Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979

by Susan Howe

In Frame Structures , Susan Howe brings together those of her earliest poems she wishes to remain in print, and in the forms in which she cares to have them last. Gathered here are versions of Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) that differ in some respects from their original small-press editions. In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word. Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York―Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America, 20th Century

122 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

About the author

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).

Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).

She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

14
On a day of rest
I went naked to my parents.

They sat on a rock
water up to their waists.

I told them to lie down and put their mouths in the dust.

I went naked to my husband
in the hug of a wave horizon rolled youngly from nothing.

I told him to lie down and put his mouth in the dust.

I stopped my children’s eyes with wool
as the angel did with Jacob.

To protect them from molestation
I told them to lie down and put their mouths in the dust.

Having traps and blankets with me
I camped on the spot

Hills of potatoes and a few pea-vines grew in the trash
I nursed them tenderly.

“It is three hours by the crooked way—
or three hours by the straight.”
I told the dead people who viewed us.

Then I lay down and put my mouth in the dust.


17
I stood bolt upright
then mast through the sea
I saw my husband.

We hoisted sail together
cheering one another
Children swam in our eyes
as silent sheep.

we said, the seven stars are only small heights
covered with dense woods.
we said, the seven orifices of the head
are what planets are to the sky.
we said, your bones are rocks
and your veins great rivers.

We promised them deliverance.

We sat on an island
I put on my son’s coat
Above us on a rock
our daughter faced the sea.

The rock became water as we sat
fragments of a lighthouse were strewn in the sand
trees made tunnels of themselves.

There was no footing but the waters.
“We are cast away.”
No footing but the waters.


21
I looked at our precise vanishing point on the horizon
“You can never” it said.
I drew my little children on a sled
when the sled was gone I ran after them.

The Judge’s cave concealed a regicide
hairy, meager, and deformed
he exulted in the prospect of Thorough
and ate sea-mews raw

his feet were singed with lightning.

Samuel climbed out of the earth
to say “There is a gulf fixed.
You cannot come into this world again.”

I squeezed my baby flat as a pancake
and turned white as chalk or lime.

Haunted by the thought, the thread we hang on will save us
I bit off and burned my fingers to keep from freezing.

I saw a woman swimming along under the ice
the language of her lips was Mute
her children learned to speak by eye.

I imagined when she lived in Eden
migrations of immense flocks of redeemers darkened the sky.

*

A spark from a match maybe hot wax ignites her flowing muslin summer dress. Her husband, sleeping in his study nearby, his custom always, hears short phrases not words. Compare the phenomenon of sleeping with the phenomenon of burning. I suppose him a great distance off in pastures detached from memory. Enveloped in flame she runs into vision a succession of static images a single unbroken movement under her breath “dead woman” she bats at wing strokes. Arcadia Accadia L’Acadie sea birds clang. Why can’t he see that the loved object will perish? Well we don’t see dark spaces between film frames, why, because of persistence of vision. God’s sun-clothed bride wades backward white petticoat tabernacle body as in a dream I perceive distance a great way off. She grips him. Print your symptoms of melancholia on a sheet of paper in a singsong manner now get better. He tries. Tries to smother the flames by wrapping her in any near cloth object such as a mat or rug. Fire badly burns his face and hands but he would rather be burned than buried. Long ago open fireplaces invited guests to enjoy the warmth of huge wood fires; candles and primitive lamps provided some escape from the immediacy of lived experience. Stricken out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken she suffers intensely for a short time then gets put to sleep with ether so she wakes up calm and free of pain. Edenic mapping of the New World Acadie. Softly softly hear the noise of distant falls of many wars and wars for national independence.

*

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve long thought of Howe as an underrated American figure in experimental writing, and this early anthology shows she was pretty much already on that wave right from the jump. Disorienting at first, the longer you sit with her work the more you become attuned to it.

[Loisa Fenichell · Rating 4 out of 5]

susan howe class this quarter is like….everything’s the archive everything’s epistolary everything’s mysticism………..my head is spinning and everything is connected with everything else, rabbits are all around us, knowledge is continually in flux, etc

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language as it borders visual art, speaking to and from Duchamp, Olson, Howe's own artwork and past, the history (some would say historicity) of E Coast USA, of continents and oceans crossed over, explored, discovered, lost, relocated, being sought, the people that crosed over, were left, left, returned, crossed back, found, were lost again, erased, rewritten, to be written again, sought, a point being moved toward through history, sorts of mythology (hist and religious text, texts of the cannon (shakespeare esp)and Greek myth), the page unfolding in the mind unfolding in the reading which calls us back and back into this work endlessly, each time giving up something else, something needed.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific selection of Howe's writing and a nice place to begin reading if you haven't read her work before. I personally prefer to approach a writer one text at a time so this wouldn't be my preferred way of reading her. On the other hand, some of her works are hard to find (except there's always Amazon!) & this offers an easy way to get them.
Ellie NYC

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the introductory essay, a kind of stream-of-consciousness auto-genealogy oscillating between Eastern Massachusetts and Western New York. I didn't get into the poems as much – not that I tried especially hard – except for "Chanting at the Crystal Sea", No. 14 ("I told him to lie down and put his mouth in the dust.").

[Mikael]

easy to read hard to understand a lot of stuff about raiding another in an internecine perhaps conflict/war

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

the opening essay I really appreciated. the poems themselves, less so.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars