and incomprehensible, yet it is an obsolete form for nephew, and more importantly, it is an archaic form of not, and part of the negative structure of neither… nor. It also serves as a homophone for knee, and so points to the kinetic qualities of language as well as Atherton’s flight.

 

If we follow the Oxford English Dictionary, itself a lexicon of certain relations of history and power, “quagg,” or quag as the dictionary has it, is identified with marshy, boggy ground, is a descriptor for flabby, unsound flesh, and forms a verb, to submerge. Submerged in this quag is “skaeg,” which is not found in the O.E.D., but which is homophonically related to “quagg” as well as suggestive of the fracturing of American Indian languages, such as the Narraganset. Also, it prefigures–in regard to Howe’s work–and echoes Melville’s “Queequeg.” Emerging from dialects and perhaps onomatopoeic formations, as well as mutations of American Indian words, words such as “quagg” make their first recorded appearance, according to the O.E.D., just prior to Atherton’s wanderings and the early wars against the Indians typified by the Falls Fight. Hope Atherton’s vision, cast in the ambiguous outline of forest and syntax, is the hope-less destruction of wilderness and otherness: the cultivation of land and the harnessing of language. In the figure of Hope Atherton, Howe reads the consequences of Cartesian dualism: the exaggerated and hence distorted position of humans as fully distinguished and separated from nature and the further distinction between nature as a subject of theory and wilderness as perceived through experience.³ The Cartesian split between the human and nature parallels the schism between reader and writer, the text and the reading. The generation and textual as well as muscularly oral articulation of sound (forms) moves toward an eros or play of language, and away from normalizing distinctions and codes, away from the separation of body, cognition, and world.

 

Are we then caught in a miasma–a defilement–of sound and meaning, or are we asked to interrogate the origins of words for the latent struggles of power and meaning? If the latter, then what of the seeming directive of the excised, but not removed “sieve catacomb”? A notation against the excavation of word-tombs? A notation against the impulse to “chisel” and “stint” words into tombs or “sects”? To “stint” a word, to stop its movement and flow, to assuage its pain, and the rupturing of instinct, is Hope Atherton’s fate: his vision of the forest, the violence unleashed, is stinted by his sect.

 

Howe directs us to this close, demanding reading–and the realization that all readings will be stinted–through her circular constructions, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth sections. This is not a palindrome, but an articulation of sound, that is the pronouncement of movement. In the articulation of movement back-and-forth, oscillation, retrieval, and continuity become important rather than a shift to the symbolic ordering of Return and Organic Wholeness associated with the image of the circle. Reading the final words of section fourteen, “see step shot Immanence force to Mohegan,” which are reversed to become the first words of the next section as well as typographically compressed, connections between words are fluid. Yet “Immanence,” with its Dickinsonian capitalization, is destroyed. To lift a passage out and isolate it from the text is to risk perpetuating violence, and yet such is Howe’s own compositional method.

 

The third section of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, “Taking the Forest,” is comprised of twenty-five segments composed primarily in declarative couplets. The highly stressed, compact lines never rupture as they do in “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings.” Instead these lines seem set as “Letters sent out in crystalline purity” (S 22). Hank Lazer helpfully suggests that in Howe’s writing there are

 

several noteworthy lyricisms: A lyricism of "disturbance" (of syntax and the layout of the page), that concentrates attention on the individual word, or even the syllables or letters in a word, as well as the word's placement on the page; a lyricism of statement in which the "philosophical" or didactic also sings; and a lyricism of historical fact, acting as an image or epiphanic vortex, often intensified by its opposition to accepted or normative historical accounts. (63-4)

 

Lazer’s “lyricism of statement” describes this third and final section. Single lines, a single couplet, or even a grouping of couplets often form an oracular meaning. In segment seven, one of two (the other being the sixth segment), which is composed in single lines not couplets, there is a tension between the line as isolated meaning or prophesy and the entire segment as narrative (a recapitulation of the Falls Fight):

 

Shouting an offering

Messengers falter

Obedient children elder and ever

Lawless center

Scaffold places to sweep

unfocused future

Migratory path to massacre

Sharpshooters in history's apple-dark    
                               (S 22)

 

Howe names the condition “Lawless center,” a cipher loosed from the draft of history, a rejection of that pleading Yeatsian vision in “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” That tightened circle of falcon and falconer, of unity (but also that celebrated predatory violence that sweeps through Yeats’s work), is the early American town’s green, that of stocks and “Scaffold places.”

 

Howe offers a spiritual history that forms an ongoing prophecy: the twenty-second segment opens with the line “Latin ends and French begins” thus compressing the transformation of languages that coincides with the shift of power, the rise of the vernacular, and the nation-state. By compression–an exercise of violence itself–Howe is able to delineate the history of the taking of the forest:

 

Caravels bending to windward

Crows fly low and straggling
Civilizations stray into custom

Struts structure luminous region
Purpose or want of purpose

Part of each kingdom of Possession

Only conceived can be seen
Original inventors off Stray

Alone in deserts of Parchment
Theoreticians of the Modern

--emending annotating inventing
World as rigorously related System

Pagan worlds moving toward destruction 
                                (S 35)

 

Like Blake reading the already and always past, or Dickinson reading the Abstract and Luminous, Howe prophesies in what we know what we are becoming still. By moving toward prophecy, Howe eludes the claim of authorship. Heidegger’s description of poetry, that of the renunciation of linguistic mastery and an opening to language’s danger or mystery, informs Howe’s Hope Atherton. In every word, Howe implies at the poem’s conclusion, occurs the “Archaic presentiment of rupture” (S 38).

 

In Howe’s poetry, the withdrawal of an identifiable authorial “I” re-emphasizes the demands placed upon the reader. Writing has ceased, but the act of interpretation continues. Howe’s work suggests her own reading–each text is never complete, each word a presentiment. Howe inserts herself into the canon through the interrogation of those texts (of Dickinson, Thoreau, Melville, Rowlandson), as Megan Williams argues, thus rescuing herself for posterity. As Williams notes, the reader of Howe’s texts, when faced with the blankness often surrounding the words, faces “the threat that words and literary stature can be reduced and written out of history” (110). Williams continues, arguing with acuity that the study of literary history in general does not acknowledge the choices individuals make in constructing chronologies so as to “create an ordered present that is a coherent continuation and conflation of our personal past” (121). When examining the prose sections that begin Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the work becomes a clear demonstration of the process Williams describes: Atherton–and his writing–are lost because they do not conform to the history of the unfolding dominion over the forest.

 

While Howe does place herself in the lineage of Rowlandson, Dickinson, and Melville, she does so as a prophet and thus inflects our readings with their own historical value. As Williams and Peter Nicholls have argued, Howe’s investment in colonial history may respond in part to a patrimony from which she has been excluded: her father was a Harvard historian interested in the colonial period. Yet Howe seldom asserts her own authoritative “I” that would thus displace the father or the Harvard academic circle. Rather, her non-authoritative, anonymous positioning recalls Dickinson’s or Melville’s position outside the margins, a situation pre-figured in Atherton’s wanderings which take him from his community.

 

The reader assumes the responsibility of making meaningful the text; this is not to say that Howe has made meaningless works, but rather part of her work’s significance (its signifying value) is the need for the reader to participate in the signifying process. This involves one’s own meditation both on the historical context of reader and text and on the historicity of words. As Mark Long has argued, texts are not simply objects to use, nor are “readings simply successive appropriations of the object-text” with the ensuing “effect of discontinuing as well as deauthorizing a continued process of inquiry” (95). In regard to Dickinson, Howe writes that “[p]oetry is never a personal possession. The poem was a vision and gesture before it became sign and coded exchange in a political economy of value” (B 147). Echoing Stevens in her claims for poetry, Howe contends that poetry transcends critical practice, and in fact jeopardizes that professionalization of language and reading: “Poetry is the great stimulation of life…. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation” (MED 138). Cultural institutions mediate and discipline–and as Howe demonstrates, violate that vision, as in the case of Dickinson, out of the fear of otherness, the forest, and eros.

 

Hope Atherton’s “wanderings”–as opposed to the disciplinary and teleological sense of journey–reiterate the necessity, and danger, of being open to mystery. Wandering suggests never reaching one’s goal and indeed, perhaps never fully positing a goal to be reached. Nonetheless, Howe suggests we are carried by “hope”–the word itself–as Atherton’s name became the figure for himself, or he the figure for the word. Atherton, wandering between forest and town, becomes a liminal figure. He prophetically occupies borders and becomes a specter from regions of otherness. He is in trespass, a kinsman to the “Shoal kinsmen trespass Golden / Smoke splendor trespass” (S 32). These “Shoal kinsmen”–thronging and skeletal, from the related Old English sceald from the word shallows–rise to the surface in this eighteenth section of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time from “muffled discourse from distance / mummy thread undertow slough” (S 32). Atherton, in his liminality, also carries us into, and prophetically summons forth, that other region:

 

Eve of origin Embla the eve
soft origin vat and covert

Green hour avert grey future
Summer summon out-of-bound shelter  (S 32)

 

Howe trebles the feminine origin: Eve, Embla (the first woman in Norse mythology created from an elm), and eve. The line suggests no unitary source but rather multiple sources, hence multiple identities and readings. The palindrome of “eve” is echoed in the line’s phrasing, which further suggests the fluidity of time and identity. It is at such moment that reading as a discipline becomes ungoverned, perhaps dangerous, but also fruitful.

 

These lines carry the force of prophecy as a form of stepping back to confront history, in that prophecy collapses time into the event of the utterance: the past informs the present in ways requiring participatory interpretation. Atherton’s wanderings has led to “Taking the Forest,” which suggests an ongoing rapine whose history has not yet concluded. Poet and prophet can still invoke “Green hour avert grey future,” which implies, as Howe has put it, a “redemption from pessimism.” This moment, although coming in the final third of “Taking the Forest,” must be tempered by the scene of the penultimate section of receding scenes:

 

Last line of hills

Lost fact dim outline

Little figure of mother

Moss pasture and wild trefoil
meadow-hay and timothy

She is and the way She was

Outline was a point chosen
Outskirts of ordinary

Weather in history and heaven

Skiff feather glide house

Face seen in a landscape once   (S 37)

 

Embla and Eve, the “little figure of mother,” are superimposed and become that “Face seen in a landscape once.” That the world is rendered as landscape, and particularly a pastoral one of “meadow-hay and timothy,” suggests a depletion, at least in our language’s capacity to realize, of the nexus of the feminine, the land’s greenness, and eros.

 

Countering the tonal nostalgia of the previous section, Howe concludes Articulation of Sound Forms in Time with the bleak assessment that Atherton’s wanderings are already figured in earlier histories:

 

To kin I call in the Iron-Woods
Turn I to dark Fells last alway

Theirs was an archheathen theme
Soon seen stumbled in lag Clock

Still we call bitterly bitterly
Stern norse terse ethical pathos

Archaic presentiment of rupture
Voicing desire no more from here

Far flung North Atlantic littorals

Lif sails off longing for life
Baldr soars on Alfather's path

Rubble couple on pedestal
Rubble couple Rhythm and Pedestal

Room of dim portraits here there
Wade waist deep maidsworn men

Crumbled masonry windswept hickory (S 38)

 

Through her highly stressed syllables and internal rhymes, Howe moves from the nostalgic awareness of recollected loss to the moment of history–if history in its very moment of enactment could be uttered. In the edition published by Wesleyan University Press, a typographical bar separates this final section of text from the blank final third of the page: as if there were more–a still earlier history now silenced, or as if the whiteness threatened to over-run the text. Or as if that space, with its traditional association of whiteness-virginity-Nature, were soon to be cultivated.

 

The closing passage, nonetheless, enacts another stepping back, pointing toward the Norse sagas, diaspora, and bleak destruction. Those “Far flung North Atlantic littorals,” as Perloff suggests, point to Howe’s predecessors such as Melville, Crane, and Olson (310). More importantly, however, it is also Howe’s invocation, or nekkia, or voyage to the underworld’s realm to seek knowledge. “To kin I call in the Iron-woods” encapsulates the poet’s passage into the otherness of history, her realization of her own prophetic calling, and her return with those gifts of poetic and prophetic language. With the poem’s concluding line, “Crumbled masonry windswept hickory” (S 38), the prophet’s and poet’s possession of knowledge is revealed; her warning of desolation sweeps around us.

Notes

 

1. See Allan Megill’s Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida for discussions of Heidegger’s rhetoric of crisis and the prophetic element within his writings (128-36, 142-170). While constituting parallels between Howe and Heidegger, rhetorical formations such as the creation of a genealogy and the location of moments of crisis are more useful as general elements describing a prophetic poetic. It is Heidegger’s views on poetry that remain critically compelling and instructive for creating ways of reading, especially texts such as Howe’s. Nonetheless, Howe’s insistence upon the specificity of history–but not simply a reiteration of the given–distinguishes her poetics from Heidegger’s.

 

2. Complementing Dickinson’s poetics and Howe’s reading of them are such statements as these by Stevens from Necessary Angels: “Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words” (33), and “It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential” (33) and “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real” (6); from Opus Posthumous: “Poetry is a means of redemption” (189) and the “genius of poetry… is the spirit of visible and invisible change” (242-43) and poetry “makes itself manifest in a kind of speech that comes from secrecy. Its position is always an inner position, never certain, never fixed. It is to be found beneath the poet’s word and deep within the reader’s eye in those chambers in which the genius of poetry sits alone with her candle in a moving solitude” (243).

 

3. See Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), 85-89, for a discussion of the impact of Descartes’s work on the idea of nature.

Works Cited

 

• Bruns, Gerald. Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry in the Later Writings. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
• Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. Anderson, John M. and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
• —. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
• Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1993. [Abbreviated in the text as B.]
• —. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985. [Abbreviated in the text as MED.]
• —. Singularities. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1990. [Abbreviated in the text as S.]
• Lazer, Hank. Opposing Poetries, Volume Two: Readings. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.
• Long, Mark C. “Reading American Literature, Rethinking the Logic of Cultural Work.” Pacific Coast Philology 32.1 (1997): 87-104.
• Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: California UP, 1985.
• Nicholls, Peter. “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History.” Contemporary Literature 37.4 (Winter 1996): 586-601.
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