Tenorio, Kim Clarence C.

BSED-ENG3A

CHAPTER 1 SYNTHESIS (The Maternal Disinheritance)

Susan Howe’s approach in her literary works notes distinct characteristics of her
roots distinct characteristics of her roots being Irish and American. Susan Howe’s
parents are both influential people as her mother was an active Anglo-Irish actress,
playwright and director who worked with several prominent personas in the industry.
Her father on the other side was known to have taught law in Harvard. Howe’s poems
were described to an “oppressed feminine” figure set against the “repressive” operation
of the hegemonic and colonizing system which were both manifested and reinforced
through the conventional use of the language.

Chapter 1 only claims that majority of Susan Howe’s works are not highly-
influenced of her mother’s nationality and cultural backgrounds to start with. Her poems
are a stratified choice that mirrors the Anglo-Irish mixed counterparts of the individuality
of the said originations. It led to the impact that showed highly of the impression of a
receptive point of repression against the common standard in writing and devising a
poem.

Howe situates herself at the crux of a horizontal, geographical disjunction and a

vertical, historical one. Surrounded by the desirable and undesirable burdens of cultural
and familiar inheritance, the "homeward rush of exile" in The Liberties works as a
paradoxical twinning of refuge and displacement at the level of the personal (the relation
of Howe’s poetic vocation to her father and her mother), of populations (the Irish
diaspora), and of lyric (the formal consequences of seeking to address a notion of
absence in poetic language.) We can see this maternal influence appear in other ways,
as well; for example, Montgomery says of The Midnight that it is a book about works
being cited, inscribed, inherited, and loved. It is stylistically diverse, combining literary
speculations, memoir, lyric poetry, and photography. The Scare Quotes sections are
built around the editions of Yeats, Stevenson, and others that Howe inherited from her
mother and her mother’s brother. a literary piece.

CHAPTER 2 SYNTHESIS (The Ghost of the Father)

Alongside the maternal associations of identity, speech, and inheritance

mentioned in the previous chapter, there runs in Howe’s work an appraisal of ideas of
law, authority, and patriarchy. Often the two currents are intertwined, and portray a
suggestion of a schematic division of the work along maternal and paternal lines any
more than would separate the writing into discrete clusters of ‘Irish’ and ‘American’
work. Alongside the exploration of the marginalized feminine in The Liberties, for
example, law is represented through an insubstantial paternal figure, a composite that
superimposes Swift on Lear and the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Further in the background
lies Howe’s own father. In this chapter, I explored some of the poems in which a
paternally coded set of associations is strongly evident. In this work, Howe explores the
notion of an aporetic origin of authority. Through this motif, which is central to her work,
Howe addresses concepts including social authority, regicide, paternity, negative
theology, and deconstructive thought.

Howe’s writing, paternity is a vexed or doubtful issue. On one hand, this might be
autobiographical, as for example in a 1982 letter to Ron Silliman on Pythagorean
Silence: “When you are 4 and your father vanishes like that and you don’t see him again
until you are 8, something has been lost forever.” On the other hand, the ghostly father
that haunts Howe’s writing is the memorialization of a divine lawgiver, which Cordelia
characterizes as “Noone in first father” (Liberties, 197). Here, Howe’s poetry appears to
address an evasive or even absent divinity. In a letter to Taggart, she makes more
explicit the link between paternity, divinity, and her own poetics.

Montgomery then moves on, in the chapter “The Ghost of the Father,” to an
examination of how paternalism enters into Howe’s poetry: “Alongside the maternal
associations of identity, speech, and inheritance discussed in the previous chapter,
there runs in Howe’s work an appraisal of ideas of law, authority, and patriarchy.”
Before even beginning to close the circle on Howe’s inheritance, Montgomery takes a
tangent into Language Writing and Howe’s relationship to it as examined from the
perspective of the lyric “I”: Although the lyric "I" was anathema to many of Howe’s
contemporaries among language writers—the "guard", if anything, of the specious claim
to coherence of the poem’s speaking subject—for Howe, despite the polyphony of her
writing, the I appears to guarantee an ethics of poetic "vision". The I is, in this view, not
identical with the speaking subject. It is a notional, quasi-divine absence that serves to
underwrite the poem by preserving the strangeness of poetic speech.

CHAPTER 3 SYNTHESIS (Susan Howe’s Renaissance)

Leaving behind that type of inheritance, Montgomery goes on to explore, through

analysis of Pythagorean Silence (1982) and Defenestration of Prague (1983), Howe’s
indebtedness to the literature of the Renaissance: “Pythagorean Silence and
Defenestration of Prague both draw substantially on motifs from the literature of the
Renaissance. I will be concerned with Howe’s adaptation, via Ovid, of the notion of
metamorphosis and of her use, when I come to discuss Defenestration, of the
aesthetics of the masque and of Renaissance pastoral.” Having explored the European
legacy in her work, Montgomery now turns to Howe’s Chanting at the Crystal Sea
(1975), where “Howe begins her long poetic engagement with American history.” Her
discovery of Hope Atherton inspired many a poem, right up to her recent book Souls of
the Labadie Tract (2007). Regarding this source of inspiration, Montgomery states: The
two major serial poems of Singularities—Articulation of Sound Forms in Time and
Thorow—show Howe wrestling into being a form of poetic speech that is adequate to a
constellation of issues involving the archive, the transplantation of the Western tradition
to another territory, femininity, and power. For many observers, their representation,
through a language of rupture, of the underside of American colonial history has
rendered them exemplary among Howe’s poems.

CHAPTER 4 SYNTHESIS (The Poetics of American Space)

Throughout a long and distinguished career, numerous themes have interested Howe,
the strands of which she has woven into a tapestry. In The Poetry of Susan Howe, it is
evident that Montgomery has done an amazing amount of research regarding Howe’s
career and writings; the pages are peppered with numerous quotations from her writing
and from interviews with her. His analysis is also exceptional, making this a book full of
insight into a “difficult” poet.

A different approach to this difficult poet in The Small Space of a Pause,

examining Howe’s interaction with what Deleuze and Guattari have termed the “third
space,” i.e. “the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and
the uncharted lands.” But there is something else—much more, in fact. Anything that
can aid in understanding the work of a major contemporary poet is highly valuable, and
this book does just that. In her introduction, begins by examining the concept of space
from the perspective of numerous other writers, such as Charles Olson and Steve
McCaffery. She also references Howe’s 1987 text Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,
combining this with a discussion of W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Spatial Form in Literature” in
setting out the relation between space and time. These discussions lead to what Joyce
refers to as “the manifesto . . . for Howe’s poetry” which she finds in an interview Omar
Barrada conducted with Howe, in which Howe states: “What has always fascinated me
is the space in the fold between two pages in a book, or the space between one poem
and the next in a series. I see an area between poems; even if I cannot control what the
reader sees, there is an area.” While referring to Howe’s reluctance to be labeled a
feminist, fearing that everything henceforth will be analyzed from that perspective and
thereby create a reductive analysis of someone who’s work is polyvalent, Joyce does
mention the importance of the “third space” as being “a potential solution to the binary
system of human existence which sets up a hierarchical power system that reinforces
the lesser social position of women, among other things.” Through significant reference
to Brian McHale’s “How (Not) to Read Postmodernist Long Poems: The Case of
Ashbery’s ‘The Skaters,’” in which McHale argues the ineffectiveness of attempting to
come to an understanding of long poems through an analysis of discrete points, Joyce
delimits the scope of her work in this text stating that “not only does this book not
analyze each of Howe’s poems; it also does not attempt to analyze any of them fully.”

CHAPTERS 5 & 6 SYNTHESIS (Enthusiasm, Telepathy, and Immediacy and The

Late Lyric)

Several of the chapters build on Howe’s use of language fragments as a visual

poetics. This concept of the visual is legitimated by Howe’s statement that “You see I
started as a painter—and am married to a sculptor and I came to poetry out of the art
being done in and around New York during the 60’s and early 70’s.” We can think of
Jackson Pollock with his splatter painting or Mark Rothko’s paint swatches and see
parallels between how these artists approached their work and how Howe employs a
similar approach. Joyce, in the chapter “When Text Becomes Images,” in describing the
multi-angular splay of words on a page of Eikon Basilike, states that “it is no longer
possible to pretend that these words will group together to form sentences. The impact
of this page style is the same as that of collage, or a kind of word cubism.” But then
there is Howe’s attraction to non-Euclidean geometry and fractal images to contend
with. “The core of this interest develops through the ideas laid out by Pythagoras.” Her
interest in chaos and fractal theory gives rise to her interest in the singularity: “The term
most indicative of Howe’s poetry issingularity, and as with most words that she takes
up, this one develops out of multiple meanings but also through her persistent
avoidance of binaries. Singularity is a moment of violence, which is partly why her
poetry focuses so much on war, but it is also the moments of movement and of formal
innovation.” As Montgomery does an exceptional job of explaining, this difficult but
extremely rewarding writer has been one of the most innovative poets of any period. He
treats the edges of a page as a frame into which he unloads word and sentence
fragments, unleashing the primeval forces of language creation. He concludes his first
paragraph with an aphorism: “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else
has been said.” And she cites an historical event, probably encountered in one of her
journeys through the library stacks, regarding the death of Sarah Edwards’s husband in
1758 and how Sarah was consoled by thoughts of God—a refuge which, as Howe
relates, was not available to him.

Howe’s refuge is in writing, and she creates stunning lines such as “Your head
was heavy as marble against the liberty of life.” For Howe, prose is a generic term and
she does not shy away from the inclusion of a dictionary entry, an autopsy report, a
letter. Here as elsewhere she reveals herself as an expert at collage, deftly assembling
disparate materials. Later, Howe incorporates a technological description of the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library “one of the largest buildings in the world
devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts” which was “constructed from Vermont
marble and granite, bronze and glass.” Reminiscent of Marianne Moore, this reads like
a brochure extolling the virtues of this building, with its “state-of-the-art North Light HID
Copy Light system.” This is followed by a description of “Hannah Edwards remembering
her delirium during an illness in 1736,” giving us a panoramic view of time, a view which
stretches as far back as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pyramus and Thisbe.

The next section is called “Frolic Architecture,” and we are greeted by a

transcendental Emerson epigraph. Howe provides fair warning of what we are about to
encounter: “this book is a history of / a shadow that is a shadow . . .” Here we enter the
realm of “writing through” which experimenters such as Jackson Mac Low did before
Howe, although she has become justly famed for having explored this method’s reach.
Essentially, she takes a piece of writing—hers or somebody else’s—and places across
it something opaque so that part of that writing is obscured, copying only the writing
showing through. On occasion she intersperses what appear to be photographs that
mimic the remainder (or vice versa). Is it accidental that “tho melancholy was yet in a
quiet frame” appears within a square block? On that the words “I was in, it was not
without a deep” appear as a visible phrase on the next line? Howe originally being a
visual artist prior to turning to poetry, is this process, for her, a development of concrete
poetry? The final section, “That this,” contains a series of five poems written in the same
form—two couplets—that began the previous section before it moved into the “writing
through.” The first of such poems, all untitled, reads as follows:

Day is a type when visible

objects change then put

on form but the anti-type

That thing not shadowed

Meaning appears on the edge of consciousness, unable to break through. This is

Howe’s magic—to make you, the reader, reach for something you feel is there, and to
keep you returning to the page in hopes that, at some point, the boundary will be
breached.