'Dangerous, Cutesy Idea' Susan Howe & R.H. Quaytman Collaborate

Mother and daughter, Susan Howe and R.H. Quaytman collaboratively produced Tom Tit Tot, an art book produced for The Museum of Modern Art. Quaytman calls the prospect of continuous collaboration 'a dangerous cutesy idea.' Quaytman and Howe's unique oeuvres are private, mysteriously averse to revealing the intimate details of their biographies. The New York Times hosts the pair's meditations on career, ancestry, and collaboration.

Susan Howe and R.H. Quaytman are mother and daughter, a poet and a painter, both widely admired and fiercely cerebral and quietly a lot of fun. They did not want to do an interview together, and it’s not hard to understand why. What daughter wants a stranger to point out all the ways that she is like her mother? What mother wants to risk eclipse by her daughter’s fame? But their reluctance was more subtle. Howe and Quaytman objected to the idea that the mother-daughter relationship is the most important one in their family. They are only two in a web of artists: Howe’s mother, Mary, was an actress and playwright; Quaytman’s father, Harvey, a painter; Howe’s second husband, the sculptor David von Schlegell; their son, the science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell. Except for Mark, who lives in Germany, all of those people are dead, but no matter; when you are dealing with Howe and Quaytman, hauntings are very much on the table.

Howe is a lauded poet, about as recognized as an American experimental writer can be. She trained as a visual artist, and in the late 1960s began to cut words out of catalogs and typewritten pages and tape them on the wall; soon enough she was printing them in books. In 1985 she published “My Emily Dickinson,” a dense and intricate study in which she parses Dickinson’s manuscripts, which were often written on scraps or envelopes. Whether writing poetry or her highly idiosyncratic criticism, Howe’s process embraces serendipity; she has an eye for what might be overlooked, and often scours special collections for out-of-print or fragile works — Jonathan Edwards’s manuscripts written on the silk paper his wife and daughter used to make fans; William Carlos Williams lines scrawled on a prescription pad. In writing her poems, she jots down her thoughts and dreams in a small black notebook, the inside covers of which contain quotations so that her own words are “embedded and surrounded by ghosts and echoes.” [...]

Souls rejoice! Learn more at The New York Times.