Many of our finest poets—think of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—are also known as major critics, but in Susan Howe’s case, it has always been difficult to separate the two practices. My Emily Dickinson (1985), the book that first brought Howe wide attention, is at once revisionary scholarship, careful close reading, and aphoristic meditation on the writing process—a book that tells us at least as much about Howe’s own poetics as about Dickinson’s. My Emily Dickinson was prompted, at least in part, by Howe’s objection to the portrayal of Dickinson as a kind of “madwoman in the attic” in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s celebrated feminist study of that title. Far from being the neurotic and repressed recluse of Amherst, Howe’s Emily Dickinson is a strong poet, keenly interested in her culture and unusually well read:
Here, and in her later “Illogic of Sumptuary Values” in The Birth-mark, Howe showed to what extent Dickinson’s curious punctuation—especially the dash, which “drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem”—revolutionized our understanding of the Dickinson corpus. And although My Emily Dickinson has a particular argument to make, it also introduced, perhaps inadvertently, a new hybrid mode of writing. Eliot Weinberger’s introduction to the reprint edition calls it “a poet’s book, a classic of writers writing on writers” in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, Robert Duncan’s The H. D. Book, and H. D.’s own Tribute to Freud. But Howe’s “critical” books, of which My Emily Dickinson is the first, have a somewhat different valence from those that Weinberger cites, distinguished as Howe’s are by their poetic structure, in which documentary material—facts, dates, place names, citations—are so fully absorbed into the lyric fabric that the texts come to function as long poems in their own right, no longer distinguishable from the volumes classified as poetry like The Midnight or That This.
The key in Howe’s case is a fierce empathy—a sense of becoming the Other in what Howe herself has called an act of “spectral telepathy,” of mesmerism. This is especially true of the “essays” in Howe’s most recent collection, The Quarry. In such earlier volumes as The Birth-mark, the poet still places much weight on outside sources. Not being herself an academic, Howe was extra-conscientious in acknowledging scholarship like Patricia Caldwell’s The Puritan Conversion Narrative as a source for her own brilliant discussion of Jonathan Edwards, or Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 as the inspiration for her essay “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” which charts (as her scholarly sources do not) the ironies of the biblical authority constantly invoked and then undermined by the authors of captivity narratives.
In her writing of the last decade, however, Howe has increasingly discarded or internalized such buttressing, relying now on what Wallace Stevens called, in a late poem, “the plain sense of things”—although in her case, as in Stevens’s, that plain sense has turned out to be nothing if not mysterious.
The very title of her new book has poetic resonance: a quarry, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “an open-air excavation from which stone for building or other purposes is obtained by cutting, blasting, or the like; a place where the rock has been, or is being, cut away.” Is it a coincidence that Susan Howe lives on New Quarry Road in Guilford, Connecticut, an hour’s drive from Stevens’s Hartford, that his particular landscape, with its seasonal extremes, is also hers? The title essay, in any case, cuts into Stevens’s final volume The Rock, excavating words and lines that Howe recharges, making them her own.
Subsequent essays take as their quarry (in the noun’s other sense) Jonathan Edwards and Charles Peirce, the filmmaker Chris Marker, various concrete artists (again rock is a medium), and the poet’s own forebears, whose history, on her father’s side, is closely bound up with that of New England. Indeed, The Quarry is a book of ghosts—literary as well as familial. And death—the deaths of two husbands, the sculptor David von Schlegell and the Peirce scholar Peter Hare—binds together what might look like “accidental sightings.”
This is the epigraph for the first section of “Vagrancy in the Park.” The text opens with an italicized citation, “Singeth spells,” referring no doubt to the Celtic myths and folktales Susan Howe learned from her Irish mother, and then the declaration: “The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth. Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns phonetic utterance excites in us. Beauty, harmony, and order are represented by the arrangement, and repetition, of particular words on paper.”
But Howe knows only too well that the “simple truth” is never so simple and that “arrangement” is the most complex of processes. Her epigraph comes from a short poem in The Rock called “Vacancy in the Park,” whose last two couplets read, It is like the feeling of a man / Come back to see a certain house, / The four winds blow through the rustic arbor, / Under its mattresses of vines. Now look at the photograph on the title page, and then the one on the title page of Part Two, “Ring Around the Roses.” Both are images (so Howe has noted) of a small pavilion or “rustic arbor” in Elizabeth Park in Hartford that Stevens frequented. The first picture is taken in winter, the second in summer. The “vacancy” of winter in the snow-covered park becomes, in Howe’s own poetic text, vagrancy: It is the poet herself who is the vagrant “roaming” through Stevens’s “park” and singing her own “spells”—vagrant recalling Emerson and Thoreau’s play on the related extravagant.
“I fear chiefly,” wrote Thoreau, “lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.” In a similar vein, Howe writes, “I owe [Stevens] an incalculable debt, for ways in which, through word frequencies and zero zones, his writing locates, rescues, and delivers what is various and vagrant in the near at hand.”
In coming to terms with Stevens’s Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is (“The Snowman”), Howe writes as if from deep inside Stevens’s world. Here she is on “The Course of a Particular,” in which “the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind”:
The passage begins matter-of-factly with the differentiation of late winter from autumn in Connecticut, but soon the imagery becomes increasingly graphic, and the sound structure highly rhythmic and figured, with its intricate repetitions of voiceless and voiced stops—k, t, and d—aligned with the spirants s and t and the fricative ft. “Salt” rhymes with “asphalt”; “vagrant” echoes “variant,” which is itself a variant of “vacant.” Sound repetition rises to a Keatsian pitch as Howe notes that Stevens deploys the obsolete past participle “shapen” (“shapen snow”), whose “pastness echoes in the sound of wind soughing through pitch pines.” And now she makes us aware of her own presence in the landscape:
The line comes from an earlier Stevens poem called “A Dove in the Belly,” but the dove’s “invisible declensions” also bring to mind the famous conclusion of “Sunday Morning,” where casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings. And further: In Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, the dove, here the psalmist’s dove invoked by Jonathan Edwards’s sister mourning his death—”Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest”—is also Henry James’s in The Wings of the Dove, “this novel where James so perfectly finds his form for the work that follows, after.” Wings is one of Howe’s sacred texts, and in Spontaneous Particulars, James’s heroine Milly Theale becomes a spectral emblem of suffering, even her name THEALE suggesting an “aspirate puff of breath [that] co-implicates his fictional birdwoman with wealth, theatricality and death.”
Theatricality and death. As “Vagrancy in the Park” unfolds, each section develops some aspect of “the sound inside the sense it quickens.” The first line of the Stevens poem “Somnambulisma”—On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls—prompts Howe to puzzle over the poet’s obsession with the consonant r, so rarely prominent in American English. This “vagrancy” leads her to thoughts of Spinoza, “by profession a lens-grinder,” who understood “A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us,” and then to Santayana, for whom Stevens wrote his own great elegy “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Mrs. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse makes an appearance, “covering the boar skull on the nursery wall with her green shawl,” as does, a few pages later, Mr. Ramsay, who, making his way through the 26 letters of the alphabet, could never get beyond r. And in the midst of Howe’s metonymic r passages, the mood becomes more meditative, more phantasmagoric:
The reference is evidently to Watteau’s brilliant little painting The Embarkation for Cythera; the painter’s “luminous” and “silvery” figures—their fragile figures rendered here in falling rhythm, again with elaborate repetition of r and s. Cythera, of course, is never reached. Indeed, Stevens’s river this side of Stygia, “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”—there’s that r again!—”flows nowhere, like a sea.” In the end, Howe insists, following Stevens, she can only be a realist. And so on the penultimate page we read:
A little reality check, just a shade tongue-in-cheek, cataloging those items most poets at this very moment are writing about. True, there is no Cythera at the end of the Acela line, only a passage through “Hartford in a Purple Light”—a town first stumbled upon in 1636 by a group of pilgrims traveling the hundred-plus miles from Cambridge “through a hideous and trackless wilderness.” “Vagrancy in the Park” is by no means a nostalgia trip:
No closure in this very 21st-century elegy, no Miltonic “fresh woods, and pastures new,” as the poet finds herself “on the beached margin, after long pilgrimage, waving to the quiet moon.” Remember that a few pages earlier, when Susan was reciting her “Star light, star bright” prayer to herself, she noted that “looking at a new moon through glass was and is terribly unlucky according to my mother’s divinations so I can’t take a chance of accidental sightings.” To be true to Stevens’s spirit, the door must stay open.
Having carefully mined Stevens’s Rock to assemble her own Quarry, Howe set the stage for the elegiac essay-poems that follow. The most important of these is “The Disappearance Approach,” written in memory of Howe’s husband Peter Hare, who died in his sleep on a January night in 2008 without her knowing anything was wrong. Howe’s flat documentary account of the morning after, when, thinking Peter might already be up and out for a walk, she “looked out the window and saw the New York Times still on the driveway in its bright blue plastic wrapper,” makes for painful reading.
Unlike most death memoirs, Howe never directly describes her feelings. Rather, emotion is objectified by intense concentration on such external objects as the CPAP mask used for sleep apnea that is still covering Peter’s face when she enters the room, notes and work plans in Peter’s computer, an overdue tax bill, anecdotes and emails about recent trips, memories of his quirks like introducing himself to people, adding, “Peter Hare as in Peter Rabbit,” his Buffalo house, whose décor, bearing the imprint of his first wife, didn’t appeal to Susan, and so on.
Pain is recorded, never directly, but in analogous stories of other sufferers at other moments in history. In the course of the essay we are presented with the autopsy report — “embolic obstruction of the right ventricular outflow tract” — and finally, with a visit to the Metropolitan to see the exhibition on “Poussin and Nature,” where Howe’s reading of Poussin’s Pyramus and Thisbe becomes a mirror of her own situation. Trying, finally, to understand what such sudden, wholly unanticipated death can mean to the one dying, she muses:
The rest can only be a “zero zone.”
It has long been a cliché that the “language poets,” with whom Susan Howe was loosely grouped because she taught in the Buffalo Poetics Program with Charles Bernstein in the later 1980s and 1990s, are not true poets at all, failing as they do to present lyric emotion, to dwell in subjectivity. But I can’t think of another contemporary elegy as deeply moving as “The Disappearance Text,” unless it is the long “Sorting Facts,” purportedly a critical essay on the documentary filmmaker Chris Marker but also (and perhaps primarily) an elegy for Howe’s first husband David von Schlegell, whose death, the opposite of Peter’s, was slow and agonizing. Howe’s study of how Chris Marker, along with such other filmmakers as Dziga Vertov and Andrei Tarkovsky, represented war, focuses on World War II, in which both David, 17 years Susan’s senior, and her father had fought.
But as always for this poet, objective correlatives tell the story. In Marker’s early ciné-roman La Jetée (1962), World War III is already over. “Marker’s use of . . . freeze frames in this film that calls itself a fiction,” writes Howe, “is a compelling documentation of the interaction between lyric poetry and murderous history.” This could be a description of Howe’s own writing, especially in The Quarry. Lyric poetry interacts with murderous history to produce a new kind of essay—or is it “cold green” pastoral elegy?—for our time.
Marjorie Perloff, professor emerita of humanities at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire.
