You can still buy the Peter Pauper Press edition of Emily Dickinson's Love Poems, a slim white book that haunts the upper floors of chain-store poetry sections, poised to foist on unsuspecting shoppers its paltry versions of the life and work. Never mind that Dickinson declined her one known suitor, the deliciously titled Judge Lord; set hastily aside the lifelong correspondence with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, at a word from whom this self-proclaimed “Idolater” would “forfeit righteousness.” Above all, forget the language of the poems: taut, demanding, and mercurial. We “know for a fact,” the introduction to Love Poems insists, that after years of romantic letters (now missing) some unknown man broke off their fine romance and broke her heart, leaving little Emily to grow “only a bit more odd, more devoted, more sentimental—as might be expected of a sensitive maiden lady with big emotions and strange words to express them in.”

Nine years ago, in her first book of prose, Susan Howe slashed this pauper's portrait.¹ Behind it she discovered a writer of “Promethean ambition,” an “obsessed, solitary, and uncompromising” figure who composed the pleading Master letters, the only trace of her purported love affair, as “self-conscious exercises in prose” and whose strange words comprised nothing less than a revolution in poetic language. Even if you had never seen one of Howe's poems, available at the time only in avant-garde journals and elusive small press editions, you could guess that she too would grapple with conventional syntax, “audaciously invent[ing] a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation.” You knew that this new grammar would aspire, like the “shock and subtraction” of Dickinson's letters, to startle you into “a new way of perceiving.” From the rustle and glimmer of association with which Howe unpacked “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun”—a reading that lifts a word here, a stanza there, strikes it and listens (lips pursed, eyes intent) for its overtones of prior texts and distant history—you learned how the poet wanted you to greet her own ranging, allusive, associative verse. You certainly learned how not to read it. As she quotes an account of her precursor more attentive to biographical pathos than to textual detail, Howe turns regal and peremptory. “Who is this Spider-Artist?” she demands. “Not my Emily Dickinson.”

For years after I read this book, Howe's Dickinson was mine. Howe's poems, though, left me baffled and divided. Passages here and there had an incantatory sureness of sound that drew me in: “Go on the Scout they say / They will go near Skegachwey / I have snow shoes and Indian shoes” (“Thorow”). But the sequences these came from blocked my approach. They stumbled, stammered, broke their own spells. Yes, I had gathered from My Emily Dickinson what you could say and do in the face of such “linguistic decreation”; and yes, critics like Rachel Blau du Plessis, Marjorie Perloff, and Peter Quartermain had strapped on their snow shoes and Indian shoes to break paths through Howe's most forbidding landscapes. Even the poems themselves stepped up to help. They held out phrases to describe their “Stumbling phenomenology,” and I duly and gratefully circled and checked them, nodding that in a “migratory odd scrap trilogy” about the “occult ferocity of origin” I should of course expect a shattered and scattered poetics of “paper anacoluthon and naked chalk” (“Articulation of Sound Forms in Time”). Yet none of this encouragement cleared up the puzzle. Why did the project that I thrilled to read about prove not just tiring, but often—embarrassed as I am to admit it—simply tiresome to read? Was there no way to take these poems that would ease my shame and address my skepticism: a way that watched for trail markers left by the poet and her critics, but kept an eye out for switchbacks and alternate routes as well?

Wanting to admire the works of Susan Howe as much as the idea of them, I read the poet's two most recent books with some reluctance, then with growing pleasure. In The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, a tightly woven collection of essays on early American writers (as well as a useful interview), I hear not just the “Stern norse terse ethical pathos” of her last book, Singularities, but precisely those elements of biographical pathos that My Emily Dickinson taught me to slight or to scorn. The Birth-mark fleshes out the figure of the Poet who stands behind Howe's poems—a figure who is, I have come to believe, at the heart of her achievement—and it gives a spirited lesson in how important essays, introductions, and interviews are to the poet's otherwise uncomfortably rigorous, sola scriptura, purer-than-Puritan oeuvre. In such pieces Howe's Poet falls from language into voice, grace into works, the open house of “Possibility” into the closure and capture (though she resists it) of prose. I find it a fortunate fall. With the voice of The Birth-mark in my ears and its prose-wrought figure of the Poet as my guide I can wander a cliff path through the rugged terrain of Howe's earlier writings and gaze down on the tattered, plangent texts of Howe's latest collection, The Nonconformist's Memorial. If I stop and cry out “Maestra, il senso lor m'é duro,” I receive, at last, the help I need.

THE FIGURE OF THE POET

Since My Emily Dickinson was the book that first attracted me to Howe, and is still, it seems, her best-known book, let me start there. A compelling, broadly satisfying figure, Howe's Dickinson shades into the image of the woman who beholds her. (“As I am,” says Emerson, “so I see.”) On the one hand, she is a heroic avant-gardist: a poet who understands that “human dislocation and terror of uncertainty in a rapidly changing social system and cosmos must be spoken in a new tongue,” and who raids the “alien territory” of received and masculine tradition for “pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology” that she will set into a new syntax of audacity and stammer.² She is also a powerfully traditional poet, however, in ways that T. S. Eliot would have approved. Defining originality as “the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity's sovereign power,” she wrestles with and ranks herself among only the strongest, most canonical ancestors: Shakespeare, Jonathan Edwards, the Brontës, the Brownings (mostly Robert). Such writers form an ideal order that the rebel's explosive-submissive heroics allow her, not all that paradoxically, to join.

My Emily Dickinson clearly wants to be an innovating, shifting, startling, cross-generic text: a “poet's book,” signaled as such by its paratactic structure, its juxtaposed quotations and Poundian subject-rhymes, its plumbings and riffs off of isolate phrases and words (“Sovereign,” “Eider-Duck,” “Thumb”), and, above all, by its impassioned tone. But even as Howe mocks those writers who want to “discuss the shattering of all hierarchies of Being” without the form of their discussion being either shattered or shattering, her study's smash and scatteration only goes so far. Some hierarchies, moral and aesthetic, get neatly retrofitted. With its high seriousness and bravura declarations about Poetry-with-a-capital-P, for example, this book reassures you that it and its readers are engaged in something more lasting and important than, say, “fence-sitting / raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal” (Ashbery, “Soonest Mended”). And for all that she twists out of the grip of scholarly restraint and the tidyings-up of traditional explication, Howe ends up writing a highly finished study. Where there's warp, there's woof; and the pattern that emerges, shock by surprise, brings a satisfying sense of repletion, a retrospective inevitability.³

Howe weaves this curiously comforting fabric—“curiously” because she lauds the ways that Dickinson “resisted comfort and confidence”—from the voice that threads through My Emily Dickinson. With its stark, declarative sentences, anguished rhetorical questions, and intermittently personal then grandly impersonal “I,” this voice belongs to someone who needs, as we all do, and has, as we all do not, Dickinson's “courage, discipline, humor, and freedom of spirit.” (Well, not a whole lot of her humor.) Despite its commitment to hesitancy, this voice seems doomed to confidence. How else explain its ringing epigrams—“the setting not the rising sun is Beauty”; “Poetry is redemption from pessimism”—or the way it appropriates the “visionary precursor's” words as the book comes to a close?

To Edward (Ned) Dickinson                    mid-may 1880
                                        Phoebus—“I'll take the Reins.”

—Phaeton.

A voice to be reckoned with—one that, as the poet declares, “belongs to no one else.”

Just after declaring in an entranced tone that her voice belongs to no one else, Howe announces a second, safer “sovereignty of abdication.” “What I put into words,” she explains, “is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem.” Now there are methods of reading where endless “possibility” blossoms into something far more fruitful than forgetfulness, erasure, and deconstruction, even if the harvest is necessarily limited, constituted by rejection—“not my Emily Dickinson”—and therefore owned. When she conjures her predecessor, Howe practices one such method, and she reaps the voice of the Poet “Susan Howe” as the reward. But in her poems Howe steps back from this accomplishment. She retires to the fairer house of “possibility,” and leans out the windows to invoke, interrogate, chasten, and above all interrupt the voice she summons up in prose. She speaks in many voices, or draws so much attention to the poem as print on a page that she unsettles any equation between voice and poetry. Possibility has opened. Or has it?

When Howe's work gives me trouble, it's usually thanks to these strategies of abdication. From others they draw praise. To Rachel Blau du Plessis, for example, they display a wrenching, admirable mixture of resistance, despair, and desire. They point the way to a new “cultural practice … that does not demand ‘sacrifice and subjugation’ to ‘form and order’ in order to write” (“Whowe”). Perhaps. I'm struck, though, by how often praise like this gestures in a more familiar direction, turning my gaze from the texts at hand to the heroic project of the Poet who stands behind them. As it trails its fingers through Howe's prose for terms of art—the phrases du Plessis quotes, for example, are from My Emily Dickinson—and as it shuffles asyntactic passages into discursive sentences about the Poet's liberating, abdicating project, such praise restores the crown that it denies. Let me turn to these ironies, if they are ironies, next.

THE VEXED QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP

In 1990, five years after My Emily Dickinson appeared, Sun & Moon Press published The Europe of Trusts: a “selected poems” that reprints three books Howe had written in the previous decade, along with a prose introduction. I'll come back to this introduction in a moment. For now, let me start a quick survey of Howe's characteristic voices and resistances to voice with the untitled prefatory poem that opens the first book in the collection, Pythagorean Silence:

                    we that were wood
when that a wide wood was
In a physical Universe playing with
                                                  words
Bark be my limbs my hair be leaf
Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver

“We that were wood”: Who could this “we” be? Dryads, followers of Artemis? A host of Daphnes, turned into woods of laurel as they fled from their Apollos? The lilt of the second line opens other, Celtic possibilities, as does the fact that “stich” once meant both a line of poetry and a row of trees. Brusquely interrupting this invitation to association, the central lines refuse to follow up one those possibilities: All this is merely “playing with // words,” they snort, in a Universe that is strictly physical, not home to spirits and voices. But once you start playing with words metamorphoses follow, the physical and the metaphysical edging into one another as readily as “words,” juggled a moment too long, spins into “sword.” The “I” who chants “bark be my limbs” in the lines that follow is about to be transfigured in this way. “Playing with // words,” she will become one of the “we” and open contact (r spins to o) with the woods.

As a prefatory poem this piece raises a number of stylistic expectations. You know from it that Howe can draw on either mystical-lyrical or dryly critical dictions: dictions it's almost too easy to parcel out by gender, since the page that follows introduces a “HE” who speaks of “The research of scholars, lawyers, investigators, judges” and a “SHE” who, with her arms around his neck, whispers that “Herod had all the little children murdered!” (Howe will complicate this opposition as the poems go on.) Since transformations of female figures into trees and reeds and such recur in myths about the origins of song and poetry—think of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx—and since the voice who closes “we that were wood” is determined to perform such a transformation on herself without losing power and agency (she aims to marry her bow and lyre and quiver, not to loosen her barky grip), you can guess that Howe's most lyrical moments will be haunted by her knowing, uneasy place as their singer. Hence, for example, the troubled undercurrent of a carpe diem passage from part III of Pythagorean Silence, a fine example of Howe at her most musical:

                    Little girl in your greed
                    come down
                    come down
                    ivy and roses          ourself
                    will be
                    without defect
                    without decay
only what is lovely          lies
faraway […]

Poets who promise to preserve their beloveds—not always women, as Shakespeare's sonnets attest—do so through “lies,” and by playing off a “greed” to be preserved “without defect // without decay,” even if that involves a transformation into “ivy and roses” or, worse, “rows and rows of reeds” for others to scan or play upon. But Howe's moral or feminist reservations can't undo her attraction to the beauty of language such “greed” inspires; they can only complicate it, ripple the waters as she sings and some Ophelia drifts by.

Neither “we that were wood” nor “Little girl in your greed” is especially hard to read. Although neither supplies a clear speaker or dramatic situation, and although both are parts of longer sequences that likewise lack these handles for understanding, the poems themselves draw on familiar syntax, well-established genres (the spell, the love lyric), and a comfortable patterning of sound (ghosts of meter behind the arras, chiming rhymes, and so on). Elsewhere Howe is less melodic, and the path grows pricklier. She layers sentence fragments in a hushed, insistent style that makes each new line sound urgent and significant, a violin or cello skittering briefly out of the silence. To my ear these frequently range from the memorable to the merely portentous within a single passage:

Hook intelligence quick dactyl
Bats glance through a wood
bond between mad and made
anonymous communities bond and free
Perception crumbles under character
Present past of immanent future
Recollection moves across meaning
Men shut their doors against setting
Flocks roost before dark
Coveys nestle and settle
Meditation of a world's vast Memory
Predominance pitched across history
Collision or collusion with history

(from “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time”)

The three- and four-stress lines pulse down the page, often “hooking” the ear with an initial dactyl or a final off-rhyme as they “hook” the intelligence with a mix of the abstract and the concrete where “recollection” and “predominance” are as active as “flocks” and “coveys.” There's a curious blend of stiffness and momentum to a passage like this. You pause after each line, but not quite long enough to ask the hard questions it demands; you tumble onward in the hope some later line will give the clue that snaps the rest into place. Or, at least, that they'll cohere by sheer force of accretion.

Elsewhere, in still stricter moods, Howe will break syntax down even further. Her pages often offer words arrayed without syntactic connection, but with clear semantic allegiance, the raw material of a poem yet to be written or all that remains of a piece now decomposed:

wicket-gate
wicket-gate
cherubim          golden          swallow
amulet          instruction          tribulation
winged joy          parent          sackcloth          ash
den          sealed          ascent          flee
chariot          interpret          flame
hot          arc          chaff          meridian
in the extant manuscript SOMEONE
has lightly scored a pen over
diadem          dagger          a voyage          gibbet
sheaf […]

Entering poetry through the “wicket-gate”—a small door or gate made in, or placed beside, a large one, according to the OED, but here with overtones of the slavery-escape term “runagate”—the poet stumbles on scraps from some religious or mystical text: one including a vision of “cherubim,” perhaps, seen by following “instruction” in how to use an “amulet” but at a cost of “tribulation” to “parents” and other “chaff” left behind in the ascent. (The diction is also Dickinsonian.) The pleasure of passages like this, the end of Pythagorean Silence, comes as you begin to grasp why these words might be yoked together, or what they do to one another in proximity, like an alchemist's stones or a diviner's dice. The results are attractively heroic and vulnerable. The poet dares “daggers” and “gibbets” and that ominous “SOMEONE” as she gathers this “sheaf” of words; her “voyage” in search of a “diadem” is propelled by gusts of language and spirit that are as likely to burn her to “ash” as they are to lift her to “winged joy.” “Weeds shiver,” the book ends, “and my clothes spread wide.”

I write this gloss with a twinge of bad faith. I can't make nearly so much of other raw materials that are just as characteristic of Howe, and had I chosen one of those passages I would now tell a less encouraging tale. Singularities, especially, stings me with a sense of inadequacy. I can't ride out or read much into passages like “rest chondriacal lunacy // velc cello viable toil // quench conch uncannunc // drumm amonoosuck ythian,” or “blue glare(essence)cow bed leg extinct draw scribe upside / even blue(A)ash-tree fleece comfort(B) drawscribe sideup,” both from the first poem, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” The vulnerability I savored when it belonged to the “my” of Pythagorean Silence is more painful when it's mine, when I feebly note that “velc cello viable toil” sounds, well, a little like Whitman's “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,” or when the “cow” of “blue glare (essence) cow bed leg” and so on recalls a taunt made to the Thin Man in Bob Dylan's ballad thereof: “You say ‘What does this mean?’ / And he screams back, ‘You're a cow, / Give me some milk or go home. … '” Something is happening here, and I don't know what it is. If I grow glib, it's in response to that confusion. Yet I can't in good conscience slip past such stumbling blocks and seize on the lines whose articulated “Sound Forms” both please and reassure me: “She is and the way She was”; “Crumbled masonry windswept hickory”; “These are the old home trees.”

I reach this impasse at some point whenever I read Howe. When I do, I turn to other readers. With some exceptions—a few paragraphs by Marjorie Perloff, an exemplary essay by Peter Quartermain—they don't give me explication of difficult passages but two other, less conventional strategies of reading. The first, which I attempted a moment ago, involves placing words and passages into sentences that describe Howe's project as a whole. The texts adduced include both the “islands of clarity or necessity” that du Plessis sees “thrown into the surrounding mystery”—those lines of self-description Howe so frequently supplies—and assorted shards of mystery itself, plucked out and arranged into a legible mosaic. The second strategy adds that explication is in fact beside the point, that stray, resistant elements ought by rights to be left mysterious. To Quartermain, for example, Howe's texts resist that “authoritative ‘rationalization’ which, patriarchal, seeks to possess the text by removing or rationalizing all ‘accidentals.’” To long for grammatical coherence, the illusion of voice, isn't merely to betray the flux and multiple reality of postmodern experience. “Like Captain Vere sacrificing Billy Budd,” Quartermain explains, such longings “legislate away the sheer mystery” of textual production, which Howe's crown-of-thorniest passages incarnate and resurrect on our behalf. “That stony law I stamp to dust,” Howe might well echo Blake's Orc, “and scatter religion abroad / To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.” My frustration signals, more than anything else, a continuing bondage to the old patriarchal covenant of “works.” I'm not lazy; quite the contrary, I'm working too hard, sweeping up her scattered leaves and suffering under the Law.

Stiff-necked, pharisaic, let me split some hairs. If Howe's struggle is against readings that rationalize and shut down “possibility” (the critic as Urizen, perverting the fiery joy of textual practice to ten commands or seven types of ambiguity), don't readings that tell this story of poetic struggle undo their own attempt at openness? Don't they supply the determinate pleasures of discursive logic and narrative, pleasures that need hardly be legalistic or authoritarian? When Marjorie Perloff confronts the four lines from “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” that begin

Mohegan ToForceImmanenceShotStepSeeShowerFiftyTree
UpConcatenationLessonLittleAKantianEmpiricalMaoris

she slips quite deftly into storytelling. The text, she writes, “is, so to speak, wounded, as if to say that the nightmare war with the Savage Other has come back to haunt Hope/Howe [the “subject” of the poem, Puritan preacher Hope Atherton, and his authorial double] with its ‘AKantian Empirical’ ‘Force’ or ‘Immanence’ of ‘Mohegan’ or ‘Maori’ presence. …” Howe may have “demilitarized” her syntax, and the critic may praise her for that liberating gesture, but in her expert reading Perloff redeploys Howe's semantic forces along a well-established barricade. Her effort reminds me that William James, no foe of pluralism or of multiplicity, found the act of selection not oppressive but essential to liberty, the very stuff of thought and art. The mind, he writes in Principles of Psychology, “works on the data it receives very much in the way a sculptor works on his block of stone,” extricating only this one sculpture from the rest. “We may, if we like … unwind things back,” he goes on, “to that black and jointless continuity of a space and moving clouds of swarming atoms that science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff.” Slowly cumulative strokes of choice: That's the help I look for in other readers of Howe; and that, thank God, is what they supply, enabling me to confront the “given stuff” while remaining in the world I feel and live in. (What are “works?” Works are where we live.)

Now for a poet who identifies with the stone that was rejected, who feels only a discordant kinship with the cultural “ancestors” James has so comfortably in mind, acquiescence to works and to “the world” comes hard, or not at all. “Why does Howe erase or elide some words? The isolation of a letter, the isolation of a syllable,” du Plessis asks:

Why does she confound grammar? a well with clefts, words as stones. Why does she use syllable-sounds of semi-meaning? (“enend adamap blue wov thefthe”) (“Thorow”) Cryptograms, language always having ‘another’ message. Why and how vibrations of shadow words, as if visual afterimages, come in in her intricate split spell-ings. … Why does she make pages of cut-ups, of upside-downs, of palimpsests? Traces one can barely read, texts of physical beauty (in words) that enact their own destruction and dispersion.

Du Plessis' answer: Howe “wants to show the half-seen, the half-forgotten”; “she represents the silence half-sounded of the powerless. […] She is suspicious of languages and discourses as already made and inhabited things” and therefore attempts “a cultural practice—an ethical and humane practice—that does not demand ‘sacrifice and subjugation’ to ‘form and order’ in order to write.”

I'm tempted to go on quoting. This essay, “Whowe,” is easily the best introduction to Howe. But think of why it is so helpful. As the poet's text grows most intractable, as it calls more and more attention to itself as words on a page, du Plessis invokes a figure of the Poet to return us to the world we live and feel in. Her focus shifts to the woman behind the poems, the one who takes liberties, who identifies with both Cordelia and Lear, who is “driven,” conflicted, heroic, and so on, the one we can identify with or admire. Du Plessis quotes from a statement of poetics which Howe herself added as the introduction to her selected poems: “I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate.” In a way that is not true of Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, or Ronald Johnson, at least for me, Howe's achievement as a poet revolves around this wishful, wistful, grim, determined, stammer-audacious “I”: a figure who lifts one voice, her own, but refuses to let it sing for fear of drowning out those anonymous, slighted others. A figure whom we hear, therefore, almost despite herself, and most clearly in her prose.

When you struggle to address “the material object” of the text in all its flux and possibility, “the vexed question of authorship [keeps] intruding itself.” So Howe writes in the introduction to A Bibliography of the King's Book, or, Eikon Basilike: a sequence which is (as she describes it in an interview) “filled with gaps and words tossed, and words touching, words crowding each other, letters mixing and falling away from each other, commands and dreams, verticals and circles,” and if it's impossible to print, that's all right, “because it's about impossibility anyway.” Ah. In Howe's sequence-introductions, interviews, essays on early American authors, and other prose texts, the poet herself must limit “possibility” by performing her own work and that of other writers, explaining the texts, choosing this and not that to bring to our attention, falling, much as she struggles against it, into a world of predication, convention, and biography. A world, that is, in which one may be Peter Pauperized.

THE FIGURE OF THE POET (REVISED)

In My Emily Dickinson Howe struck out bravely against reductive biographical interpretations of her precursor's work. “In some sense the subject of any poem is the author's state of mind at the time it was written,” she asserts, “but facts of an artist's life will never explain that particular artist's truth. Poems and poets of the first rank”—hierarchy, anyone?—“remain mysterious. Emily Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. The vital distinction between concealment and revelation is the essence of her work.” Like the Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Howe here wishes “to divert interest from the poet to the poetry”; yet in the introductory essay to The Europe of Trusts, Howe sets her own work in a loosely autobiographical frame. “For me there was no silence before armies,” she begins, and goes on in the first paragraph to tell us her birthdate, to describe her parents (in a phrase) and to tell us how they met. The essay quickly moves to interweave Howe's life with historical atrocity and the knots that history will twist in language: “Now there were armies in the west called East,” she writes. We're meant to follow it in this trajectory, to pay less attention to Howe's psychological unconscious than to these traces of her “historical consciousness.” But as she juxtaposes a section of Pythagorean Silence with a reminiscence of her father going to war, or invokes the instructions of Creon to “Antigone who was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta”—“Go to the dead and love them”—you can't help musing on the biographical ground from which the poet's effort to “break out into perfect primeval Consent” and lift others' voices might stem. Even the essay's flickering title points to Howe's impulses towards concealment and exposure, poetic self-fashioning and shameful, biographical nakedness: “There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover.”

Howe's most recent collection of prose, The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, fills in the outlines of this conflicted figure: a woman who is at once the fallen Eve hunting for fig leaves and the ambitious and revisionary poet defying myths of the fall to search for laurel in a world where there are not leaves enough (or not enough for both). With the academic colon in its title and its tips of the hat to literary theorists and a ringing, Whitmanian catalogue of American scholars (Kibbey, Caldwell, Colacurcio, Slotkin, Shrager Lang, and Bercovitch) The Birth-mark is more traditional in its approach than My Emily Dickinson. It's a hungrily, gratefully researched volume: “It is the grace of scholarship,” Howe writes; “I am indebted to everyone.” Even the grace of scholarship, however, can't entirely justify the scholarly enterprise to Howe. “I am drawn toward the disciplines of history and literary criticism,” she writes, “but in the dawning distance a dark wall of rule supports the structure of every letter, record, transcript: every proof of authority and power. I know records are compiled by winners, and scholarship is in collusion with Civil Government. I know this and go on searching for some trace of love's infolding through all the paper in all the libraries I come to.”

To search for traces of love's infolding, as opposed to mere textual or historical insight, Howe turns toward the sorts of writing that send her own critics and readers scrambling back to the scene of inscription, where they discover an affecting, emotionally resonant Poet. She gravitates, that is to say, to writing that is (messily) born and not (perfectly, instantly) made: writing marked by a birthmark, a stammer, a flaw. She champions variorum and facsimile editions, whether of Dickinson, Shelley, or Hölderlin, for these preserve the strain and grain of composition against the fatal quests of Alymer-editors for clean copy and polished final intentions. “In spite of the zealous searching of editors, authors, and publishers for the print-perfect proof of intellectual labor,” Howe observes, “the heart may be sheltering in some random mark of communication. Cancellations, variants, insertions, erasures, marginal notes, stray marks and blanks” may be “memories in disguise,” preserving the human against time's and print's “it was.” They restore an absent presence to the reader, a sense of “your being alive there,” as F. O. Matthiessen wrote to his Russell Cheney, doting on his absent lover's letters home. Like the crack in Auden's tea-cup, they open a lane to the land of the dead:

When my brother was young, he covered the margins and the fly leafs of every book in the house with lines of poetry and other quotations, and with his own name, and other names. Nothing brings him back to me so vividly as looking at those old books.

—Elizabeth Hawthorne

The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me.

—Elizabeth Shaw Melville

He seems ever at my ear, in his books, more especially in his marginalia, speaking not personally to me, and yet in a way so natural to my feelings, that finds me so fully, and awakens such a strong echo in my mind and heart, that I seem more intimate with him now than ever I was in life.

—Sara Coleridge on her father

The birthmarks preserved in variorum and facsimile editions present all texts as (in words Howe takes from Richard Sieburth) “events rather than objects … processes rather than products,” which turn the reader “from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem,” and they make the work of many writers (Dickinson, Melville, Shelley, Hölderlin, even Thomas Shepard) look like a text by Howe. In doing both of these they do something far greater: fulfilling the traditional promise of poets to their beloveds without a suspect appeal to greed or an evasion of defect and decay. So long as women read and eyes can see, so long live these, and these give life to thee.

As a frontispiece to The Birth-mark Howe reproduces one such annotated text: a column from Melville's Authorized New Testament with Psalms, Luke 13. The novelist has bracketed verse 34, and scored, in a wavy penciled underline, the first sentence of verse 35: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! / Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.” The prophets Howe has in mind are a group of American figures, mostly but not only writers, whose “antinomianism” has been erased in accounts of American culture. Some are traditional fare: Anne Hutchinson, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson (a curiously muted and marginal figure, but who shows up now and then). Others would have rejected the charge quite violently, like Thomas Shepard and Mary Rowlandson, but their texts betray them. As he struggled to impose order and discipline on the Bay Colony, for example, Shepard wrote an autobiography whose title Howe reproduces as “T (My Birth & Life:) S;,” and whose structure, with its “improvisational commentary” and eighty-six empty pages in the middle, she describes as if it were a deliberate Duchampian or Dada artifact. As Shepard discovered in an anagram Howe quotes, even his name encoded disruption: “O, a map's threshed.”

Howe's antinomianism lies far from the sexual license and “Communitie of Weomen” Governor Winthrop accused Anne Hutchinson of promoting, and which, in trial transcripts, she promptly retorts she abhors. Nor is it the dizzying revelation announced by Ranter preacher Abiezer Coppe: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I inform you, that I overturn, overturn, overturn.’” Rather, the antinomian is a freedom from laws of language: a mixing of genres, a spontaneous, sound-driven composition which dodges Ginsbergian “first thought best thought” dullness through its ever-failing, ever-shattered attempt to capture the movements of Spirit. As Patricia Caldwell observes (in an essay Howe graciously cites in her Acknowledgments), the American antinomian controversy was above all “a crisis of language.” “If human language is imprecise and uninformed before grace and swept away in a tidal wave of spirit after grace,” Caldwell explains, “then words cannot consistently be relied upon to fulfill their basic denotative function.” They might give their best evidence of grace through their failure as works, whether those be works of literature or of human will.

“The moment of true poetry,” declared the Situationists, “brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” When Howe speaks of Dickinson's manuscripts as “a Reformation” and their misrepresentation as “a blasphemy” she opens old accounts indeed, grounding her Romantic love of imperfection and her postmodern notebook aesthetic in a religious quarrel nearly four centuries old. Listen how the poet's voice lifts into confidence, released into prophetic anger. “The excommunication and banishment of the early American female preacher and prophet Anne Hutchinson, and the comparison of her opinions to monstrous births, is not unrelated to the editorial apprehension and domestication of Emily Dickinson,” she writes, spitting the understatement of her double-negation. Even now “canonical social power” has as its “predominant purpose” the effort to “render isolate voices devoted to writing as a physical event of immediate revelation,” revising their texts according to a “covenant of works” and drowning out the stammered, scribbled covenant of grace.

At moments like these The Birth-mark echoes the grand rhetoric of My Emily Dickinson, and I prick up my ears at the sound. Once again Howe's prose voice is confident—and even, in its own way, comforting. Lately the notion of a Puritan origin for American writing has begun to seem, in William Spengemann's witty metaphor, “a kind of verbal shell game, in which the prestidigitator places his thematic pea under one shell labeled ‘Puritan,’ makes a lot of rapid movements on his typewriter, and then produces the pea from under another shell marked ‘American literature.’” Diversity and discontinuity are the terms to conjure with. Howe sets these new developments aside to tell one story and one story only: a twice-told tale that lets her use an unquestioned and historically oppressive binary opposition (works and grace) while still claiming the high if shifty ground of multiplicity. I am again pharisaic, perverse. I get a great deal of pleasure, after all, from Howe's work in this vein; it calls forth some of her finest detective work and Poundian subject-rhymes.⁴ It also helps to fill in the figure of the Poet I have already outlined from My Emily Dickinson and “There Are Not Leaves Enough. …” For like Hawthorne's and Robert Lowell's meditations on Puritan themes, Howe's is a family affair, marked by her birth and focused on her father, Harvard Law School professor and legal historian Mark de Wolfe Howe.

Near the start of The Birth-mark Howe includes a rare personal story. “During the 1950s,” she writes, “although I was only a high school student, I was already a library cormorant. I needed out-of-the-way volumes from Widener Library. My father said it would be trespassing if I went into the stacks to find them. I could come with him only as far as the second-floor entrance. There I waited while he entered the guarded territory to hunt for books.” This is a consciously emblematic moment, and after noting that because of it “the stacks of Widener Library and of all great libraries in the world are still the wild to me,” Howe lets it fade into memory until you reach the volume's close. Here, tough, in the interview she reprints from Talisman magazine, Howe discusses her background once more. “My father also was fascinated by the Puritans,” she recalls.

I remember him in his study late in the evening with his light-shade on because his eyes must have been tired from so much reading for the Holmes book and students' papers, etc., but he would be bent over some old Mather or Sewell diary for relaxation! [Mark DeWolfe Howe, Oliver Wendell Holmes.] They said of Increase Mather that he loved his study to a kind of excess. In the 1950s, there was my father, who felt the same way, and all I could think of was acting and boys and whatever else I thought of then. And now I have taken this long journey back through Puritan history, although I entered another way. I find myself reading about the Mathers for relaxation, and I love my study to a kind of excess. I would dearly love to sit down and show my father what I know now. We would talk about the garden and the wilderness together, and all would be well. All manner of things would be well. Yet this place I want to come home to was false to women in an intellectual sense. It was false.

From a dream of reconciliation, lulled to sleep by words from Dame Julian of Norwich (“all shall be well”), Howe wakes up into feminist homelessness. And when she talks about her compositional method, with its rhythms of capture and freedom, this mix of nostalgia and dislocation returns. “I think a lot of my work is about breaking free,” she says, “starting free and being captured and breaking free again and being captured again.” The interviewer tries to shift topics: “The texts that you use seem …” Howe breaks in to finish her thought. “It just seems that I end up with this place that I wish I could belong to and wish I could describe. But I am outside looking in.”

I don't want to unmask Howe's interest in Puritans or history or antinomian composition as a matter of familial determinism, a mere reworking of what simply was. But think of what this autobiographical material adds to The Birth-mark and, more broadly, to the figure of the Poet “Susan Howe.” By introducing it in the reprinted interview Howe adds a satisfying complication to the earlier essays. The bond with the dead enjoyed by Sara Coleridge, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, and Elizabeth Hawthorne suddenly anticipates the poet's revelations, while the limited personal interest of biography opens out onto unanticipated historical vistas. The mysterious “you” Howe addresses early on—“you. Fate flies home to the mark. Can any words restore to me how you felt?”—takes on at least one plausible object, reinforced by the latent put in flying “home to the mark”; the later Mark, in turn, becomes one more lost “you” in a series that stretches back past one life's losses into that “loss of something” that a Dickinson poem calls the mirror image of our hope for the kingdom of heaven. The tensions and complications of Howe's project take on just that element of retrospective inevitability I admired in My Emily Dickinson; they loop strangely through time and hierarchical levels of meaning, rather than simply disrupting them. Even Howe's prosodic experimentation surges and ebbs in response. When she speaks of her poetry washing ashore at a place she wishes she could belong to and describe, but can't, interviewer Edward Forster offers an insightful gloss. “So it begins in fragments and ends in prose,” he proposes, “and prose is a kind of convention with an expected syntax and order and shape.” “I hope that my prose hasn't got an expected syntax,” Howe ripostes, but Forster's proposition strikes home. Precisely because of its association with convention, with expected syntax, with the garden from which Howe has been expelled into (political) self-consciousness and the pain of mortal loss, prose becomes the false home longed for and the one to be, regenerate, remade.

THE NONCONFORMIST'S MEMORIAL

In her prose, then, Howe braves the aesthetic shames her poetry resists: conventional syntax, and embrace of sovereignty, a unity and (often) fluency of voice. If she risks resembling the caricature of Dickinson where this essay began—a devoted, sentimentalized women “with big emotions and strange words to express them in”—the risk pays off, not least because of what it adds to her portrait of a Poet struggling to make her work, in Eliot's words, “an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem [the realm of sign-making, of signification] and not in the history of the poet.” Her Dickinson did no less.

Even more than My Emily Dickinson,The Birth-mark sparks my curiosity and gives me an appetite for Howe's other writing. Reading it I want to see what this Poet will do, what her quest to “enfold tenderness” will look like, not just unfolded in the fallen medium of prose, but caught up in rapt and visionary gestures of antinomian composition. Ready to listen for traces of “the heart” and human presence, I also want to see what “writing as a physical act of immediate revelation” looks like—whether it really convinces me to abandon my love of literary works and trust instead in a justifying, all-or-nothing “covenant of grace.”

Opening The Nonconformist's Memorial, then, I face four sequences. Two of these have prose introductions, overtures in which Howe introduces phrases and thematic material from her essays as leitmotifs that you can trace through the difficult music to come. (The order of composition may be the opposite, of course.) Thus in “Melville's Marginalia” Howe describes Wilson Walker Cowen's “loving” transcription of Melville's marginal annotations in a way that recapitulates the central theme of editing that runs through The Birth-mark. She strikes the chord of tenderness as well: “I thought one way to write about a loved author,” she explains, “would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others: what if these penciled single double and triple scorings arrows short phrases angry outbursts crosses cryptic ciphers sudden enthusiasms mysterious erasures have come to find you too, here again, now.” (Who, you? I scrawl in my margin, suddenly conscious of my own act of annotation. James Clarence Mangan, the nineteenth-century Irish poet who turns out to be, for her, the model of Bartelby? The mysterious “you” from the Introduction to The Birth-mark?)

In the introduction to A Bibliography of the King's Book, or, Eikon Basilike Howe counterpoints her interest in matters of editing with her love of English history and the antinomian impulse. She describes the execution of King Charles I and the same-day publication of The Eikon Basilike, the Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitude and Sufferings, a collection of “essays, explanations, prayers, debates, emblems and justifications of the Royalist cause.” The book gives as Charles's words what is in fact a pagan shepherdess's prayer from Sidney's Arcadia, thereby lending ammunition to Milton for his disdainful response-tract, the Eikonoklastes. The Howe you know from The Birth-mark could hardly resist a text like this, at once Royalist and subversive, mixing up genres, and probably a forgery to boot. She could resist Edward Almack's Bibliography (1896) still less: a work meant to “describe each material edition” of the Eikon and prove its Royal authorship, yet which Howe's son found in a library sale of “useless books.” Kings appall; their ghosts appeal; the books that served their cause, now discarded (thus “marginalized”), address themselves by chance to poets, who find in them “The Sovereign stile / in another stile / Left scattered in disguise.”

Scattered through the later pages of A Bibliography of the King's Book are a number of threads and strings: the “remains of light blue silk / strings” that figured in some edition of the Eikon; allusions to Ariadne and Arachne; a kite-string with which Charles Dickens's Mr. Dick will fly a kite “covered with manuscript” that includes “some allusion to King Charles the First's head.” “There's plenty of string,” says Mr. Dick, “and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That's my manner of diffusing 'em.” Here and in “Melville's Marginalia” Howe takes facts from her prose and sends them soaring above discursive logic and predicative syntax. They fly “according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth,” as the Spirit moves her, but she's careful to leave a string back to the kite-maker, too. A Bibliography thus has a Royalist “I” who asks us to “Tell you my author / knew his hand / The book was his,” and an implied “I” who cuts and rearranges these prior texts, ostensibly leaving “IN / HIS / SOLITUDE / To The / Reader the work” but lingering as the ghost in its shattered machine. “Melville's Marginalia” even more explicitly asks to be read as a “trail” back to its author. “If there are things Melville went looking for in books so too there were things I looked for in Melville's looking,” the poet explains. What follows isn't quite a mystery or dramatic monologue, with clues you add up to recover those missing “things.” That would be conventional, workaday: A. S. Byatt's Possession without the satire and romance. But if we're invited to turn pages with the musing irregularity of Mangan (“Instead of classifying / be browsed and dreamed / he didn't even browse / regularly”), other, more insistent voices remind us of how much is at stake. Above the phrase “the things that are written,” printed upside down, another line appears: “All my soul,” it whispers, “is in the book.”

If prose introductions and echoes of The Birth-mark help decode these sequences (the second pair in the book), the two poems that open it, lacking an explicit context, are bleak, demanding, comfortless—yet powerful. The poet makes and marks her way through deep mourning, refusing the consolations of religious orthodoxy as she reads and comments on a scholarly edition of the New Testament (we pore over the tags and scraps she's underlined or copied in a notebook) and denying herself the satisfaction of elegy (a winning of aesthetic gain through betrayal of what's lost). This half of the book, called “Turning,” bears an epigraph from Mary Shelley's journal marked by Melville in his copy of Shelley Memorials: “The enthusiast suppresses her tears, crushes her opening thoughts, and—all is changed.” On the page that follows, as the epigraph for “The Nonconformist's Memorial,” runs John 20:15–18, the moment when weeping Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus, has her tears stopped (crushed?), is told “Touch me not” and instructed to convey a message to the disciples: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

Mary Magdalene, Mary Shelley, Susan Howe: All are, in this sequence, figures for the female enthusiast or antinomian who “fled from consolation,” tasting none in a “Master” who belongs to his Father more than to her. Tags of text link poem to poem: “The act of Uniformity / ejected her” and “Citations [to her?] remain abbreviated”; although “She was coming to anoint him,” “In Peter she is nameless” with her “headstrong anarchy thoughts.” Fishers of men did not catch her; thus while “The nets were not torn // The Gospel did not grasp.” Lines begin to cross one another at sharp angles, some perhaps drawn from a Bible commentary. “Whether the words be a command / words be a command issuing from authority or counsel” crosses “his hiding is understood” (upside down), at “authority” it crosses the “drift” of “night drift shreds earth knowledge”; “Dissenters gathered in the place” crosses “Wind blowing and veering.” Clearly the dissenters, those nonconformists to the Act of Uniformity, are the ones in touch with the gusts of Spirit, and the page seconds their dissent. Later pages grow clearer, but continue to register their nonconformity. They interweave neutral scholarly observations and hushed protests against any merely “intellectual grasp” of the noli me tangere scene:

The motif of fear is missing
The motif of searching
Historicity of the scene
Confused narrative complex
Two women with names
followed by two without names
Distance original disobedience
Against the coldness of force
Intellectual grasp
Scene for what follows
Do not touch me
It is by chance that she weeps
Her weeping is not a lament
She has a voice to cry out
No community can accompany her
No imagination can dream
Improbable disciple passages
Exegetes explain the conflict
Some manuscripts and versions
Her sadness

The enthusiast's sadness remains an ineluctable fact, despite the efforts of “exegetes” primarily concerned with whether Mary did or did not enter the tomb (a conflict between versions of the story). Against the coldness of such scholarship, which masks her “voice to cry out” in talk of motifs and historicity, denying that her weeping is a lament, Howe poses fear and trembling. She longs to “go back / recollectedly into biblical / fierce grace,” but she refuses to submit to the Christ who lies in wait for her return: the lost, now found, now risen Master who tells her (could he?) “Do not touch me.”

As in the other poems here—as everywhere in Howe—“The Nonconformist's Memorial” refuses to tell the story I have made from it. The refusal of narrative, or even of shapely resolution, all the shards placeable into some mosaic at last, mirrors Howe's refusal to be reconciled with loss, to call her fall from “biblical / fierce grace” into de profundis sadness fortunate. There are, however, Howe's usual discursive and lyrical moments as well: a voice that tells you “These are thoughts / This is not intention / as to the sense of it / To be a man of Sorrows / the Person speaking”; or an address whose simplicity of syntax is as surprising and intimate as its confession: “Reader I do not wish to hide / in you to hide from you / It is the Word to whom she turns / True submission and subjection.” These bring the poem well within the range of voice, the range of pathos—in whispering range, that is to say, of the “Person speaking” in The Birth-mark, the figure these poems implicitly ask you to trace, and to embrace.

When I think of The Nonconformist's Memorial, I twist it a little. The first poem that comes to mind is the third, “A Bibliography,” with its enthusiastic shatterings of the Book-as-Icon, remembered mostly for its gestures on a page, its quotes from David Copperfield, and its curious, guilty hauntings by prose and “the ghost of a king.” The second is the title poem, particularly the passage I have already quoted at length. Then comes “Melville's Marginalia,” the closing poem and the one which Howe calls “the essential poem in the collection.” Perhaps: For me it remains elusive, in part because of its length (sixty-five pages), in part because it overlaps in theme with so much of The Birth-mark, which in some sense drowns it out. Indeed, all three of these poems are bound up in memories of Howe's prose, where her resistance to “comfort and confidence” relaxes and her voice begins to rise. I am always surprised by how successfully they resist glosses and narrative recasting when reread. As Howe says of Dickinson's manuscripts, they “preserve their insubordination.”

I tend to forget, at least at first, the “Silence Wager Stories.” Yet the close of this sequence, the shortest in the collection, haunts me: one of three passages from Howe I have, without trying, by heart. In a poem shadowed by “loveDeath” and a “Theme theme” of “heart fury,” and which echoes the words brought to a dying Tristan as he waits in vain for Isolde's sail to appear on the horizon—Oed' und leer das meer, “wide and empty the sea”—these lines underscore the loss that links these two new books, and they undermine Howe's hope that text (the manuscript, the mark, marked Scripture, something—just not “works”) can bring about an end to loss, social or mortal, so that all manner of things shall be well. In The Birth-mark Howe quotes Thomas Shepard's promise to the sinner worried about Christ's absense, off in heaven. Take and read, Shepard advises, for “here, he that was dead, but now is alive, writes, sends to thee; O, receive his love here in his word; this is receiving ‘him by faith.’” Against which consoling covenant of grace I read the rest of The Birth-mark's frontispiece from Melville:

35 Behold, your house is left
unto you desolate. And verily, I
say unto you, Ye shall not see
me, until the time come when ye
shall say, Blessed is he that
cometh in the name of the
Lord.

and the last five gently rocking lines of “Silence Wager Stories”:

Half thought thought otherwise
loveless and sleepless the sea
Where you are where I would be
half thought thought otherwise
Loveless and sleepless the sea

Audacity and stammer I admire. In lines like these, sung “otherwise,” I hear my Susan Howe.

Notes

1. Adrienne Rich, in her essay “Vesuvius at Home” (first published in Parnassus 1976), was the first to insist on the poet's experimentalism, and propose it as a form of “nonconformity.” Howe finishes the job.

2. The first of these proto-modernist moves is actually attributed to Jonathan Edwards, but Howe sees much of Edwards, except for his “humorlessness and the dead weight of doctrinaire Calvinism,” resurgent in Dickinson's work.

3. An example of this retrospective revelation: When Howe quotes Dickinson's last letter at the start of the book—“Little Cousins, / Called back. / Emily.”—after a quote from Keats's “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” the reason for that start is left unclear. Looking back from the end, after this voice has led you through readings of Dickinson, Shakespeare, and so many others, it's evident the calling back was here a summoning up, a gift (in Keats's terms) of phoenix wings, a chance for two poets, both in some sense unknown, to fly at the latter's desire.

4. In Johnson's Wonder Working Providence she spots a line: “surely had this sect [the antinomians] gone on awhile, they would have made a new Bible.” Holmes to our Watson, she does not deign to add that writing a new Bible became the ambition of Emerson, Whitman, and other American Romantics. Score one for the shell game.

Works Cited

Susan Howe. The Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1990).

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

———. Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).

Rachel Blau du Plessis, “Whowe.” In The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 123–139.

Peter Quartermain, “And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe.” In Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 182–194.

Marjorie Perloff, “Collision or Collusion with History: Susan Howe's Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” In Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 297–310.