For the last fifty years, Susan Howe has held the distinction of being difficult. She cuts words down to syllables, bends syntax past sense. She is highly musical, allusive, and spare. All useful poems reward rereading; Howe’s poems demand it. Her writing is almost always rooted in history: Hinge Picture (1974) scavenges its language from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“when sailing sleep / westward through her / pillars was a sign / of being born”); the majority of That This (2011) is a series of collages made from the private writings of Hannah Edwards Wetmore, the younger sister of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, cut up with scissors and scanned. Across more than a dozen books, Howe’s writing continually slips in and out of quotation and allusion, blending her voice with the words and work of the dead. Her sources include maps, scraps of dresses, diaries, and transcriptions of almost-illegible marginalia.
Texts are places where the past is passed on. In secondhand language, there inhere scraps of presence of those who used a word, as well as those whose presences the word once sought (or still seeks) to erase. Or so Howe’s poems wager. With each split syllable or quote, there’s an attempt to recover something lost: sometimes a community or a landscape, sometimes a person that the author herself has lost. Take, for example, the beginning of the poem “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” published by Telephone Books in 1978:
mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary manic a land a
tract indicate position 2 record bunting interval
free also event starting the slightly position of
O about both or don’t something INDICATION Americ
“Secret History of the Dividing Line” is an errand into the word mark—Howe’s father, Mark de Wolfe Howe, died when she was eight months pregnant. When her son was born, she gave him the name Mark: “it seemed to be me the spirit of one went through me into the spirit of the other.” How can the same sound name both the dead father and the infant? What else can it do? Mark like marks on paper, or like a mark on a map indicating a change of ownership or terrain. As this first poem reads against the grain of a dictionary entry, Howe scouts out the space the word opens, staging in fragments the kinds of encounters that can happen inside it.
Most of “Secret History” is derived from two voices: one is William Byrd’s “History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina” (1728), a surveyor’s account of the state line between the two young colonies. The other is a volume of the Civil War diaries and letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, edited by one Mark DeWolfe Howe. Mark the editor and mark the settlement: Howe collides and alters her sources in an attempt to follow the word through time and place, and in doing so grasp the movement of the name that passed through her body. For as much as language can transmit the presence of its authors and subjects, it can also transmit the presence of its readers. Her father’s hand can be found in—even recovered from— the shape and arrangement of the Wendell Holmes letters. So too can the violences of settlement and colonization be uncovered in Byrd’s “Dividing Line,” a secret history buried inside the authorized one. “I wish I could tenderly lift,” she writes in a later poem, “from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate.” To lift, not to make articulate or cover, not to speak for, but to bring closer, to lift, to list, to listen. Reading is a means to encounter others: such encounters, in Howe’s archival poetics, are material, grounded in marks of ink and type. Armed with “a little heir of alphabet / lean a knife,” the poet goes looking for something among the marks, a trace of the spirit of one that moved through her.
Howe came of age as an artist in the 1960s, first as a painter and stagehand, and only later as a writer. As with many experimental artists of her generation, she approaches any given medium as a bricoleur, taking what she will from painting, sculpture, and performance and bringing it to bear on poetry (and vice versa). In a preface to a collection of her early work, she writes:
The essential part of any invention is distance and connectedness. We pass each other pieces of paper. A sheet of paper, a roll of film, the frame structure. Conceptual projects of the 1960s and 1970s combined windows, mirrors, garbage, photographs, video, dance, tape recordings, tope, steel, yarn, nails, cars, machines just about anything.
The kitchen sink hybridity of that artistic moment followed her into her life as a poet, and by the 80s, she began to work in earnest with the forms of scholarship and literary criticism. Still her most well-known book, 1985’s My Emily Dickinson is a study of Dickinson’s life and writing, composed as inventively and passionately as any poem. In it, Howe lays out a case for the 19th century poet as a formally radical writer on the level of Gertrude Stein, misread and domesticated for decades by (mostly male) editors and critics. She fixes her eye and ear to Dickinson’s handwritten archive, full of the errant enjambment, capitalization, and dashes that those editors saw as mistakes to be corrected. “These manuscripts,” Howe says, “should be understood as visual productions”: pictures made of words that were at hand, poems made of music found in books by Shakespeare, Browning, and James Fenimore Cooper. My Emily Dickinson is an attempt to read Dickinson through the voices that surrounded her in Amherst, in her parents’ library and in her daily life. It’s a vision of the poet as one who “carries intelligence of the past into future of our thought by reverence and revolt,” and of poetry as a means of rescuing disobedient traditions from ossification or oblivion. For as much as it’s rooted in the words and work of its subject, My Emily Dickinson reads a lot like a statement of poetics from its author:
Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchy suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem.
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Penitential Cries, published last fall by New Directions, begins with a pronouncement of body, a speaker waking and feeling close to death:
Each morning rapid heartbeat. Scattered alphabet
Hello Interloper the Fake
Standing on the brink of afterlife or nothing
Little more relation to everyone more open and free
Where most other books and poems of Susan Howe’s tend towards a subject, text, or central figure, it is the poet herself at the center of Penitential Cries. The aged and visible body (“Geriatric tachycardia murmurs pounding or fluttering even chaotic”) lives alongside the voices of her long-loved dead. “I’ve been lucky I say to the indifferent universe / ‘There is a great river this side of Stygia’,” she writes, letting Stevens’ late poem surface too.
This titular opening poem finds the speaker alone at the archive, after an “almost first post-Pandemic drive on I-95 from Guilford to Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven without a crash.” She’s visited in dreams by fellow octogenarians and has trouble opening doors. Death’s proximity is foregrounded in Penitential Cries—the death of the poet and of an entire way of life. As tactile modes of interacting with the past slough away in favor of digitization, younger generations of readers and writers come to texts entirely differently than Howe does and few come to the particular books she loves at all. This, amidst a larger sea change in the funding of so-called higher education in the U.S. that shove away the kinds of study she has placed at the core of her artistic and scholastic practice. At stake in Howe’s writing from the beginning is the threat that words—and the spirits that words conduct and transmit—can be occluded, written out of history. Penitential Cries sees the scholar-poet facing down not only the reality of her own advanced age, but the endangerment of the texts and kinds of reading she has dedicated herself to.
She walks through the university’s “updated STEM-funded corridors” towards the “original faux gothic interior” of the library more familiar to her, closer with the antique contents of document boxes than to the people around her. And the people are few: she numbers herself among “Octogenarian widow pariahs,” “for to be one or both is to be anonymous in soft rain on a quiet street waiting quietly alone.” In double quiet, the poet evinces a loneliness that she then seeks to fill with recalled and recovered others:
Exit landlord. Re-enter with two great coats.
Cordelia Clarissa
Our time is lost.
SML Truck inspection flag “going to deep storage.”
John Donne, “My body my skin”
Quoted here is Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa, published in 1748. Where other poems of Howe’s use a relatively narrow selection of sources, “Penitential Cries” wheels through periods and author with abandon. A list of the materials for the poem—which Howe does not give—would also include Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, Thomas Percy, H.D., Handel, Wallace Stevens, and Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. Rather than staging the intensive study of one subject, the poem engages the breadth of a library shelf. The texts and scraps housed on such a shelf are vast but, even at Sterling, not invulnerable. Touching old paper directly is forbidden because it speeds decay; to preserve so-called originals, the living body must be gloved and mediated.
“If you stand there long enough searching the half-empty shelves,” she says, “florescent tubular bulbs above switch off ever so quietly.” Body and book plunged into darkness, both so near to vanishing. Part of the pleasure of Penitential Cries, and all of Howe’s work, comes from an unfamiliarity with her archive: by not (always) giving you the names of the voices that come back, she lets them come back obscured. “Anonymous, slighted—inarticulate.” I encounter them as voices, not as individuals. Even when a trace of the dead survives, they can only be brought back incomplete and unrecognizable. Not for nothing is the myth of Eurydice invoked: “What trespass to see her face to face, ruining the desire in her to wander. She should remain hidden away like a family secret clothed in illegible moral syllables.” Howe transmits the disappearing past as disappearing, bringing texts up from the underworld while preserving their illegibility—their right to wander.
The majority of Penitential Cries comprises a long collage sequence, “Sterling Park in the Dark.” Works like this, which start cropping up in her books around 2008, extend the visual strain of Howe’s poetics and allow for a different kind of experimentation within her broader obsessions. Here, the title offers some small ground to the reader: we can imagine the poet walking through a neighboring park or sitting in a quiet courtyard after her time in Yale’s Sterling library, the bricolage of all the books she encountered swimming around her head in “shadowy waters as a fish gone out.” She photocopies and cuts with scissors the same or similar source texts that her poems use, ribboning and overlaying sentences in multiple directions:
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The collages hover between visual art and poems, barely readable beyond a few words or phonemes. When she reads these pieces aloud, as in her collaborations with ambient musician David Grubbs, they sound contiguous with early poems like “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” littered with stuttered vocables (“mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary”). Because sequences like “Sterling Park in the Dark” are copied, cut, and scanned directly from the source material, the reader comes to Howe’s collages not as channeled voices, but as pieces of extant text. Each fragment’s distinct typeface, stains, and illegibility bring their own particularity to bear in their rearrangements. If all of Howe’s work is engaged in the forms and consolations of recovery, the collages are where the recovered material is at its most fragile. In them, the voice of the poet cedes the terrain of the page to its sources, incapable of suturing them into a legible grammar and unable to abandon the desire to save them from ruin.
A few months before Penitential Cries was released, Susan’s younger sister Fanny died at age 84. “Chipping Sparrow,” the final poem in the book, is dedicated to her: “Left the body // Drowsd a little / Done with soul.” “Chipping Sparrow” is uncharacteristically self-contained, short, and monovocal. It has no recognizable source text or historical setting. Each of its ten movements or sections are no more than four lines long, orbiting an absent center. The titular sparrow isn’t seen, only heard, and the poem’s form and music imitate a kind of birdsong in response, clipping between images of “Bird and pencil dining” and “Special visitors // walking on stilts / in snow.” The poem’s ending repeats and inverts that figure, chipping moved from adjective to verb, sparrow transformed into the onomatopoeia “whishth”: “Civil fortification / years awayaway // Whishth chipping.” The sparrow takes flight and leaves its chipping behind. A poem can only seize a trace—the sound with which it is replaced with air—and no more.
Though it reads like an elegy, Howe has said in interviews since that the poem predated Fanny’s death: “Now I feel as if it were a premonition.” Portent or no, “Chipping Sparrow” rings a twilit note very much in harmony with the rest of Penitential Cries. “When I came home / it was very late,” the speaker says, “There was little in / work but did go on.” It’s late everywhere she goes, the body and the archive, the sparrow and the soul. “On the subject / of assurance // I should have / I should have.”
Lee Trumpfheller
Lee Trumpfheller is a poet and artist living in the Bay Area. Find them online at leewillow.website