Grid Logic

There was a time, now more than a decade ago, when I found Susan Howe’s poetry too opaque. The fractured and clipped syntax, and the stuttered sounds, left me searching for a point of entry. Her use of typography, symbols (arrows, brackets, etc.), and idiosyncratic punctuation halted my attempted reading. But then I read My Emily Dickinson (1985), her unclassifiable prose work that created a dialogue between the namesake Amherst poet and the Brontë sisters. It helped me understand how radical art could emerge from something as austere and stultifying as Puritanism. Through a structure more architectural than argumentative, it built an expanse of ideas, traced literary genealogies, and illuminated aspects of American history that previously hadn’t interested me but that in Howe’s framing became urgently alive. After reading the book, it was as if the difficulty, or at least the opacity, I previously experienced with Howe’s poems suddenly fell away. It wasn’t that her work was easier to access—it was that I was willing to go wherever the work took me; what at first felt closed seemed like a series of open doors.

Like her contemporaries Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, Howe is a radical stylist. An atomistic attention to units of sound and typographical form characterizes her work, which in recent years has extended to her practice of composing poems with tape and scissors from found texts, resulting in photocopied collage works that challenge the limits of legibility through poems increasingly proximate to visual art. (A selection of these compositions was exhibited at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.) Also like Carson’s and Rankine’s poems, Howe’s sometimes look more like essays; she shares Carson’s habit of revivifying the intellectual lives of the past and Rankine’s concern for interrogating American self-mythology. In her essayistic mode, Howe relies extensively on quotation, stitching together brief illuminating anecdotes, lyrical fragments, philosophical observations, lists, and dictionary definitions. Entries from early editions of Noah Webster’s dictionary are used as if to view the origins of American word usage like preserved specimens under a microscope. A rich and expansive set of sources and concerns repeat in her work, most notably centering around the intellectual history of the United States and New England, including Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle; encompassing the Brontës, the Romantics, and Shakespeare; forward to the high modernism of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and on through to contemporary art and film.

Howe is as interested in theology and the law as she is in art and literature, all of which she brings together in sometimes cacophonous choral dialogue. Although her subjects may seem antiquarian, the means with which she addresses them is starkly avant-garde, doing for early American intellectual history what the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin did for the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcades in his unfinished Arcades Project. As Benjamin did, Howe composes by collecting quotations, facts, and related observations, which she then arranges as much by rhythm as by theme. Howe has said “my work is a mass of quotations,” and in her work, readers experience an eclectic but judiciously curated personal library that has been cut down and reassembled into stylized, intellectual auto-portraits.

Howe’s techniques for writing cut-up histories are on display in three distinct modes in the three sections—let’s call them long poems—of her latest book, Concordance (New Directions, 2020). The title refers to a list, usually in book form, used for textual analysis and navigation. A concordance, first used to study the Bible, consists of an alphabetical arrangement of principal words in a book or some other body of text (such as the complete works of an author) along with their immediate contexts. Howe’s Concordance asks a question at the hinge of form and content: what is the relation between collage and concordance? Although the latter is formally rigorous and indexical in the way it parses text into an enumerated alphabetical list, the process of collage—from the French “to glue”—is aesthetic and intuitive as it arranges disparate parts into a coherent whole. 

The epigraph to Howe’s book comes from the Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson and uses the entry for “Sliver” to show how a concordance functions:

“Sliver (2)
 
1885 ‘An envious Sliver broke’ was a”
Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson
 
_________
 
To Abbie C. Farley early August 1885.
“‘An envious Sliver broke’ was a passage your Uncle peculiarly
loved in the drowning Ophelia”

The broken phrase found in the concordance (probably delimited by a fixed number of characters) produces a quality at once constrained and oracular, similar to the syntax of Howe’s shorter poems. The juxtaposition of the clipped entry with the full sentence also illustrates how a fragment that appears opaque may become more transparent with little additional information. With this example, Howe begins a chain of references relating to scenes of drowning that continues throughout the book. The rigor of the concordance and the intuition of collage provide a dynamic tension to the book’s three unfolding movements.

“Since,” the book’s first and most essayistic section, begins, “Ghostly step pre-articulate hop.” How to trace this tentative fragment of a line? Perhaps pre-articulate, like a score awaiting its performance. Or a book read but only silently, internally, unvoiced. I excavate pre-articulate as a phrase Howe has used before, in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2014), her illustrated lecture turned book-length ode to the rare book rooms and special collection libraries where she has researched and incubated her work. She refers to archival objects and manuscripts as “a pre-articulate empty theater where a thought may surprise itself at the instant of seeing. Where a thought may hear itself see.” Spontaneous Particulars explores the wonder of reading manuscripts and archives; Concordance illustrates the way Howe synthesizes this reading and research into poems in which readers might experience surprise at “the instant of seeing.” In “Since,” she describes this process, slantwise, as “microscopic reduplications of desire … pieced together through grid logic.” Howe sets herself up as an intermediary transmitting her sources to readers. She’s a medium not—or not merely—in the sense of a spiritualist (she writes of “mesmerism” in “Since,” the section title an approximate homonym for séance) but in the technological sense. Howe is sensitive to technology’s rigor as well as its potential for error. (“Since” is also a close homonym to sins, another link to error as well as to the Puritan obsession with original sin.) “In order to facilitate phonetic interpretation, I will make up my mouth as if it’s a telegram,” she writes.

Technological references recur throughout Concordance: telegraphs, typewriters, radios, and stereoscopes. The most important technology as it relates to form and method here may be scissors, which she links to the book’s opening phrase: “Always is a reader going on with little and great hops.” Later down the page—“Scissor a stricken rabbit crying out.” The collagist’s scissors cut fragments of text for readers to hop between. Webster’s dictionary entry for “Scissors” follows as does an aphorism by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (a central figure in the section): “Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.” Perhaps picture is to sum as collage is to concordance? “Concordance can also mean a state of harmony between persons. Or a musical chord with satisfying musical effect,” Howe writes. As the fragments accrue, readers begin to sew connections across them or to listen for harmonic chiming. The distinctions between painting and sum and collage and concordance are not so rigid—they bleed into and complement one another.

Death, real or imagined, looms over Concordance. “I’m so scared of dying without answers,” Howe writes. Born in 1937, she is “a relic of the typewriter generation” who is clear-eyed about the fact she is writing near the end of her life. “Late poems tiptoeing on a philosophical threshold of separation and mourning for an irrevocable past holding to memory ...,” she writes in “Since.” The poem—its various fragments like doors leading each to a room containing a memory—functions much like a concordance, whose fragments point to the whole of the source. Howe quotes a line from Judge Holmes’s memoir: “I’m dead, I’m like a ghost on the battlefield with bullets flying through me,” to which she comically replies “To a certain extent I’m also alive.” (Howe is often funny, as when she writes “What is rabbit light? Is it a fusion of rabbit and light?” in reference to the phrase from Wallace Stevens’s poem “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”) As with the epigraphs, we again see Dickinson pointing us toward Shakespeare and to a source for the title of this first section. In a letter from Dickinson to Judge Otis P. Lord, the poet writes, “Antony’s remark to a friend, ‘since Cleopatra died,’ is said to be the saddest ever lain in Language—That engulfing ‘Since.’” This quote is immediately preceded by a simple dedication: “Emily Dickinson from Judge Otis P. Lord, 1880,” which was transcribed from the flyleaf of Dickinson’s copy of The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare. It was a gift from the judge to Dickinson. Judge Lord later asked Dickinson to marry him following the death of her mother; she declined.

Knowing little about Judge Lord and following Howe’s prodding elsewhere—“Google again for the source of my quotation”—I learned Lord was the “Uncle” referred to in the epigraph’s letter (“’An envious Sliver broke’ was a passage your Uncle peculiarly loved in the drowning Ophelia.”) I also learned the letter was made in reference to the drowning of Mary Farley, Abbie’s cousin, in Walden Pond. This extends the context for the reference to drowning, a motif Howe takes up again in the third section of the book, which centers on the 19th-century writer and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller.

By the end of this first section, readers are tangled in a dense, still somewhat mysteriously related web of connections. But I am left with a layered picture: Howe writing at her desk in contemporary Connecticut, not far from where Dickinson sat at her small desk in 19th-century Massachusetts corresponding with her contemporaries and thinking of Shakespeare. Howe accesses Dickinson partly through her copy of the Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson, as Dickinson accessed Shakespeare partly through the concordance of his plays that Judge Lord gave her. I imagine each writer with her tools for studying, analyzing, and collecting the past in writing. In the dense 20 pages of “Since,” it is as if Howe provides readers with a sheaf of notes for better understanding and contextualizing the two sections that follow.

“Concordance,” the second section, is starker. It consists of Howe’s cut, taped, and photocopied collage poems. The poem constructions provide small windows through which only flickers of an obscure whole are visible. I’m reminded of the small windows in the Georgian-style clapboard house in Concord, Massachusetts, on which Nathaniel Hawthorne etched a poem with a diamond in the 1840s, which Howe references elsewhere in her work. (The title Concordance also sounds an allusion to Concord.) If these poems often cannot be read as narrative or even lyric fragments, they do evoke images as concrete poems. They appear variously as squat houses (not unlike Dickinson’s so-called “envelope poems”), as bundles of sticks or channels of running water, as patterned embroidered patches on white linen cloth. A skinny poem without a single legible word is like the toothsome track of a zipper. Others resemble fragments of skulls; another looks distinctly like a ladder; and two or three look like radios, recalling the line “This is radio memory” that appears in “Since.” The word thorough repeats perhaps more than any other. A rare, almost-lengthy phrase is legible: “The eternal note of sadness[es] do wander everywhere.” A stack of words, almost certainly from a concordance, is aligned right on the page in a vertical column that, in part, reads “Retirement, Retires, Retiring, Retort, Retorted, Retreat, Retreated, Retreating, Retrenched, Retribution.” This stack also recalls Dickinson’s habit of creating alternative word choices in columns above or below where they would appear in her draft manuscript poems.

The shift in tone from “Since” to “Concordance,” at first disconcerting, is ultimately reviving as it pulls readers’ attention to different modalities of reading, seeing, and thinking. Concordances, principally the concordance of Dickinson’s correspondence, serve as all, or a substantial portion of, the source material for these recombinant poems. If “Since” reads like an accrual of notes written over months or years within a particular library, then “Concordance” looks like a series of collage works made from the scraps discarded in the recycling bin next to that same library’s photocopier. It is as if these long poems are composed in counterpoint to one another to illustrate two different approaches to the same material. In “Concordance,” Howe demonstrates another means of reworking sources; these are poems from a library dissected using scissors like a scalpel.

In the third and final section, “Space Permitting,” Howe works in a more traditional poetic mode. Each page contains one or two stanzas of no more than eight lines. In these poems, an assortment of water-logged garments washes up on, and are collected from, the shore, as are life preservers; tossed, wrecked planks; and sundry personal effects. The clipped lines feel as though they are sourced from a diary that consists mostly of lists:

Tasseled dress torn by wreck—
spike lead color shut tin box
Bundle of letters and papers
a child’s striped apron fringe

The poem relates the aftereffects of the 1850 shipwreck that drowned Margaret Fuller and the crew of the Elizabeth. As a note at the end of the section explains, the contents of “Space Permitting” are collaged from drafts and notes Henry David Thoreau sent to Emerson and to Fuller’s friends and family in Concord after they sent Thoreau to recover her remains from the shipwreck on Fire Island and the manuscript of her recently completed History of the Italian Revolution, which was ultimately lost at sea. The section’s first of two epigraphs quotes a remark Fuller’s friends made to Emerson: “Well, on the whole, it was not so lamentable, & perhaps it was the best thing that could happen to her. For, had she lived, what could she have done?” The sentiment bluntly underscores that, in the 19th-century United States, the life of a married intellectual woman with a child was seen as impossible, a fate worse than death. The final stanza of the section begins: “I saw many leaves of a large un- / bound Latin book—scattered over the / beach a mile from the wreck …”

The experience of reading Concordance is akin to the work Thoreau set out to do: recollect manuscript pages and understand an ill-fated journey. In this case, the journey is intellectual, and it is heroic rather than ill-fated, rooted in the New England landscape where Howe has spent most of her life. In Concordance, it is as if a manuscript, along with the library used to write it, were both wrecked and then washed ashore, mostly lost, although what remains was carefully recombined and artfully reconstructed into something beautiful, monstrous, and new. In Howe’s poems, writing is a process of collecting. Concordance is a slim volume that documents the late concerns from a lifetime of reading, a life lived in literature and libraries, and it is written with the urgency of being perhaps a final book. “Trusting that as a helpful reader you will respond in your rabbit self. I have composed a careful and on one level truly meant narrative and on another level the Narrative of a Scissor,” Howe writes. You open it, read it. Cut it up if you’d like. Take what you will. It needn’t be difficult.