SOURCE: Crown, Kathleen. “‘This Unstable I-Witnessing’: Susan Howe's Lyric Iconoclasm and the Articulating Ghost.” Women's Studies 27, no. 5 (1998): 483-505.

We ask for history, and that means that we ask for the simple record of unadulterated facts; we look, and nowhere do we find the object of our search, but in its stead we see the divergent accounts of a host of jarring witnesses, a chaos of disjoined and discrepant narrations, and yet, while all of these can by no possibility be received as true, at the same time not one of them can be rejected as false.

—F. H. Bradley

Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them—Awu tsst grang splith gra pragh og bm—Yes, one can break them. One can make words. Progress?

—William Carlos Williams

To articulate a history that is “disjoined and discrepant,” the poet-historian Susan Howe has found it necessary to disarticulate the lyric—to smash its elegant architecture—and to “break the words,” as William Carlos Williams puts it. If history presents us with “a host of jarring witnesses,” Howe responds by combining detailed archival research with an unrelenting lyric iconoclasm. Shattering dominant ideologies of the contemporary lyric—its privatized subjectivity, scenic-derived emotion, gendered agency, and image-based epiphanies—Howe's serial lyrics testify not to the solitary speaker's inward eye but to a painfully public, dissociated, and multiple sensibility. She offers not a unified witnessing “voice” but a chain of discordant, jarring testimonies; not elaborate displays of metaphor and image but arbitrarily juxtaposed shapes and sounds, which only occasionally tumble into words, thoughts, or sentences. If the lyric offers us, as T. S. Eliot claims, a brief raid on the inarticulate, Howe's serial lyrics are prolonged raids on historical narratives grown suspiciously and rigidly articulate.

Despite her iconoclastic approach to lyric convention and traditional historiography, Howe ultimately undertakes in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (the long poem that opens her 1990 volume Singularities) to rescue and reconstruct such lyric valuables as the figure of “voice,” the status of language as a somatic experience, the paradox of the verbal icon, and the possibility of the lyric “I” as eyewitness. From Howe's perspective, the coherence and autonomy of each of these lyric capacities is nothing more than an illusion, and she arranges words on the page to visually implode cultural myths of origin, progress, personal expression, and manifest destiny. But this essay will argue that destructivism—scattering, disjunction, disarticulation, or implosion—is not the final gesture of Howe's work. Although she is a defiant iconoclast who bristles at religious and editorial orthodoxies, her poetics is one of regeneration and re-articulation, in which the poet and reader—who together rearticulate the past and thereby offer hope for the future—remain ghostly figures and unreliable witnesses, veiled and drifting in the margins and gaps between words, pages, and texts.

Howe's lyric iconoclasm is evident in her adoption of seriality as method of composition—she works exclusively in extended poetic forms, thinking of each poem as a piece of a larger “series.” As the title of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time suggests, Howe pieces together “sound forms” or discrete segments of language, “articulating” them in ways that purposefully resist the organic unity of the lyric, the narrative progression of the epic or history poem, and the thematic continuity of the poetic sequence.¹ “I always think of my work in terms of separate poems in one long poem,” Howe writes, “that each page (usually it's a page) can stand alone and together: one reason for calling my book Singularities.”² These “singularities” consist not only of individual poems that can be broken off from the larger sequence but also of the spaces and leaps between each poem, the invisible traces of an articulating authorial presence. “The ghost,” Howe tells us, “(the entrance point of a singularity) is the only thing we have” (B [The Birth-mark] 177). A singularity enters the page when and where the iconic status of language has been catastrophically ruptured; the ghost who inhabits this marginal space is the articulating poet, who threads together the detritus of histories forgotten, denied, or lost. Howe's opening epigraph for Singularities suggests the Egyptian goddess Isis as a figure for the poet: “She was looking for the fragments of the dead Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in fragments over the wide world.” Howe's second epigraph, “under her drift of veils / and she carried a book,” alludes to the apparitional Lady of H. D.'s Trilogy, who carries “the unwritten volume of the new.” At the entrance point of the singularity, then, Howe places a phantom and indeterminate feminine figure—“she, the Strange, excluded from formalism” (S [Singularities] 41; emphasis added).³

Howe borrows the term “singularity” from mathematician René Thom's catastrophe theory, in which it denotes “a sudden change … a chaotic point … the instant articulation,” in order to suggest that poetic agency inheres in this singularity—the instant of articulation, conversion, or change—or, to put it another way, in the re-membering, drifting work of Isis or H. D.'s veiled Lady (B 173). Although Howe finds in the science of chaos and catastrophe a theory of history and language capable of describing the formal elements of her experiments in serial form, her writing seeks neither to create nor reflect chaos. Instead, she wants to bring into articulation histories that have been “incoherent inaccessible muddled inaudible” (S 21), by hooking together fragments of language that call attention to themselves not as words but as “sound forms in time”: “Hook intelligence quick dactyl” (S 33). We see the “bond between mad and made,” we notice how quickly “collision” becomes “collusion,” and we smile as “Lif sails off longing for life” (S 33). Howe's poem insists on the embodied or performative word (as speech or visible mark) located in space and time but always contingent and moving metonymically into other shapes, sounds, words, meanings. The hinges or joints connecting these “sound forms” or singularities is the ghostly poet and reader, who offers us points of access to the dead, to the past, to history.

A serial form composed of “articulated” but autonomous and discordant segments, according to Joseph Conte, “disputes the necessity of telos, completion” and thus challenges traditional methods of accessing historical knowledge (54). Howe's turn to serial form is motivated by gender-based critiques—not only of the lyric's presupposition of a unified (male) speaking subject but also of historiography's claim to incorporate memories, narratives, and anecdotes (recorded for the most part by male editors) within a progressively larger historical narrative that is coherent and continuous. Without rejecting the immense cultural authority available in traditions of the lyric and historiography, Howe takes an iconoclastic approach to both genres, shattering their wholeness only to rearticulate the fragments within such hybrid genres as the “narrative lyric” and the “nonnarrative collage long poem.”⁴ Proposing history as a “never ending sequence of // Becoming,” she rejects positivistic assumptions about historical knowledge that would construct linear narratives and work toward cultural fixity and narrative closure (S 18).

In an often quoted line, Howe asserts that “If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices,” and much has been written about her archival searching of the documentary remains of colonial America for traces of the feminized and racialized voices that preceded those documents (B 47). In a statement of her poetics, Howe expresses her wish that she “could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate” (“Statement” 17). Her work, according to Peter Quartermain, enacts an “archaeological retrieval” of historical persons and texts “straitjacketed or obliterated by being textualized and then erased: Hester Johnson, Mary Rowlandson, Thoreau, the emblematically named Hope Atherton, Emily Dickinson” (192). This archaeological retrieval seeks visionary access to unrecorded voices as well as to the existing historical record, and Marjorie Perloff notes Howe's “uncanny ability to enter the experience of an actual historical woman and to make that experience her own” (523). But as Lynn Keller points out, Howe is not content to give “stuttering tongue to some of the nearly lost or intelligible voices,”—she also “dramatizes the processes by which marginal forces are silenced and leaves many of the silences to speak for themselves” (195). Because Howe's textual archeology has been thoroughly discussed by these critics and by others,⁵ I will not belabor the point that her disjunctive texts attempt to translate individual or collective experience of women and others who have been repressed from the official culture or banished to the realm of madness.

My focus, instead, is on the rhetoric of ecstasy or “possession” that underpins Howe's acts of historical reclamation, with its dramatic effects on language, form, and lyric subjectivity.⁶ In her experimental essays on literary history collected in The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Howe writes of “choosing to install certain narratives somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (45). We need to recognize that Howe's is a poetry of spirit or enthusiasm, in which the violently self-dislocating experience of ecstasy or “outsidedness”⁷ repeatedly collides with historical narratives of nation formation. Her work stages the confrontation of postmodern vision with early American history as an event of “historical possession,” in which speakers are “possessed” by archival materials and historical voices. Because ecstatic vision is most often connected with an intense, immediate revelation that may burst forth as enraptured lyric utterance, Howe's visionary work surprises us with its sustained attention to history as textual archaeology—to scholarly research, annotation, and gloss, and to the textual concerns of manuscript production, revision, editing, preservation, and cataloguing. For Howe, ecstatic speech is a social practice inextricable from textuality, history, and genealogy. Her experimental works operate as textual archaeologies that question source documents and explore the material resistance of language (its complex etymologies and shifting orthographies) to the social vision it inscribes.

Such ecstatic, dislocating occasions pose an immediate challenge to a linear view of history, to the unity of the lyric subject, and to the autonomy of the lyric itself, whose shape and music changes as it expands to accommodate historical narrative. This ecstatic speech is not unambiguously celebratory or liberating but occurs in an encounter with otherness and under conditions of extremity, violence, and dissociation that necessarily alter older modes of poetic expression. Nor is ecstatic speech in and of itself a viable political challenge, feminist or otherwise, to hegemonic culture. Such compulsive possessions by history, first of all, are not always chosen or willed. “The narrators are chosen,” writes Howe (B 65). Second, the embedding of historical narratives of colonization within moments of ecstatic and “unstable I-witnessing” may in some cases serve to stabilize the threatening unruliness of that confrontation by moving away from the experience of shock and trauma in order to reintegrate it into a comprehensive visionary gaze (B 66): “In the machinery of injustice,” writes Howe, “my whole Being is Vision” (S 49). Yet as Susan Stewart has suggested, we need to investigate “the use of states of vertigo, sensory disorder, disarticulation, and silence across multiple genres” because “these aesthetic modalities correspond to the situation of subjects under the historical pressure of cultural processes” (“The State of Cultural Theory” 14). Although Howe's writing is “the textual equivalent of talking in tongues,” as Hank Lazer puts it, he also notes that her poems “put into play the recoverable linguistic elements of a historical expression” (65-66).

Haunted by history, occupied by the wilderness, and possessed by the past—the vocabulary of spiritualism serves well to describe Howe's work, which is not unique in identifying a dislocated or disassociated subject as a fundamental condition of the lyric. According to Susan Stewart, such anxiety about poetry's disturbance of voice and agency is part and parcel of lyric theory:

The rhapsodist and the poet have knowledge, but they do not possess it. Rather they are themselves possessed by the power of the muse who inhabits them […] Standing behind, standing before, standing beside—all send the voice into a difficult trajectory; it is the trajectory of writer and reader who can only project and approximate one another's presence, and it is the trajectory of generations, of the many-branched temporal path between the dead and the living.

(“Lyric Possession” 36)

Howe as poet and historian does not so much speak as she is spoken through, and in an interview with Lynn Keller she speaks of the writer as a medium for outside language: “When I revise it's as if I were taking dictation, but who the dictator is I do not know” (Keller, “Interview,” 26). This paradigm of poetic creation does not eliminate authorial agency, however, but relocates it in the poet's determined receptivity to the voice of another as it is projected across time. Stewart calls this complex negotiation of poetic agency a “willed dissociation” or “willed possession” (36), a paradox that Howe gets at in her statement that “the writer is commanded and commanding” (Keller, “Interview” 31).

In adopting this difficult, ecstatic trajectory, Howe's poetry does not return uncritically to such mystifying terms as inspiration, transport, voice, and transcendence. Instead, she makes of this poetic paradigm a serious and large-scale method of historical inquiry. Her emphasis on “voice” and her almost obsessive preoccupation with the past differentiate her work that of most radically disjunctive or “postmodern” poets, who often experience referentiality as a burden and the past as a deadening influence upon the continuous present. If “the fundamental aspect of lyric writing … is to produce an apparently phenomenal world through the figure of voice,” as Jonathan Culler has argued,⁸ Howe's serial lyrics understand that voice as perpetually dislocated, elsewhere, and thus ventriloquized. Basic to her work is the “recognition that there is an other voice, an attempt to hear and speak it.” In “Thorow,” for example, Howe writes, “I heard poems inhabited by voices … The Adirondacks occupied me” (S 41; emphasis in the originial). Yet as Bob Perelman points out, “Howe never pretends that she can fully hear the suppressed voices […] Intelligibility cannot meet the unknown without rendering it—but only partially—intelligible” (132-133). Howe hears not “voices,” in fact, but a stream of broken words and nearly unintelligible phrases. By serving as ventriloquist or medium for “letters, phonemes, syllables, rhymes, shorthand segments, alliteration, assonance, meter,” the possessed poet offers the reader “a ladder to an outside state outside of States” (B 46).

If the refrain of the witness is “I saw” or “I was there,” what kind of testimony can be offered by the ecstatic speaker, who is “beside him or herself”? Can such ecstatic utterances protest against or testify to historical oppression with any kind of political efficacy? In Howe's long poems, historical knowledge possesses the “unknowing” speaking subject who, rather than constructing a past, is constructed by it and produces or manifests it, through an encounter with the otherness of language or history. In Howe's poetry, the telegraphing of voices from the past is neither completely beyond the will of the poet nor within her control. These voices do not escape their historical matrix, their embodiment as speech or icon, or the demand for serious, ethical response by the receiving community. When Howe writes, for example, that “Memory mutinies,” she proposes a speaking subject no longer in possession of her memories but instead possessed or articulated by them (S 23). The collective force of “Memory” is imagined in concerted rebellion against lawful authority—whether grammar and syntax, the sovereign self, or the official historical record. For Howe, historical inquiry is always a kind of invocation of and intimate communion with the dead: “the outside … partly consists of other people's struggles and their voices. Sounds and spirits (ghosts if you like) leave traces in a geography” (B 156). The poet who listens for these spectral voices, moreover, engages in a transhistorical event because in Howe's view the past is modified by the one who inquires into and articulates it. This other voice that inhabits the poet comes not only from the past or from the dead, but from the future—the poem's reader: “You are of me and I of you, I cannot tell,” Howe writes, “Where you leave off and I begin” (S 58).

Articulation of Sound Forms in Time examines one such case of “ecstatic witnessing”: the story of Reverend Hope Atherton, who claimed to witness events surrounding the “Falls Fight” in May of 1676. With his ambiguously gendered name, Hope Atherton is the kind of unreliable, discredited witness that Howe describes in The Birth-mark: a “Narrator-Scribe-Listener-Confessor-Interpreter-Pastor-Judge-Reporter-Author [who] quickly changes person, character, country, and gender” (B 69). Citing layers of archival documentation surrounding inaccessible and finally unknowable historical events during the so-called “fight” between settlers in the northernmost part of New England and Native Americans who had camped in the area,⁹ Howe explains that the English settlers sent out a militia that slaughtered 300 Indians who had been sleeping in their camp, mostly women and children. The victorious army was pursued by neighboring Indians, and 37 English soldiers were killed. The Reverend Hope Atherton, who had accompanied the militia, claimed to have witnessed brutal killings of both Indians and settlers. In commenting on the history, Howe remarks on Hope's “traumatic exposure” and “borderline experience,” noting that the reverend's deranged witness was disbelieved by his congregation: “Many people were not willing to give credit to this account, suggesting he was beside himself” (S 5). According to unnamed historical sources, Atherton's exile from institutional authority and credibility “occasioned him to publish to his congregation and leave in writing” an account of his wanderings (S 5). But this publication earned him few supporters: “He became a stranger to his community,” Howe writes, “and died soon after the traumatic exposure that has earned him poor mention in a seldom opened book” (S 4).

Howe is not interested in retrieving or validating Atherton's account of his experience; she does not tell us, for example, whether his written account, or any copy of it, survived. Nor does she make clear the substance of his account, providing only an “EXTRACT from a LETTER (dated June 8, 1781) of Stephen Williams to President Styles,” written more than 100 years after the fact. If readers turn to Howe's sources (unnamed in the text), they will find that much of the language of her poems is drawn from historical accounts that have nothing to do with Hope's excursion.¹⁰ Yet the framing first section of the poem encourages us to read the poem's second section, “Hope Atherton's Wanderings,” as fragments of Hope's traumatized consciousness. In the third and final section, “Taking the Forest,” Hope converts into the poet “Howe” (transforming pacification, perhaps, into questing), giving us the sensibility of a contemporary poet who has “abolished limitations” and “demythologized [the] fantasy of Manifest Destiny” (S 4). Howe is interested in Hope not simply as an actual historical figure, but as an emblem for a new poetics of history and for a new lyric able to accommodate an epicene speaking subject who is beside him or herself. “I assume Hope Atherton's excursion of an emblem foreshadowing a poet's abolished limitations” (S 4). She seeks not to recover Hope Atherton's lost story but, in exposing the means by which it has been suppressed, to demonstrate an alternative intelligibility. Like Hope Atherton, “a gentleman of publick spirit,” Howe desires to “p[u]blish in the margin” (S 4; B 122), to restore the collective nature of a terrifying national memory by resituating it within the public sphere. By exploring linguistic forces they neither control nor contain, Howe's lyrics resist those narratives that would shatter collective memories of violence into an unbearably private memory.

Howe's sense that language's agency exceeds one's control, or that the speaker is formed by the voices and language that speak her, is not a means of evading responsibility for poetic speech; instead, it intensifies the need to negotiate and explore the conditions of intelligibility, legibility, readability, and legitimacy. The poet does not serve as stable representative for an organic community to which she belongs. On the contrary, her orientation toward collective action is shaped both by the social codings embedded in language and the range of voices made audible precisely by the erosion of the listening “I.” This erosion requires a poetry attentive to “grammatical irruption” but also able to articulate or “link” this language in ways that can meet pressing human needs. “Witnesses are all humans linking or heralding truth or transgression in a grammatical irruption of grace abounding” (B 124).

Just as Howe's poem takes apart the unified lyric subject, opening itself to plural voices in order to radically reconstruct the lyric I-witness, it also shatters orthography, syntax and visual codes in order to reassign iconic status to the poem (though certainly not as the mute, idealized “verbal icon” of New Criticism, bearing its own truth, independent of reader and writer). This shift from iconoclasm to iconicity is encapsulated in the poem's opening section, entitled “Hope Atherton's Wanderings,” which moves from emphasizing the sound of language to displaying its shape. The shattering of the poem's visible form reflects the literal violence against the indigenous peoples outlined in the framing historical narrative. In the first stanzas of the poem, we hear the cracked speech of a person who is “beside himself,” a sensibility opened up to the multiplicities of language. Hope's trauma and wilderness-wandering are enunciated in a strange, babbling rhythm that comprises a kind of speaking in tongues: “quench conch uncannunc,” we read, “drumm amonoosuck ythian” (10). As Marjorie Perloff notes, Howe's words, “fragmented, gnomic, enigmatic,” derive from numerous linguistic groups including Hebrew, Indian, and Old English (529). Slammed together, unpunctuated, drifting, the words are marked by the historical trauma they attempt to relate:

MoheanToForceImmancenceShotStepSeeShowerFifty Tree

(15)

Strewn among the cryptic lyrics are a variety of “Irruptive” phrases such as “archaic hallucinatory laughter” (34), “cult annunciation” (31), “girl stuttering” and “barbarous jargon” (31). The seven densely packed stanzas that open this first section give narrative depth and comprehensiveness to Atherton's “faint slaughter story,” which is “faint” in the double sense of being nearly inaudible and also being suspected of being a trick or “feint.” The historical record appears to be an archeological dig—“deep so deep as my narrative” (S 9)—that turns up nothing but the rubble of obsolete language:

Clog nutmeg abt noon
scraping cano muzzell
foot path sand and so
gravel rubbish vandal
horse flesh ryal tabl
sand enemys flood sun
Danielle Warnare Servt
Turner Falls Fight us
Next wearer April One

(S 6)

All the markers of the chronicle appear in these poems—places, names, dates, times, numbers—“April,” “Clay Gully,” “May,” “abt noon,” “5 rails high houselot Cow”—but only as shards and fragments, not the product of a single shaping consciousness. Following these seven stanzas are two facing pages of similar language rubble, but this time with different spacing between the lines. With extra space, the pace changes; we imagine a self-reflective, more contemplative speaker. The rhetorical elements of the earlier stanzas give way to the somatic elements of language—the pleasurable nonsense of “scowl aback din // flicker skaag ne // barge quagg peat // sieve catacomb [crossed out] // stint chisel sect” (S 10). These stanzas call further attention to their own compositional process; the poet's presence is indicated by the authorial crossing-through of the line “sieve catacomb.” (Was the rhythm wrong? The consonants too soft? The words too familiar?)

At the end of this section, Hope Atherton recovers sufficiently to articulate his thoughts to his “Loving Friends and Kindred” within more or less conventional structures of address: “We are a small remnant / of signal escapes wonderful in themselves,” he says (S 16). But as Hope becomes progressively more reassuring (“We must not worry”), his despair becomes all the more evident, as indicated by the tired “and etc” that follows the line “Hope for the artist in America.” As Perloff points out, the poem turns away from this sentimental and glib “Hope” in the poem's third and final section, “Taking the Forest,” so that Atherton's stuttering witness remains in exile in the forest, far from “the old home trees.” A reader familiar with Howe's work will know that the forest is the place of vision, magic, and the powerful mother (children wandering, babes lost in the woods, Hansel and Gretel). In taking to the forest, Howe struggles particularly against those insidious myths of beginning that have obscured narratives like Hope's. Here, too, we find in the section's concluding poem an inflated address to the reader—the jarringly inverted syntax of the lines “To kin I call in the Iron-Woods / Turn I to dark Fells last alway” (S 38). Atherton's “old home trees” become Howe's “crumbled masonry windswept hickory.” But the gesture to home only reminds us of the radical departures these poets have taken, including their exiles from the comfortable home we inhabit in conventional language. In the lines “Rubble couple on pedestal / Rubble couple Rhythm and Pedestal,” Howe gestures to our cultural nostalgia for an originary couple (the “little figure of mother,” “Bridegroom,” and “Alfather” in previous lines) as well as to her own poetic form—rubble of language sometimes appearing as couplets, the rhythm and off-rhyme of phrases like “rubble couple,” the page as a pedestal from which the lyric has fallen.

Throughout Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, Howe employs a markedly disjunctive language, but her iconoclasm paradoxically ends up restoring iconicity to language, presenting us with pieces of speech so extremely divorced from conventional reference that often their shapes or sounds are their meanings. Highlighting the visible shape of the poem by mirroring textual structures, Howe makes the poem shine forth as a visible, caressable object. She arranges words, for example, so that pages reflect one another, though not in simple ways. There is linear reversal of words, as well as spatial displacement. Forward becomes backward; words move from top to bottom; the word “upside” becomes “sideup.” A block of text is flipped over and pivoted on its axis, in the process losing white space between words, and we thus enter a hall of mirrors in which the effect is to emphasize the form of the written text and, by obliterating conventional meaning, to emphasize its sound or music (in an interview with Linda Reinfeld, Howe mentions that the phrase “articulation of sound forms in time” is drawn from the writing of Schoenberg).¹¹

Thus the poem gets at what it calls “the face of the voice of speech” (S 19). Historian Ann Kibbey describes the Puritan belief that “written texts were in some way fundamentally dependent for their intelligibility on their incorporation into speech, that sound—however transitory and precarious—was essential” (8). Thus, Kibbey tells us, the Puritans “gave unusual prominence to material signifiers, to the acoustic shapes of spoken words” (8). Howe's view of the poem as a (shattered) icon—the poem as scattered remnants of a sacred image that once claimed pure immediacy and the ability to body forth divine presence—responds directly to the iconclastic violence of Puritanism, an intellectual and ideological heritage that continues to haunt us. Kibbey has argued compellingly that Puritan iconoclasm, in its rage to destroy images, not only committed violence against the body of iconic artwork, but also served to “justify violence against people as images” (3). Not only was the language violent, but the violence was symbolic, according to Jill Lepore's recent history of King Philip's War. “War is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds,” she argues, suggesting further that the bloody 17th-century conflict between Indians and settlers was “deliberately and deeply symbolic” (including Indian tortures like the one that Howe describes—covering white soldiers with dry thatch, setting it on fire, and ordering them to run). For Kibbey, the “decision to commit genocide, to murder women and children as well as men, follows directly from the assumptions of iconoclastic prejudice” (103). By showing the body of the poem as icon shattered by violence into fracturings and syllables and sounds, Howe connects the Puritan rhetoric of iconoclasm with American warfare: “Speech was a cry for action” (S 21). Absorbing the rhetorical violence of iconoclasm into her poem, Howe connects the Puritan rage to destroy the iconic, material shape with extreme acts of colonial prejudice and violence.

The poem further connects this violence with the Puritan banishment of women's voices to the literal margins of society and the enforcement of radically different linguistic roles for men and women. Women such as Ann Hutchinson who spoke as the equals of men, for example, risked the radical exclusion of banishment. Hope Atherton's strange speech was unheard or at least unreciprocated, like that of a Puritan woman, and he was thus rendered a feminized figure, occupying in his banishment an ambiguous gender and race identity. In an interview, Howe describes how she came to write the poem: “I was turning the pages of a history of Hadley, and Hope's name just caught me. It was the emblematical name. Here was this person. A man with a woman's name. He had this borderline, half-wilderness, half-Indian, insanity-sanity experience. He was a minister accompanying an army. The enemy thought he might have been God. Was he telling the truth? Had he been hiding or marching?” (Talisman Interview, 167). Hope's feminine name encapsulated, for Howe, the American propensity for feminizing antinomian visions, and subsequently expelling them into the “wilderness” outside history's enclosure.

Despite her critique of Puritan iconoclasm, Howe nonetheless relies on the Puritan rhetoric of “conversion” for her poem's potentially transformative effects. As Wendy Martin has pointed out, “Puritan reformation and feminist transformation are structurally similar”:

both envision the creation of a new world … The Puritan heart prepared to receive God's grace has its parallel in the feminist process of consciousness raising, and both Puritans and feminists accept struggle as an essential part of their lives as pilgrims or pioneers.

(7)

Howe finds structural parallels for the Puritan conversion experience in mathematics (the singularity as sudden change) and in a disjunctive poetics; the “instant articulation” as a kind of conversion is the aim of her work. Kibbey tells us that for the Puritans, conversion was a “linguistic event”—a response to heard speech that, in altering the listener's system of reference, called for new social behaviors. As a fully verbal experience, conversion could be produced only by “spontaneous speech,” which thus stood as the most highly valued aspect of language. The goal of Howe's text is in some sense the conversion of the reader—the “alteration of the hearer's system of reference … a conversion from one system of meaning to another” (Kibbey, 7). Thus the shattering of the poem as icon calls for an alternative intelligibility, a new system of reference, a new way of reading.

Despite this imperative of articulation and transformation—which suggests communicative rationality and intelligibility—Howe's poems unfold as resonantly inarticulate lyric sequences in which the rhetorical force of language is overwhelmed by its somatic elements. Her visionary texts evoke less the redemptive wholeness and clarity of Pentecost's healing tongues than the postlapsarian, shattering confusion of Babel. They renounce the nostalgia for origins, pure immediacy, and union with the divine in favor of a polyglot “cohabitation of languages”—what Roland Barthes has called “a sanctioned Babel.”¹² Thus Howe imputes sacredness and inviolability not to a common, universal tongue but to a speech that is multiplicitous, polyglot, cracked, raving, and at times nearly unintelligible.

It would be easy to read Howe's disjunctive writing, with its eccentric orthography and stuttering syntax, as the mirror image of a catastrophic national history, as the jettisoning of historical narrative in favor of a poststructuralist lyric fragmentation, and as proof of the poet's failure to make history cohere. But such a reading would overlook Howe's deep investment in historiography as a narrative genre that can articulate the cultural and historical realities of those people whose experiences have been excluded from the public sphere as unintelligible or irrational. “Once dams,” Howe writes, “narratives are bridges” (B 57).¹³ Howe seeks, like Mary Rowlandson, “a retrospective narrative voice [that] can control and connect the twists and turns of time past” (B 124), but she does not propose the long poem as a subversive “counternarrative.” This strategy, in assuming a unified, coherent tradition of historiography, would only shore up authority found in the original model, falling victim to a realist view of the long poem by calling for it merely to reflect cultural realities rather than to intervene by proposing new aesthetic forms.

Articulation of Sound Forms in Time presents the paradox of the long poem as icon—a long poem whose fundamental unit is neither poem nor stanza, neither word nor syllable, but the “sound-form,” or in Howe's phrase, “sounds we see. Sounds [that] leap to the eye” (Birth-mark 139). Emphasizing what she calls “the visible surface of discourse,” the acoustic image or shape of speech, Howe makes explicit in an interview with Ed Foster that, for her, “a poem is an icon” (B 177). Howe's stance in relation to the poem as icon is ambivalent, however. Often called an “iconoclast” by her critics, she clearly shatters language and typescript conventions. But Howe equally desires to restore to poetry its iconic status, so that the formal tension in her long poems derives from competing impulses—the destructive impulse of iconoclasm, on the one hand, and the re-articulating language of enthusiasm, on the other, with the ecstatic experience of “conversion” serving as a hinge between them. Juxtaposing the iconoclastic heteroglossia of archival research (in which multiple public languages are in productive or violent conflict) with the iconic glossolalia of a private mystic speech, Howe's poems foreground both the textual body—its marking, apparatus, and appendages, and the embodiment of the text by the visionary witness. Howe claims as her heritage a re-articulating enthusiastic legacy that the competing tradition of Puritan iconoclasm has worked to shatter and silence.¹⁴ Thus Howe's long poems balance dangerously between disarticulation and articulation. “[I]t's the articulation that represents life,” she writes. “And Hope has that sort of experience. And Hope is in me. In all of us.”

Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth has argued that an extremely dislocating or traumatic experience presents itself as a “pathology of history,” in which historical knowledge possesses the “unknowing” speaking subject who, rather than constructing a past, is constructed by and produces or manifests it. Texts produced out of such violent, dissociating limit-experiences are often disarticulated, disjunctive, and esoteric; part of the experience, according to Caruth, is the uncontrolled rehearsal of the trauma and the infectiousness of its speaking. In the shock of a traumatic encounter, “experience dissociates from the knowledge of the experience,” so that the violent incident (or accident), which had nearly dissolved any stable sense of identity or self, remains incompletely registered and unresolved. Because the original experience is inaccessible, the problem then becomes the impossibility of referential language, creating a crisis for the victim of trauma. Even those who have been subject to traumatic experience and seem to have survived unscathed are, apparently, doomed to repeat and re-enact the event in strangely literal ways, inexorably “possessed” by latent memories that seem unreliable, unwilled, and alien. Speech under these conditions seems automatic, or dictated from “outside.” Stuttering rhythmically, such speech defies grammar and syntax as it disintegrates into feverish fragments of syllable and sound.

On entering the public sphere, such speech arouses cultural anxieties about the contagiousness of the traumatic experience—fears that listeners will be traumatized merely by the listening. According to Caruth, the very contagion of trauma makes possible the transmission of a new historical knowledge. “To listen to the crisis of a trauma,” she writes, “is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor's departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure” (10). In Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, Howe gives us both the “collapse of witnessing”¹⁵ and the imperative to witness, to publish and read differently. Her poem reenacts and relives trauma, offering itself as “singularity,” the “catastrophe of bifurcation,” as she calls it, because in that violent space—the devastating anecdote emerging from the anonymous community—conversion is possible, the creation of a new system of reference.

Susan Howe's poetry asks how we can reconcile the urgent need in our time for poetry to give historical witness to traumatic events with our increasing sense of the erosion of the witnessing “I,” the instability of the speaking subject's sovereignty. “Vision closes over vision,” she writes, “Standpoint melts into open” (S 30). Her work suggests that more is at stake than might appear in contemporary poetry's recurrent scenes of what Susan Stewart has called “lyric possession.” The textualized contagious ecstasies of contemporary poetry and (at its most extreme) its turn to embodied, autonomic speech are acts of history making and critical memory. These haunted speakings and impossible utterances do not represent, as some would claim, a nostalgic return to the Romantic ideal of poetry as transport or to an even older discourse of poetry as inspired utterance. Rather, these multiple kinds of traumatic utterance reveal a sublime disturbance at the heart of the Enlightenment ideal of rational consensus within the public sphere. The attempt to speak at the borders of the sayable by accommodating terror—and its obverse, ecstasy—unsettles many of our notions about language and agency, calling for alternative concepts of agency and resistance, and, in Howe's case, a radically new mode of writing.

Notes

1. See Joseph Conte, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry.

2. Susan Howe, “Postscripts to Emily Dickinson,” 82-3.

3. The titles of Howe's books will be abbreviated as follows: B, The Birth-mark; S,Singularities.

4. See the title of Perloff's essay, and Keller p. 6.

5. See essays by Peter Quartermain, Peter Nicholl, Peter Middleton, Lynn Keller, and Marjorie Perloff.

6. By “ecstasy” (ex + stasis), I mean to suggest a projective, outward-directed displacement of self—the subject possessed, dispossessed, and in motion. By speaking of an “ecstatic poetics,” I do not mean that poetry of the “scenic mode,” in which Charles Altieri finds “a smug, self-satisfied lyric persona constantly transported into visionary states” that “climax in moments of resonant silence” (15). Like Altieri, I am wary of any poem that would claim to be a sincere, direct, and spontaneous utterance, or that would meet public traumas with a fine and quiet ecstasy. By “ecstasy,” I mean instead to suggest a borderline state of subjectivity that corresponds to the situation of the subject exiled from official histories by complex cultural and national processes. Like the victim of trauma, the ecstatic suffers from a loss of place; ecstasy is in some sense a disorder of memory and history. Thus, ecstatic speech is not only as a thematic issue but a formal element of an open poetics.

7. The Birth-mark, 166.

8. Jonathan Culler, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 726.

9. Among the texts that Howe draws on in this first section are Reuben Wells's A History of Hatfield (1910), Sylvester Judd's History of Hadley (1863), and George Sheldon's A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts (1895-6). See Peter Nicholls' essay for an illuminating comparison of Howe's poem to one of its historical source documents.

10. See Peter Nicholl's essay.

11. See Linda Reinfeld, 124.

12. Roland Barthes, 4.

13. Important discussions of “lyric narrative” include Margaret Dickie's On the Modernist Long Poem and Susan Friedman's recent essay, “Craving Stories.” Dickie points out that modernist poets merged the narrative impulse of the long poem with a lyric “ecstatic affirmation” (11). Although the modernist poets privileged lyricism over narrative in their long poems, in order to disrupt the authority of a cultural narrative perceived as inadequate and tyrannical, feminist accounts of contemporary women who are working in extended forms have focused on their turn to narrative as an empowering strategy. Friedman's essay challenges the critical binary that would value the subversiveness of lyric over narrative by highlighting the importance of historical narrative to marginalized groups who bear witness to the unspeakable and irretrievable and to the survival of the story.

14. Susan Howe's poetry comprises, like Ann Hutchinson's teaching, a “millennial activism”: “I am a poet writing near the end of the twentieth century,” writes Howe (B 12). She might agree with Clement Hawes that there is an “ongoing cold war against the enthusiastic legacy” (which he traces back as far as the Ranters and up through Christopher Smart) which would deny “a very real sense in which enthusiasm constitutes a continuing presence within literary tradition.” Howe, like Coleridge before her, believes that the “the disease of the age is want of enthusiasm, and a tending to fanaticism” (B 47).

15. Dori Laub (quoted in Caruth, 10).

Portions of this paper were presented at The American Literature Association (Baltimore, May 1997) and the MLA Convention (Toronto, December 1997). I am grateful to those people who talked with me about this work, including Lynn Keller, Cynthia Hogue, Don Wellman, Alicia Ostrikes, Charles Altieri, Hamet Davidson, and, especially, Miriam Bartha.

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