Susan Howe's Telepathy as Library Cormorant

Jonathan Creasy writes about Susan Howe as “library cormorant” for Los Angeles Review of Books. ("The phrase 'library cormorant' comes from Coleridge. It evokes the greedy, insatiable appetite of the reader. 'I am deep in all out of the way books,' Coleridge writes: 'I am almost always reading.'”) The piece also cover's Howe's newest book, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (New Directions 2014), which began as a lecture for Academy of American Poets Blaney Lecture Series.

In her characteristic, collage-text style, Spontaneous Particulars synthesizes Howe’s efforts and affinities over the last 50 years. It proves, once again, that she is among the most articulate and inventive writers we have, and cements her eminent position in a lineage of pedagogical poets of the United States.

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Howe’s work puts both herself and her studies of literary history under the microscope. Rather than to explain, her writing often seeks to demonstrate by this method the connections between texts, historical figures, and periods. These connectives are woven like textiles. She explains: “the English word ‘text’ comes from Medieval Latin textus […] literally ‘thing woven’ […] ‘to weave, to join, fit together, construct.’” She points to a perfect definition of “sentence,” made by Gertrude Stein — “A sentence is partly.” Work in archives weaves these disparate threads naturally.

In research libraries and collections, we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and textiles. In material details. In twill fabrics, bead-work pieces, pricked patters, four-ringed knots, tiny spangles, sharp-toothed stencil wheels; in quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-outs.

This describes not only the found objects and materials in research libraries, but also the practice of Howe’s own poetry and poetics. They are fragmentary and associative — in her word, telepathic. The shock of some archived object sends thought-waves out across generations and spatial barriers. Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Susan Howe become contemporaries, alive in certain moments of realization. Texts allow travel through time.

Also elemental to Howe’s writing is her sense of location. It is no accident that she ends her near-scientific description of the cormorant by situating its habitat: it is a strand bird, one native to Long Island Sound in Connecticut where Howe has made her home for the last 30 years. The vast, forbidding ocean of the library is also a literal sea of expansive possibility. . . .

Read it all at Los Angeles Review of Books. And of course for more Susan Howe, head to our feature this week!