This volume Frame Structures gathers together four out of five of Susan Howe's first books, including Hinge Picture, Chanting at the Crystal Sea, Cabbage Gardens, and Secret History of the Dividing Line. Although these four received critical acclaim upon publication, they were all issued by small presses, and have not been readily available for some time. Given that Frame Structures presents Howe's first publications, one might expect to find the poet stumbling towards her present originality. Or those readers familiar with Howe's previous career as a visual artist might anticipate a turning point in “her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word,” as the dust jacket promises. Perhaps because Howe began writing poetry relatively late in life, none of the poetry in Frame Structures has the feel of such a poetic apprenticeship. Rather, one discovers here a full-blown poetic imagination, suggesting a remarkable coherence to Howe's oeuvre.

This sense of Howe's work as all of one piece is increased by the preface to this volume, itself entitled “Frame Structures.” As in My Emily Dickinson, Howe deftly gathers together in this essay strands of biography, textual and literary history, and geography. “Frame Structures” provides a record of how relational contingency informs identity and a sense of place, with a particular focus on Buffalo and Boston. When the Howes moved from Buffalo to Cambridge in 1942, they occupied an apartment on Craigie Circle. As Howe explains, the street was named for a nineteenth-century family who ran a boarding house, renting rooms to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. In the Harvard climate in which Howe grew up, Longfellow's accomplishments “had been relegated to minor (even laughingstock) status by contemporary critical theorists of both Cambridges” (8). The fact that Howe's father admired Longfellow and had a dog named “Waddy,” or that Howe remembers hearing as a child the story of Fanny Appleton Longfellow's death by fire, does not begin to exhaust the marvelous ramifications of Craigie Circle. And this summary does not touch on the multiple narrative of the cross street, Berkeley Street, not to mention the flow of capital through Buffalo, or the lexical proximity of Niagara to Nigeria.

In such a dense network of associations, Howe eschews a narrowly ideological approach to history, and embraces an open-ended juxtaposition of facts which might allow “the real” to seep through their interstices. As Howe writes, “Historical imagination gathers in the missing” (3). This approach to history is perhaps more available to the amateur than the traditional scholar because it opens a space for personal memory. While resisting closure, and holding to no single linear narrative, Howe recognizes the ways in which history holds us:

Telepsychology. We have always been in contact with one another, keeping on never letting go, no distance as to time, nothing such as liberty because we are in the field of history.

(25)

What makes Howe's method particularly compelling, beyond her genius for particulars, is her sense of the play of history across geographical space. “Space is a frame we map ourselves in” (9), Howe observes, emphasizing the manner in which humans shape their environment, and are in turn shaped by it. She presents relations which are not merely eccentric, though overlooked in more traditional narratives. If one conceives of “Frame Structures” as a map, it might resemble the cartography described in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, through which not only legal boundaries and roads are registered, but also a brook, sheep in a field, or the trace of someone's passing.

Howe invokes this experiential (and experimental) sense of geography through the “last first people” in opposition to the colonial exploration of New England:

MARK border bulwark, an object set up to indicate a boundary or position hence a sign or token impression or trace

(90)

This passage is enriched when we arrive at Howe's dedication at the bottom of the next page: “for Mark my father, and Mark my son” (91). This “secret” or hermetic valence for “MARK” demonstrates a way in which personal experience is inscribed in geographical formation. As we learn in Chanting at the Crystal Sea (and elsewhere in Howe's work), her family has deep roots in New England's history, and thus both father and son are implicated in its settlement. In this manner, Howe deconstructs any sense of impersonality and objectivity to the process of forming boundaries. Central to Howe's deconstructive project is an effort to “unsettle” the celebratory myths of settlers:

O where ere he He A
ere I were wher
father father
O it is the old old myth

(93)

One can find a fragmented “hero” voiced in this passage, though interrupted by a loss of direction (“where”) and temporality (“ere”).

The difficulty, and challenge, of Howe's poetry does not so much lie in uncovering its sources and references, however esoteric they may seem to be. It is, more generally, what sort of reading strategy one should take towards these poems. How far can one (or should one) press a hermeneutic reading of a poem such as Secret History of the Dividing Line, or even more so, Hinge Picture? Hinge Picture, Howe's first published volume, would seem to be composed of loosely related, luminous fragments such as the following:

Antiphon Versicle & Prayer foretell the Virg ins roll in the s cheme of Things

(42)

This passage probably refers to the ten virgins with the lamps who “went forth to meet the bridegroom” (Mat. 25:1). The enjambed words (“Virg / ins”) and non-standard spelling (“roll”), arranged in narrow center-justified lines, suggest a historical document—perhaps a strip of paper or an engraved stele. In this sense, Howe's historical interests converge with a carefully balanced typographical arrangement which recalls the formal concerns of concrete poets such as Ian Hamilton Finlay. Yet this line of interpretation does not account for the disruptive impact of Howe's typography, which bears no relation to the way in which it might be read out loud. Through her layout on the page, Howe overturns normative expectations for poetry, and draws attention to the poem's material form in an avantgardist fashion. As Howe points out in a 1989 interview for Talisman, avant-garde techniques have remained viable in contemporary poetry:

I think that one reason there is so much ugly antipathy to writers who are breaking form in any way is because people know that language taps an unpredictable power source in all of us. It's not the same in the visual arts, where there are many abstract or form-breaking visual artists who enjoy wide popularity, are embraced by a critical establishment, and sell their work for a tremendous amount of money. You will see their work in museums and books about the work on large glass coffee tables. Try the same thing with language, certainly in this culture, and you may find your writing lost.

(1)

The tension between fragmentation and historical narrative, surface and depth, is never resolved in Howe's poetry, and generates much of its ongoing challenge and pleasure. That her earliest work has lost little of its edge after twenty years, without getting “lost,” is a great accomplishment. While some innovative writing from the 1970s has become predictable through repetition, the poetry in Frame Structures would seem to have become richer in the context of Howe's more recent work.