[In the following essay, Quartermain discusses the defining characteristics of Howe's poetry.]

How do I exist in a language that doesn't want me to exist, or makes me exist as a fiction, as la femme?

—Nicole Brossard¹

There's a deceptively literary or bookish flavour about Susan Howe's work, especially at the beginning of many of her sequences and books, prefaced as they often are with a quotation or quotations (e.g., Hinge Picture, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time); or opening with lines that have the feel of quotations, unmarked and unacknowledged, though the words may actually be Howe's (e.g., “Thorow”); or opening with a directly identified one.² Often, as in the case of Cabbage Gardens or The Liberties, the poem responds to the challenge explicit or implicit in the quotation, debunking or deconstructing the assumptions underlying and/or the circumstances giving rise to the words quoted. Cabbage Gardens is prefaced with Samuel Johnson deriding the notion of poems about cabbages whilst playing with the notion that the cultivation of the cabbage marks the history of civilization. The Liberties gives us Jonathan Swift writing the personal “little language” of the Journal to Stella, his writings to her preserved (“so adieu deelest MD MD MD FW FW Me Me / Fais I don't conceal a bitt. as hope sav'd”), hers to him destroyed, prefacing a poem that, in passionate rage, retrieves Hester Johnson (Stella) from her “liquidation.”³ Insofar as these works are bookish, they are revisionist. This is true, too, of those more explicitly radical works that seek to revise our notions of the world, and that are prefaced by quotation, such as Articulation of Sound Forms in Time and “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” I read the last-named work as a poem, for its direction is determined, much as the direction of Howe's astonishing My Emily Dickinson is determined, by her reading of language as an emblematic collection of signs, potential meanings, abbreviations, wonders, and terrors to which she is subject rather than of which she is “master.” As George Butterick has observed, Howe “is another argument for the late start, like Olson,” for “she does not make her earliest appearance with relatively predictable work, and then markedly develop from there.”⁴ I would add that her work is, too, all of one piece: It all makes one work, one life, one poem, but carrying with it a multiplicity of works, lives, poems.

It is in these terms that I take as thoroughly representative of Howe's writing the eight-poem sequence “Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk,” collected in Singularities. The first poem begins with an identified quotation from an American literary “classic” and the last ends with the words, significantly in upper case, “THE REVISER.” The sequence itself is a further installment in Howe's radical reassessment of canonical notions, of history and of language, of patriarchal notions of women and of power and of truth. While her reassessment and indeed her poetics, rejecting the possibility of definitive statement, invite elliptical commentary (if they invite commentary at all), there are indeed identifiable and even definable concerns and themes recurring throughout Howe's work. I think that the great energy of Howe's writing arises from a series of tensions, between the more-or-less explicit themes and subject matter of the work, and the unstated verbal and schematic activity of the poem (between the algorithmic and the heuristic might be one way to put it); between Howe's enchanted fascination with and desperate possession by history and with language, and her intense desire to be free of them; between her desire for the secure, the stable, and the defined, and her apprehension of them as essentially false; between her impassioned attraction to, and sheer terror of, the wilderness. What I offer is only one way of reading Howe. Here is the opening poem of “Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk”:

“on a [p < suddenly … on a = was shot thro with a dyed ← < dyed ← a soft]”∗
(became the vision)(the rea) after Though          [though]That
Fa
But what is envy [but what is envy]
Is envy the bonfire inkling?
Shackles[          (shackles)          ] as we were told the … [precincts]

∗ Billy Budd: The Genetic Text

In the course of the following pages, my remarks are largely confined to the opening three lines.

Bluntly uncompromising and problematic, the opening line emphatically and unabashedly draws attention to itself as text, as written rather than spoken language, indifferent to the reader. How, after all, can one voice this unfamiliar and cluttered-looking notation: Is it musical, with its p, its greater-than/less-than brackets? Is it conventional American-English literary orthography, with its quotation marks, lower-case beginning, square brackets, italics, elision marks, and asterisk? What are we to make of those arrows? Surely this is a code, though we cannot recognise which one: a computer text, perhaps? Voiced or not, it proceeds in bits and pieces, stops and starts, repeats. Problematic, and emphatically for the eye. So uncompromisingly is it removed from the forms and modes of “normal” discourse that there is a haze of uncertainty, what Howe elsewhere calls “a halo of wilderness” (“Illogic”), thrown about the line. We know—or at any rate trust—that it's verse, the look of the page tells us that, but how can we possibly voice it, how does one bit lead to the next? Are we to read “suddenly … on a” as grammatical subject to the verb “was shot”? What sorts of relationships are these, in this asyntactic writing? That “suddenly … on a” has something of the air of quick instruction on how to voice the first two words, and that closing “soft” looks like an echo, especially if we read the italicised p as piano (another voicing instruction). “Shot through with a dyed—[pause?]—dyed—”: like shot silk, then? or to do with death? We do not know what we see, for we do not recognise it. (Yet we do know, of course. But there are no customary meanings here—or seem to be very few.)

The second line is similarly difficult, with its offbeat spacing, its variety of parentheses, its (apparently) fragmentary words, its use of upper case, and its equally problematic syntax. It's almost as though the notational system is continually being pushed (is falling?) off balance, subverting convention, undermining itself: The paired parentheses look like the mathematical notation for multiplication (and why are the round brackets such latecomers on the parenthetical scene?); the square brackets pushing that word “though” tight against “That” do not seem to be used the way they were in line I; the large gap after “Though” comes as a welcome break for the eye after the headlong crowded impetus of the first line (the arrows forwarding, forwarding), but is difficult to interpret (a new breath? a second thought?). Parentheses and spacing mark words off into groups while signalling a tentative uncertain quality to them, and suggesting that the movement of thought in this writing need not necessarily be progress. Semantic grounds shift: “became” means turned into? Was fitting? Syntax continues to break down (what “became the vision”?) and indeed extends into the fragmenting and fracturing of words (“rea”; “[though]That”). The second line, like the first, gives us small islands of localised meaning, a haze of uncertain stumbling bursting into pockets of lucidity, clearings in the thicket, the movement toward coherence (“became the vision”) shifting instantly to fragmentation and incompleteness (“the rea”), the lines diminishing down to the initial and terminal fragment “Fa” of line 3. Far? Father? Fate? The uncertain context makes all three (and a lot of others) possible, and the fragment suggests they might all be under erasure. It is worth recalling, though, that Fa is, according to both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Century, a musical term (the fourth note of the octave)—so the lines sing a diminishing music? The same sources tell us that Fa is an obsolete word for few and for foe, as well as Scottish for fall. If the word is complete, it is no less uncertain.

What is remarkable is not simply that the notation for the eye plays against and with that for the ear, but that moving toward fracture and fragment the syntax and the diction move also toward completion. The “rea” in line two invites us to read “Though” as similarly “incomplete,” especially after the abbreviation “thro” in line one, yielding “thought”—an invitation reinforced by what comes next, the close-packed “[though]That” (a kind of apo koinou at the level of the letter). This itself gives rise to a rather complicated little movement in which, rhyming “thro” in line 1 with the “though” of line 2, the ear, reminded of Robert Duncan's habit of spelling “thought” thot, proposes a rhyme between the putative “Though[t] though” of line 2 with the “shot thro” of line 1. The ear hears what the eye does not see, and the movement of the poem depends upon and is a response to the shifts and uncertainties in the language.

So the lines are packed with transformations, and we see how, amid and because of the uncertainties, language generates text, the poem generates itself. The sheer closeness of the sets of parentheses incorporates the Rea(l) into the vision, making it visionary. And what follows? another fairly dense play, this time predominantly semantic/lexical—“after Though.” The upper case on “Though” makes it seem an afterthought, a substitution for “after,” which immediately suggests (if we had not seen this already) that in these lines we are privy to the processes of writing, the processes of composition, the processes of thought—a word remarkable in these lines for its absence. As a conjunction or as an adverb expressing contrast (but here syntactically it seems to work as a noun?) though manifests thought—and after a gap, a pause (for thought?), the terminal group in the line emerges: “though[that]”: that, deictic, pointing, a gesture toward the concrete object—or, as the Century dictionary says of real, “always importing the existent.” So the last two words (one word?) of the line bring together the insubstantial/nonmaterial (thought) and the actual/material (thing). The last two words bring together, then, enact, the vision and the real, the perceived and the thought.

“Fa” is a crux, encapsulating as it does the fracture and fragmentation of language in the very act of moving toward completion. Howe's work, from the very title of her first book (Hinge Picture) on, treads borders, boundaries, dividing lines, edges, invisible meeting points. Her language returns to such cusps again and again, for they mark extremities, turning points, limits, shifts, the nameless edge of mystery where transformations occur and where edge becomes centre. Hope Atherton, in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, moves from the centre to the margin, to the wilderness, and (like Mary Rowlandson) thus marginalises the centre. “Extremities. Paths lost found forgotten. Border margin beginning. Birth/Death. Inside/Outside. She/He. Moving/Staying. Finding/Losing” (“Armantrout” 209). Kings, Howe tells us in My Emily Dickinson, ruled by “divinely ordained decree, the allegorical point where God, the State, and human life met” (81), and King Lear “rashly gave his world away. Balance, confusion, naming, transformation—. Arrived at the point of initiation, stopped at the moment of conversion, instinct draws up short” (114). Mary Rowlandson, at sunrise “on a day of calamity, at the inverted point of antitypical history, looks out at the absence of Authority and sees we are all alone” (CMR 115). A cusp, where two curves meet and stop. Or do they. At the point where one realm meets another there is a crossover. And the great crossover place is language, always “at the blind point between what is said and meant” (MyED 82), always at the blind point between the static authority of name and the fluidity of nameless object. Language, moving toward definition, moving toward name, moving toward Authority, toward the arbitrary, toward Power, toward Noun, to assert control: “it was the primordial Adam to whom God gave the power of naming.” But a world without names? “In the brave new world of Death there are no names” (“Armantrout” 211). Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte entice Howe “away from comprehension to incommunicable mystery that may be essential harmony or most appalling anarchy” (“Women” 63). Mystery is nameless, incommunicable, pathless, wild, but irresistible. “Artists bow to no order” (“Olson” 6).

Hence the text is uncertain, indefinite; it resists description. How many words are there in line 2? How many groups? How many languages? Is “rea” a word? If “rea” is conventionally incomplete, is “Though”? If “though” is complete, is “rea”? You will not find rea in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor in the Century. But you will in Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary. It is a juridical word:

I. Originally, a party to an action (res), either plaintiff or defendant; afterwards restricted to the party accused, defendant, prisoner, etc. II. In the stricter sense. A. A party obliged or under obligation to do or pay any thing, or answerable or responsible for any thing, a bondsman, a debtor; one who is bound by any thing, who is answerable for any thing, a debtor. B. One who is accused or arraigned, a defendant, prisoner, a criminal, culprit.⁵

And it is feminine, a woman. Rea is also, as readers of Williams's Paterson find out, a Spanish word for whore. What vision what perception of women is this? Howe's poem is packed with transformations indeed, and the transformations are wrought by the apparent disorder of the language, the very irrationality of the text, out of which possible figurations and configurations of meaning emerge.

Unparaphraseable, these lines seem to register a process of perception and thought subject perpetually and continuously to re-casting, re-seeing, re-vision. They register a process of cogitating, meditating and exploring an old enigma, endemic perhaps to all human culture but especially acute in the history of New England, perpetually evoked and invoked by the complex of the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the cultivated and the wild: The relations between the real and the visionary. Hesitant, seeking certitude and clarity, rejecting them as impossible, the vision immediately corrected (?), re-seen, re-assigned, to the necessarily and perpetually incomplete real. Caught in the field as it is, caught in the field of language, thought can progress no Farther. Fa. The doubleness of the movement is a doubleness of desire. Clarity and definition of deixis, of pointing, of the, lead only to fracture in language. “The” revised, surrounded by a halo of wilderness.

But there is more. The asterisk at the end of line 1 points to a text that proceeds through a series of more or less minor surprises, lurching, hiccupping, stopping and starting, stuttering and stammering along, casting jerkily around for words: “Billy Bud: The Genetic Text.”⁶ Line 1 is a quotation, a found text. Not—as the footnote carefully keeps clear—Melville's, but a coded text recording Melville picking his way in stops and starts through the writing of Billy Budd, a text recording Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts picking their way through the tangled manuscripts of Billy Budd. Decoding it, not knowing at any given moment whether the words we read will two words later be crossed out, perhaps only to be restored a couple of pen strokes later, we discern a text “criss-crossed with erasures and corrections” (as Susan Howe wrote of P. Inman's Platin [9]), a text so urgently stumbling almost blindly along through a mind-boggling series of tentative and at times almost desperate castings-about for words and phrases that we are caught up in the sheer suspense the processes of the telling generate, a stuttering narrative of inarticulation unspoken within the narrative.

Howe's first line comes from the top of a left-hand page of the book (412)—it stretches from margin to margin—and is just the sort of line that might catch the casual eye—or at least Susan Howe's—casting through flipped pages, or drawing the sorts. Decoded, it says:

“on a [cross out in pencil all the words from ‘suddenly’ to ‘on a’; insert, above the line and with a caret, the words ‘was shot thro with a dyed’; cross out with (the same?) pencil the word ‘dyed’ and insert, above the line, with a caret, the words ‘a soft’].”

The first line of Howe's poem then, decoded, tells us that Melville's manuscript looks (more or less) like this:

suddenly dyed by the sun behind
approaching near the horizon, took
                                                                      a soft
                              was shot thro with a dyed glory
on a

Such a translation of Howe's first line, thus made more or less coherent (“with a a soft glory”?) and intelligible, does not get us very far (but where were we going?). The meaning of the line, as it appears in the Genetic Text of Billy Budd, seems to be nothing like its meaning in Howe's poem (meaning is a function of context). The asterisk points us explicitly to this text, and what we have is a poem which in the act of inviting translation/decoding denies it, at the same time asserting the primacy of context and drawing the reader's attention to the processes of (Howe's) writing as well as of her/his reading. What is on the page is what we see. Yet the word “suddenly,” one of the words the code tells us is crossed out, is not otherwise in Howe's line: it is, that is to say, present in its erasure. We see it in its absence. We see what we do not see.

The context from which this line comes might help if we're looking for clarity (whatever that might be) in Howe's poem, looking for a way of sorting out the syntax, the code. The sentence from which this line comes does afford a clue as to where that “(became the vision)” in the second line might have come from, but on the whole the context is not especially enlightening if we're looking for some sort of definitive meaning for Howe's text. Melville is describing the precise moment at which Billy Budd, that young man with something of the feminine in him, that young man Captain Vere has already called “an Angel,” is being hanged:

At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedge of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.

(124)

But how much clarity does this provide? Hayford and Sealts, in their commentary, say that “as to the implications of this … passage the critics are in wide disagreement” and “draw opposite conclusions from the [same] evidence” (192). Readers cannot agree on the meaning of Melville's text, though all seem to agree not only that the sentence from which Howe's line comes is of crucial significance in the narrative of Billy Budd but also that Billy Budd itself is a crucially significant document in the American literary canon (significance is a function of context). The text of Billy Budd is bristling with (unspecified) significations, but we hardly needed Howe's poem to tell us that. Why then does line one point outside the poem to the Genetic Text of Billy Budd?

This is not an easy question, even if part of the answer is to rejoin that the footnote dissolves the distinctions between a world inside the poem and a world outside the poem. It points to that set of attractions and repulsions I referred to in my second paragraph and establishes the quoted line as a boundary, a turning point of the visible and invisible. It may indeed look as though Howe is trying to eat her cake and have it, using the footnote reference as a source, using it to declare that this writing, so difficult to sort out and decipher, so uncompromising in its eschewal of conventional meaning, so determined in its rejection of conventionally intelligible syntax, is after all not eschewing or rejecting those things, but is instead actually decodeable, is indeed “about” something, does have a paraphrasable content. Perhaps those words and notations which lie so uncompromisingly opaque on the page, language, are after all transparent, and the poem is to be seen as forum, vehicle, and hence finally static. Perhaps the reference is a sort of apron string connecting the poem to the conventional world, making it intelligible in conventional terms. It may indeed look that way. The pull of the footnote is toward the conventional, toward the “intelligible,” toward the “classic,” toward “meaning,” toward a paraphrasable “content,” toward Noun. The pull of the syntax, of the weird notation on the page, is away from that, subverts and transforms the apparent stability of the transparent word, pulls toward Verb. The resulting tension is not only one source of energy for the poem, not only a source of the poem's passion—for this is indeed a poem of feeling as well as of thought; it also, in grounding the language of the poem in the perceived and physical world, reminds us that language is, itself, physical, the perceived and felt world.

In addition, it points to a complex of thought and feeling identifiable in that tension. The footnote points to the notations, the editorial apparatus and code, which clutter the line and which litter the Genetic Text. For significant as the Genetic Text (and Melville's manuscript) may be, it (and Melville's manuscript version) is also incoherent. Jerking and stuttering along and then bursting momentarily free into coherence and even lucidity.

          Having settled upon h←<h→the cou→<the cou→his→this<Having
… upon→Having determined upon the course to adopt,

(371)

it is littered with misspellings and broken-off words

                                                            [p <striker of the blow] Too well the thoughf
→<thoughf→ thoughtful officer knew what his superior meant. [p <Too well
… meant]

(377)

and with omissions (the result, perhaps, of haste)

          what remains primeval in our formalized humanity may in
          end have caught Billy to his arms

(400)

and with repetitions.

What this poem does, by making both Melville's and the Genetic Text visible, is point to the incoherence, the uncertainty, the groping of Melville's text—those features of his writing that are erased, made invisible, liquidated, in the Reading Text—and assert them as a compositional principle, insisting that we attend to the writer in the act of composition, responsive to the detailed notation of uncertainty's hesitation and accuracy's register. The first line of the poem insists that we read the Genetic Text the way Howe insists we read Emily Dickinson. “In the precinct of poetry,” she says, “a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark silence or sound, volatizes an inner law of form; moves on a rigorous line” (“Illogic” 7).

Yet one great interest of the Genetic Text of Billy Budd is that, unlike Melville's manuscript and unlike Howe's poem, it is indeed littered. It is littered by the editors who interrupt their coding with such editorial comment as “left incoherent,” “revision leaves the sentence incoherent” (386, 367, and elsewhere). In the long run this means for the editors that even the Genetic Text, as they say of their own Reading Text transcribed from it, only “approximates Melville's final intention” because he might have engaged “in further expansion or revision” (vi.) For the editors thus to conclude that the text of Billy Budd is indeterminate is to assume that a text is only determinate if it conforms to grammatical, syntactic, and even perhaps thematic and cultural conventions. It is also to assume that Melville had intentions for the text that either were clear to Melville himself and deducible or that conformed to an implicit but nevertheless clear set of grammatical, (etc.) conventions. Or both. Howe's poem assumes the contrary: that Melville's “litter” of emendations, faulty grammar and syntax, misspellings and incoherence is not litter at all—and neither, once it is before us, is the editorial apparatus. In transcribing Melville's manuscript the editors invented the Genetic Text, and in preparing a Reading Text they turned their backs on what they had wrought. For the Reading Text presents us with a composition whose order has been wrestled from an intractable text, from a Genetic Text that simply cannot be confined within the coherence imposed by the conventional obedience of the Reading Text. The Genetic Text bristles with tentativeness and is rich with possibility; it is thematically straitjacketed in a Reading Text which, like Captain Vere sacrificing Billy Budd to the principle of law, legislates away the sheer mystery of the Genetic Text and of Melville's actual writing encoded within it by seeking to control and to possess.

Thus Hayford and Sealts's edition of Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is, Howe's poem tells us, a trope. Within its covers we see enacted two conflicts: that between Melville and his “material” (the essentially inchoate story of Billy Budd); and that between the editors and Melville's text. It is a trope for a history in which “little by little grandmothers and mothers are sinking in sand while grandfathers and fathers are electing and seceding” (“Women” 69); a history of settlers exterminating the Indians and “redeeming” the souls of the Indians' captives by buying them; of the English repressing the Irish by force and by doctrine until, irreversibly divided, they begin to exterminate themselves in the name of certitude and righteousness; of the hegemony of an intellectual and economic power which would, by revising and acculturating the texts it recognises as central, marginalise and even abolish the actual texts as written because it seeks, by stabilising the world so that its processes are arrested or invisible, to manage it.⁷ As Howe remarks of Emily Dickinson in “The Illogic of Sumptuary Values,” “in a system of restricted exchange, the subject-creator and her art in its potential gesture, were domesticated and occluded by an assumptive privileged Imperative.” It is a trope telling us, says the poem, that “malice dominates the history of Power and Progress. History is the record of winners. Documents were written by the Masters. But fright is formed by what we see not by what they say” (“Poetics” 13).

It thus enacts the essential human conflict, between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the cultivated and the wild. The two editors, wrestling the wildness of the manuscript into stable and definitive canonical shape, evoke the complex of the relations between the real and the visionary. Howe invites us to read Billy Budd as Melville wrote it, spasmodically erasing itself, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing itself. Throwing a halo of wilderness around the line from the Genetic Text with which it begins, the poem throws a halo of wilderness around Billy Budd itself and points to a textual, literary, intellectual and cultural arrogance which in homogenizing a work shackles it into invisibility. Here (again) are the last three lines of this opening poem:

But what is envy [but what is envy]
Is envy the bonfire inkling?
Shackles[          ](shackles)          ] as we were told the … [precincts]

Howe sees that arrogance as patriarchal, and the conflict, between the world as is (wild) and the world as wanted (ordered), as devastating. A cincture is a girdle, a belt, a barrier, an enclosure, and a fence. While the text longs for resolution, it insistently demands that its disorder not be dissipated in mere definition. The blankness of the page surrounding each poem in the sequence—and indeed Howe's deeply ingrained necessity to compose in units of one page—is essential to the poem's decontextualizing of utterance, forcing us to read Genetic Texts (surely each poem itself is one) without translating the code, so the eye sees and attends everything on the page without hierarchising or invisibilising according to the demands of the canon. Eyes pre-cinct the poem. As the last line of the poem suggests, our history, what we were told, precincts the text and our reading.

Such a thematic view of the opening of “Scattering” as a radical rereading of Billy Budd sees the poem as a further stage in Susan Howe's archaeological retrieval of lost or straitjacketed American texts, in her retrieval of historical persons (women especially, but also writers) straitjacketed or obliterated by being textualized and then erased: Hester Johnson, Mary Rowlandson, Thoreau, the emblematically named Hope Atherton, Emily Dickinson. “I write to break out into perfect primeval Consent,” she told the New Poetics Colloquium in 1985. “I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate” (“Poetics” 15). They have been hidden by a utilitarian, canonizing, and classicizing impulse; they have willy-nilly succumbed—like Cordelia in The Liberties—to an authoritative “rationalization” which, patriarchal, seeks to possess the text by removing or rationalizing all “accidentals,” confining it to a single body of meaning, to a single role, to a single order of understanding. It does so by reshaping and “correcting” the text in the interests of tidiness, in order that it conform to notions of formal (“literary”) decorum. It rejects outright the notion of world as text, world as language, world as trope, viewing the world instead as a series of fixed categories of meaning whose validity is determined by the rationality of the forms of discourse in which that meaning is couched. It confines Mary Rowlandson in a “familiar American hierarchical discourse of purpose and possession” (CMR 116) and, rhetorically, appropriates her march “away from from Western rationalism deeper and deeper into limitlessness” (CMR 116) until she “excavates and subverts her own rhetoric” (CMR 117) lest she be false to her sense of the world and to herself. Such a convention-ridden view of writing not only confines value to conformity but also finds incomprehensible and reprehensible the notion that Emily Dickinson's work is as great as it is because it is like Melville's Billy Budd and like angelic Billy Budd. It stammers and stutters and jerks along, more silent than it is loquacious, breaking and breathing in awkward places, violating customary syntax and vocabulary and diction, occasionally incomprehensible, often incoherent, perennially uncertain because it articulates a world where, as Howe says of Rowlandson, “all illusion of volition, all individual identity, may be transformed” (CMR 116). And perennially incomplete, unfinished. So Dickinson appends to her poems alternative versions as “a sort of mini-poem” (“Illogic”); she obeys not the traditional rigidities of the quatrain, but the topography of the poem's composition, the page. Line breaks and stanza breaks, shifts of attention and energy resulting from reaching the edge or the end of the page, from turning the paper over and starting a new page, affect the course of the poem's breathing, and thus of the poem's making, and the course of our reading. “Specialists want to nail things down,” Howe says in an essay on Charles Olson (himself notably inarticulate and incoherent). “Poets know to leave Reason alone” because “all power, including the power of Love, all nature, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable.”⁸

“What does not change / is the will to change” (Olson, “The Kingfishers”). For Howe this is not a matter of will (save in that Nature might be willful), but of necessity to which one must submit. And the impulse to disorder in the world leaves its mark in the sheer isolation of Howe's poems on the page, surrounded by white: a visible trope of Howe's tough and difficult feminism. There are figurations in these figures who are figured against no ground, who move away from ground, who move without. Such a movement, to be free of the burden of ground, freed of definition by others, freed of singularity, freed of language, freed of the necessity to be sane or to be mad, freed of history, is terrible and is exhilaration. But it is impossible and doomed. Howe knows that the primeval (that “lost prelapsarian state”) “may have existed only in the mind” (“Armantrout” 209) if it existed at all; that we all suffer violent “primal exile from the mother” (MyED 107); and that we can never escape “that language outside language we are all entangled in” (“Women” 61). Always one balances on the edge, on the turning point, on the move to without. Always one carries language, desire, history. One balances, as she said of Emily Dickinson, between and in “reverence and revolt” on the cusp of the present, carrying “intelligence of the past into future of our thought” (MyED 85). Caught between loss and desire, Howe's vision is difficult, uncompromising:

No hierarchy, no notion of polarity. Perception of an object means loosing and losing it. Quests end in failure, no victory and sham questor. One answer undoes another and fiction is real. Trust absence, allegory, mystery—the setting not the rising sun is Beauty

(MyED 23).

Howe is, more than any American writer I can think of except perhaps Melville or Henry Adams, burdened by history: The burden, of retrieving from erasure and marginality those (women) who have been written out, without (as Howe puts it in her prose introduction to “Thorow”) appropriating primal indeterminacy, is compounded by the drift of the primal toward the immediate, toward the abolition of history (and hence of language) altogether. History, like language, is not and cannot be linear. Her writing is essentially religious, devoted to a lively apprehension of the sacramental nature of our experience of the world, and of the sacramental nature of the world. Like Emily Dickinson she is an utterly astringent formalist.

Notes

1. Nicole Brossard at The New Poetics Colloquium, Vancouver, 23 August 1985.

2. In what follows I refer to the following titles by Howe, abbreviated, as indicated.

   “Armantrout,” “Rae Armantrout: Extremities,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984) 208–10.

   ASFT, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Windsor, Vt.: Awede, 1987).

   CG, Cabbage Gardens (n.p. Fathom Press, 1979).

   CMR, “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Temblor 2 (1985): 113–21.

   HP, Hinge Picture (New York: Telephone Books, 1974).

   “Illogic,” “The Illogic of Sumptuary Values” (unpublished typescript).

   Liberties, The Liberties, reprinted in Defenestration of Prague, (New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1980) 64–127.

   MyED, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985).

   “Olson,” “Where Should the Commander Be,” Writing 19 (November 1987): 3–20.

   “Scattering,” “Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk,” Singularities (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan UP/UP of New England, 1990) 61–70.

   “Owen,” “Howe on Owen,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 13 (December 1980): [28–30].

   Platin, “P. Inman: Platin,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 12 (June 1980): [8–10].

   “Poetics,” “[Statement],” Poetic Statements for the New Poetics Colloquium, August 21–25, 1985 (Vancouver: Kootenay School of Writing, 1985) 12–15.

   “Women,” “Women and Their Effect in the Distance,” Ironwood 28 (Fall 1986): 58–91.

3. The words “little language” are Swift's, as are those in parentheses. They are quoted by Howe (Liberties, 66); Part 1 of The Liberties is titled “Fragments of a Liquidation.”

4. George F. Butterick, “The Mysterious Vision of Susan Howe,” North Dakota Quarterly 55 (Fall 1987): 313. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Whowe: An Essay on Work by Susan Howe,” Sulfur 20 (Fall 1987): 157–65, is, like Butterick's essay, essential for anyone interested in Howe's work. She manages that difficult task of elucidating Howe's poetic without in the least diminishing the deep rage and pain so intrinsic to it.

5. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879) entry for reus.

6. Herman Melville, Billy Budd Sailor: An Inside Narrative. Reading Text and Genetic Text, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962) 412.

7. Howe's insistence on reading Melville's works as Melville left them is an act of reading markedly close to Zukofsky's retrieval of the Shakespearean canon: Lacking canonical certainty, the forty-four items of the canon must be treated as one work, no matter when written, no matter how moot Shakespeare's authorship. Viewed thus the work is longeval as a unity which is (in Shakespeare's words) from “itself never turning” (Bottom: On Shakespeare [Austin: U of Texas P, 1963] 13; permission to quote refused by Paul Zukofsky). Zukofsky amplifies this view throughout Bottom, but especially in “Definition” (266–341).

8. “Olson” 17; MyED 116. Guy Davenport says of Olson that “his poetry was inarticulate. His lectures achieved depths of incoherence” in The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (San Francisco: North Point, 1981) 81.