Susan Howe

The intimacy of the index

Listening notes on ‘Concordance’

Betsy Porritt
Above: portion of ‘Concordance’ LP cover art. Image courtesy of Drag City.

I love to be outside as night falls. Whenever I can, I mark the transition from day to night by walking through quickly darkening streets and peeping into the neighboring houses. My neighbors and I may have nothing in common beyond the fact that the light of day is fading for us all, but when I pass by their uncurtained windows I leave traces; a wake of moving air, the sound of a footstep, or the impression of a familiar face to someone invisible to me. There is an intimacy to this repeated, glancing attention. As I stalk the last licks of light, I am sutured into the lives lived behind the windows I pass. 

1.

Horizon

Pt. 3

Michael Cross
Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.
Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.

For Leslie Scalapino, the poem’s an apparatus, no mere mimetic catch to reproduce world(s) as a backdrop for the poem’s disclosures. That it can be used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s) is also mere axiom; more crucially, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (in this case, where flesh meets florescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

in the hug of a wave horizon rolled youngly from nothing.
— Susan Howe, “Chanting at the Crystal Sea” [1]  

Collaged correspondences: Alexa Mergen on movement, stillness, & other practices

MARCI VOGEL
found sign | collage by Alexa Mergen
found sign | collage by Alexa Mergen

When I was a girl, my father used to set me atop the postal service mailbox located around the corner from our house. Blue and red, with a cavernous mouth that swallowed envelopes into what I imagined to be an enormous steel belly, its steadfast presence signified a mysterious process of reception and delivery — the transport of words to somewhere else.

Of a related process — the carrying over of one word to another — poet and translator Forrest Gander observes a corresponding mystery:

Marginalia for Susan Howe's 'Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives'

Charles Bernstein

My annotations, made for the first performance of the essay for the Trilling lecture at Columbia on Nov. 31, 2011:

pdf

'In poetry all things seem to touch so they are.'

Jill Magi

In what will be my last “a textile poetics” post, I return to some familiar themes or where I started: tactility and weaving and language. This time, I proceed by way of a weaving and writing workshop I lead in Kuwait, an essay by Tyrone Williams on ecopoetics, a brief consideration of Susan Howe’s work, and a mention of a lecture on exile by Costica Bradatan. Also on my thought horizon: a project I am working on called “last book” which is a drawing sequence accompanied by a book of random, highly excerpted entries from twelve years of notebooks. This book will be “published” with no cover art, title, author, other marks of publication, and will be made — printed locally — in an edition of 99.

There it was (PoemTalk #83)

Wallace Stevens, 'The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain'

PoemTalk
Left to right: Susan Howe, Dee Morris, and Nancy Kuhl.

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Among the last things Wallace Stevens wrote was a metapoem, a poem in which a man — a reader and presumably a poet too — does not write a poem but picks his way among the aspects of an old poem, the poem that had once helped him by standing in for a mountain. He composes (or rather “recompos[s]”) the objects and perspectives of the way or path up the mountain. It had been a “direction.” Was it now again?

December 29, 2014

Witness Mark Booth

A prosodic variable is the type of constant

Patrick Durgin
Mark Booth, from T.S.I.R.B.A.I.S. (2)

Susan Howe’s recuperation of Emily Dickinson’s visual prosody marks a pivot point in American poetics, insofar as it calls attention to the long effaced but paradigmatically American enterprise of self-invention that Dickinson’s practice depicts. And in depicting her work, the picture is the work, hence the holograph images that for the most part replace block quotes in texts like Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and the essay from which I’ll cull this epigraph, “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart.”

This space is the poem’s space. Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and ruptured stanzas are points of contact and displacement. Line breaks and visual contrapuntal stresses represent an athematic compositional intention.

Howe, and by extension Dickinson, are reference points for discussing the work of Mark Booth, printmaker by training, a painter, who also works in sound and performance, but whose practice is in some sense reducible to writing.

Trespass and presumption

Susan Howe and Muriel Rukeyser

Stefania Heim
Sarah Dowling and Stefania Heim at Kelly Writers House, April 2013.
Sarah Dowling and Stefania Heim at Kelly Writers House, April 2013.

Muriel Rukeyser and Susan Howe tell the same anecdote about nineteenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and American Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. In it, Peirce has been tasked with defining — among many specialized terms of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy — the word “university” for the Century Dictionary.

September 25, 2013

Eight introductions to Creeley, 1961-1996

PennSound podcasts

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The twenty-seventh podcast in the “PennSound Podcasts” series features an anthology of eight introductions to Robert Creeley, culled from PennSound's many recordings of Creeley’s readings over the years. The introductions are, in order: by Paul Carroll (Chicago, May 15, 1961), at the Berkeley Poetry Conference (Berkeley, July 22, 1965), by Ed Sanders (New York, October 24, 1966), in the Woodberry Poetry Room of Harvard (Cambridge, October 27, 1966), at MoCA Los Angeles in 1983, by Reed Bye at Naropa (Boulder, July 1984), by Diane Wakoski (Washington, DC, 1984), and by Susan Howe (Buffalo, October 11, 1996).

This PennSound podcast is hosted and introduced by Amaris Cuchanski and edited by Nick DeFina. Be sure to listen to other PennSound podcasts. And find us on iTunes by typing “PennSound” in your iTunes music store searchbox.

March 23, 2013

Howe interviews Bernstein and Andrews in 1979

PennSound podcasts
from left: Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein

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On March 14, 1979, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein visited the studios of WBAI in New York and were interviewed by Susan Howe, host then of the Pacifica Radio Poetry Show. This installment in the PennSound podcast series, introduced again by Amaris Cuchanski and based on editing done by Nick DeFina, features an excerpt from that interview focusing on a discussion of opaque as distinct from transparent language and of language’s materiality.

February 22, 2013
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