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Articulation of Sound Forms in Time
EXTRACT FROM A In looking over my papers, I found a copy of a paper left by the Rev. Hope Atherton, the first minister of Hatfield, who was ordained May 10th, 1670. This Mr Atherton went out with the forces (commanded by Capt. Turner, captain of the garrison soldiers, and Capt. Holyoke of the county militia) against the Indians at the falls above Deerfield, in May, 1676. In the fight, upon their retreat, Mr. Atherton was unhorsed and separated from the company, wandered in the woods some days and then got into Hadley, which is on the east side of the Connecticut River. But the fight was on the west side. Mr Atherton gave account that he had offered to surrender himself to the enemy, but they would not receive him…
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
14 people want to read
About the author
Susan Howe
68 books156 followersSusan 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.
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.
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May 16, 2010
With this essay/review I will discuss the grid in Susan Howe’s work and its connection with modern visual practices of art. Beyond location and variable linguistic and visual uses of the grid in Howe’s work, I will discuss a certain Modern spiritual /material split that the doubling nature of the grid, together with a doubling poetics of destruction, loss, and eternal return, might have previously implied when connected to ideas circulating around Rosalind Krauss’ notion of the grid as a “repressive” modernist emblem. Where Krauss deems the grid anti-mimetic, anti-historical, anti-narrative, and anti-real, I will discuss how, with the fusion of poetics, Susan Howe turns this visual artifact of apparent irreconcilable difference on its side, either “upside” or “sideup.”[1:] It would then seem that the apparent modern avante garde paradox of building with lack and opposition does not necessarily have to be the servant to a tautology filling that tall single column of the capitol I with substance, but with Howe’s poetry can become as Linda Reinfeld shows us, a narrative of connective force and an allegory of multiple modes of individuation:
Thought dissolves into the medium of thought so that the word alone, like Hope in the destructive element immersed, generates the zero degree of meaning that makes possible a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.[2:]
Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s The Intertwining—The Chiasm, will prove useful to discuss one way that this notion of a ‘Zero degree of meaning’ produces an ‘X’ marking the spot of visual/textual connectivity, sounding out, while maintaining highly individual modes of perceptual difference to make possible “…a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.” The phenomenological engagement of Howe’s poetics shows the potentiating nature of post-linear work like hers to connect with the differences of individual experience, offering new ways of seeing and reading image-text complexes, which activate the passive reader into the process of making meaning, challenging classical modes of perspective.
Questions may still remain: doesn’t the continual use of the grid, and a reliance on it and its “mathematical continua,” imply or even assign a certain linear truth value to it? To this I would answer yes; but I would like to suggest that it has been centripetal, closed, clinical and “repressive” analysis of the grid that appears to be symptomatic of the very modernist myths they try to diagnose. And so, from the renewal of possibility emerges a renewal of connectivity, not connected in any way consciously, as fascist regimes, talking cures or organized religions require, but connected through the individuation of new inventions of sight developing through modes of vision itself . And as text is an integral written code of our view, the connective tissue of one aspect of phenomenology, Susan Howe’s “zero degree of meaning” can act as a connective force among women and men reading into the “side-up” square of the grid, which when slightly tilted “Side-down[3:]”( either by loss of reason or refracted by the water of Hope Atherton’s river crossing ) shifts into an ‘X’: a “zero degree of meaning,” which marks the spot for a connection through independent modes of salience and solidarity. And previous polarities which can be associated with the grid, such as the relationship between author and reader, subject and object, and privacy and publicity, with the work of Howe’s grids, cave in on themselves -- “It thus makes it possible for a single person to be both.”[4:]
Susan Howe writes with a poetics of doubling. She builds with negation and the drama of loss.[5:] Her projections of “mathematic continua” and the tension she creates against such rationality come together with such force that dialectical discourse itself systematically implodes, and often we are left with no more than chunks of word, barely strung to a grid, whose open spaces dominate the page reverberating the sound of words that are both separated and relational as they emerge -- isolated and vibrating from their fall-- into the boxes of a word square:
S
2, only fury cleave most air
lovely asymmetry incline light
lean imagery altus x soar 6
arc hue heraldic puzzle midhe
paradigm bolt motivic prebendery
moor breach weir tactile spinster
herd polyphonic mathematic madhouse
skip cottage easter snow homine
L laracor aye yew medb heron
will stirring 1668 bound purely
( ) aye estersnowe enclosure
Prism
Pennant ‘nature of the future’ [6:]
Susan Howe’s poetics are a function of the eye and functions of vision are poetic forms. The way sound resonates from her words depends on the scopic space of the margins and implied fields that surround them. Much of their power comes from their visuality, their appearance on the page and just as a grid contains itself, both in form and content, so too does Howe’s poetics.
Howe’s grids, either as the subject or structure of her poetics, are modes through which to rupture syntax and dialectical synthesis. Even when Howe recalls the mythical and romantic figures of Tristram and Iseult, they are brought to the surface of her sleet- whipped page as devices of literary construction and not to extend the syntactical orderings of their myths. Or are they?
Iseult seaward gazing Iseult stands at Tintangel
( pale secret fair) on the mid stairs between
Allegorical Tristram or light and dark symbolism
His knights are at war
Sleet whips the page.[7:]
When Iseult and Tristram are taken off the syntactical grids of Arthurian romance (or Hope Atherton off the Puritanical grid of their written testimony) and stripped bare of their mythical significance by slicing through their original context with the materiality of Howe’s own sleet- whipped page, does it create an irreconcilable split between the materiality of literary construction and the tumultuous spirit of myth? “When you slice into the past and the future, what abrupt violence may open under you? The stories of Pandora and Psyche must have been told before the flood.”[8:] Does the opposition between “empty” and “full” become the reigning factor for readings of Howe? Are we left with the empty surfaces of the emblematic grid of 20th Century art, that even when painted in attempts to unify the spirit/ material split, are subject to unchangeability? Or when Howe reduces the richness of Swinburnian descriptive illusion to the stark recognition of a single figure’s location on a “mid stair between / light and dark symbolism,” has the illusion of the myth lost its significance with the drastic reduction to what Brian Reed calls “stick figures”? Is meaning’s source in the sparse armature of its linguistic surface- in its materiality as language? This is certainly true, but sparse, unchangeable, irreconcilable and permanently divided it is not. And a sign that has gone through the process of becoming an “empty” signifier is not “empty” at all; it is as “full” as any other sign carrying its history of meaning. The so called “empty” literary device carries with it the process of its becoming a literary device, and this shift is as full as any other myth (its strategy is meaning) contained in the representation of circulation itself. There is no mark written in the context of other marks which can remain extra-lexical[9:] “Words are like swords. “S” makes word a sword.”[10:] Howe’s ruptures are exactly counter to the modern contention that the grid is rigidly ant-mimetic. In fact, they are an exact mimesis of the functions of the modern grid itself—failing-- and through its use, Howe breaks down literary constructedness to suggest something else.
: X: Perhaps, with the case of Tristram and Iseult, Howe relocates the lovers to a place safe from the resentful lance of Mark, who can be seen as the symbol for a forced synthesis of an age old triad— the undoing of two adulterous lovers for the sake of the social contract of chivalry and marriage that eliminates the lovers autonomy. And as much as this division of the two lovers is for the sake of the synthesis of a social contract, it also ruptures the illusion of the synthesis itself which, while usurping the couple, eliminates their autonomy. This is the doubling work of the grid. It is Mark, who has splintered his Arthurian lance with his (S) word pulled from the lines of the emblematic modern grid of spatial division, who threatens distance and autonomy on an open field. Susan Howe takes the diachronic verticality of stacked myth and legend and changes the once representative distance of time and duration into a chiasmic surface.
: X: In his essay: “Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word
Squares,” Brian Reed suggests that this is only half the story. Depending on one’s
reading of the Tristram/ Iseult myths, through Howe’s syntactical ruptures, these figures can become either “empty stick figures” or “full” explications “trailing” the “clouds of glory” of the myth.[11:] As Reed points out, if we consider Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, within which Iseult’s soliloquy illuminates itself through countless descriptions of light and dark and a failure to create a distinction between the two, then the figure on “the mid stairs/ between light and dark symbolism,” becomes a full one, recalling “a precursor poet writing magnificent verse at the height of his career.”[12:] But if we consider the nearly tragic abridgement of the illustrious Swinburnian reference to the literal materiality of the statement: “between light and dark symbolism,” then readers less familiar with the Tristram/ Iseult myths, or overly familiar with it and ready to re-imagine the stories, are given the chance to reify the myths with both the materiality of its language devices and their relationship to previous circulations of the stories. The reader becomes an active participant in the meaning making process in a dynamic way previously absent from linear structural themes. This works for Howe in two ways. On one level authorial intent shifts to the reader, inevitably challenging ideology which holds that the spectator or reader must remain a passive participant. And on another level Howe’s Tristram and Iseult can both maintain their materiality as literary devices while “ trailing” the “ clouds of glory” of their precedents. And just as interpretations of Agnes Martin painting’s ( paintings Howe looked at with intrigue) shift drastically depending on the viewer’s location, so too does the interpretation of Howe’s poetics depend upon the location and point of view of the reader.
To fully engage the uses of the grid in Howe’s work we must face the dilemma set forth by W.J.T. Mitchell concerning Post-Linear poets or Language Poetry:
“The image text…that is the whole ensemble of relations between the visual and the verbal… the study of image-text relations is far from straightforward…there is no “Metalanguage” available or possible that would enable critics to speak confidently, synoptically and transhistorically about the interface between the verbal and the visual.”[13:]
This ‘dilemma’ has perhaps been a refreshing aspect of Language or Postlinear Poetry. It has forced critics to insist on “literalness and materiality” in their analyses, rather than too-abstract and falsely generalizing statements.”[14:]Only by mapping the idiosyncratic specificity of the poet’s vocation, history, and of course her words, can one begin to make productive analysis that can aid in the creation and circulation of such poetry. This can bring readers a fraction closer to understanding the limits and potentials of the subtle workings within the relationship of sounding/seeing/ reading and writing sight.
To begin to understand the “literalness and materiality” of the grid work in Howe’s poetry turning briefly to Howe’s vocation as an installation artist in the New York art world of the 1960’s and 1970’s will be helpful. Before Susan Howe chose poetry she had already chosen installation art after studying painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. She began working in New York during the linguistic turn of conceptualism and the rise of minimalism. So her work was influenced by many experimentally and conceptually minded artists working at the time such as Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and John Cage.
Again, revisiting Reeds reading of Howe; he points out that her early installations looked like her later “Word Squares.” In keeping with the early conceptualism of which she was surrounded, Susan Howe utilized unframed photocopies of seemingly boring or mundane images snatched from magazines and journals. She also incorporated her own written text. Appropriated imagery and text were brought together and displayed in gallery spaces in hyper- rectilinear formats. The texts of her early aesthetic investigations were kept small and placed within the sea of the white wall- as to interrupt the field of open space. These text bits and squares interspersed with similarly sized images formed geometrical orderings all placed on implied grids.[15:]
Surmounting the peripheral effect of the early conceptualists was the work of Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhart, whose work brings the emblematic modern grid directly to the surface for consideration. Susan Howe was also fascinated early on by the writing of Charles Olsen and Robert Smithson for their “interest in archaeology and mapping. Space. North American space—how it’s connected to memory, war, and history.”[16:] It was at the Greene Gallery in the late sixties while looking at Agnes Martin paintings that Howe made a notable transition from installation artist to poet. She had been writing “word lists” and was “scared to begin writing sentences.” At the time she wasn’t sure why: “But it just gradually happened that I was more interested in the problems of those words on the page than in the photographs I used or the watercolor washes.”[17:] Howe’s early aesthetic investigations were concerned with the effect text could have on one’s reading of an image or as was the case with one of her most noted aesthetic contemporary, Agnes Martin, how words could effect one’s reading of chromatic grids:
“I remember a show Agnes Martin had at the Greene gallery – small minimalist paintings, but each one had a title; it fascinated me how the title affected my reading of the lines and colors.”[18:]
Agnes Martin is most noted for painting grids: muted color fields with delicate, often times hand drawn, grid structures superimposed over them. The titles of Martin paintings are generally drawn from nature with titles like: Water Flower, Leaves, The Beach, Desert, Wheat, and Milk River. It can be argued that the poesis of Martin paintings and what Susan Howe saw in them was in the poetic relationship between the ‘apparent’ anti-natural structure of her grids and the effect words have on their readings.
Writing about the history of the grid in modern art Rosalind Krauss states:
“In the spatial sense, the grid states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art, flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the over-all regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.”[19:]
If one accepts the notion that the emblematic grid of 20th century art is anti-mimetic, anti-natural, and anti-real, as if something could be anti-real, then one overlooks how Howe’s work, with the addition of words on the visual field turns this notion against itself.
To read the rest visit: www.wlloyd3.blogspot.com
1] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987.
[2:] Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992. pp. 140
[3:] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987
[4:] See, Rorty, Richard, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp.198. Rorty’s discussion about cruelty and solidarity and how it is possible to maintain liberal hope and private irony at the same time, is parallel with the functions of the grid in Susan Howe’s poetics which makes visible the possibility for a single person to be both.
[5:] See, Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
[6:] Howe, Susan, The Europe Of Trusts, From The Difficulties, Sun and Moon Press, 1990
[7:] See, Howe, Susan From Defenestration of Prague
[8:] Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/h..., 2006.
[9:] See Bernstein’s discussion about Impermeability and Absorption in, Bernstein, Charles, A Poetics, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1992…
[10:] See, Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/h..., 2006.
In this interview Howe recalls that she was interested in “ bringing from words what they were able to bring” stating: “ “S” makes a word sword.”
[11:] See, Reed, Brian, Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word Squares and Postlinear Poetics, from Postmodern Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v014... Brian Reeds article has been tremendously influential on the conception of this essay, in fact I would consider this essay an extension of many of Reed’s points.
[12:] Ibid.
[13:] Ibid.
[14:] Ibid.
[15:] Ibid.
[16:] Howe, Susan, Modern American Poetry, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Form The Difficulties 1989, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poet...
[17:] Ibid.
[18:] Ibid.
[19:] Krauss, Rosalind, Grids, You Say, October #9, 1979
[20:] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987. Unpaginated.
[21:] Ibid.
Thought dissolves into the medium of thought so that the word alone, like Hope in the destructive element immersed, generates the zero degree of meaning that makes possible a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.[2:]
Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s The Intertwining—The Chiasm, will prove useful to discuss one way that this notion of a ‘Zero degree of meaning’ produces an ‘X’ marking the spot of visual/textual connectivity, sounding out, while maintaining highly individual modes of perceptual difference to make possible “…a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.” The phenomenological engagement of Howe’s poetics shows the potentiating nature of post-linear work like hers to connect with the differences of individual experience, offering new ways of seeing and reading image-text complexes, which activate the passive reader into the process of making meaning, challenging classical modes of perspective.
Questions may still remain: doesn’t the continual use of the grid, and a reliance on it and its “mathematical continua,” imply or even assign a certain linear truth value to it? To this I would answer yes; but I would like to suggest that it has been centripetal, closed, clinical and “repressive” analysis of the grid that appears to be symptomatic of the very modernist myths they try to diagnose. And so, from the renewal of possibility emerges a renewal of connectivity, not connected in any way consciously, as fascist regimes, talking cures or organized religions require, but connected through the individuation of new inventions of sight developing through modes of vision itself . And as text is an integral written code of our view, the connective tissue of one aspect of phenomenology, Susan Howe’s “zero degree of meaning” can act as a connective force among women and men reading into the “side-up” square of the grid, which when slightly tilted “Side-down[3:]”( either by loss of reason or refracted by the water of Hope Atherton’s river crossing ) shifts into an ‘X’: a “zero degree of meaning,” which marks the spot for a connection through independent modes of salience and solidarity. And previous polarities which can be associated with the grid, such as the relationship between author and reader, subject and object, and privacy and publicity, with the work of Howe’s grids, cave in on themselves -- “It thus makes it possible for a single person to be both.”[4:]
Susan Howe writes with a poetics of doubling. She builds with negation and the drama of loss.[5:] Her projections of “mathematic continua” and the tension she creates against such rationality come together with such force that dialectical discourse itself systematically implodes, and often we are left with no more than chunks of word, barely strung to a grid, whose open spaces dominate the page reverberating the sound of words that are both separated and relational as they emerge -- isolated and vibrating from their fall-- into the boxes of a word square:
S
2, only fury cleave most air
lovely asymmetry incline light
lean imagery altus x soar 6
arc hue heraldic puzzle midhe
paradigm bolt motivic prebendery
moor breach weir tactile spinster
herd polyphonic mathematic madhouse
skip cottage easter snow homine
L laracor aye yew medb heron
will stirring 1668 bound purely
( ) aye estersnowe enclosure
Prism
Pennant ‘nature of the future’ [6:]
Susan Howe’s poetics are a function of the eye and functions of vision are poetic forms. The way sound resonates from her words depends on the scopic space of the margins and implied fields that surround them. Much of their power comes from their visuality, their appearance on the page and just as a grid contains itself, both in form and content, so too does Howe’s poetics.
Howe’s grids, either as the subject or structure of her poetics, are modes through which to rupture syntax and dialectical synthesis. Even when Howe recalls the mythical and romantic figures of Tristram and Iseult, they are brought to the surface of her sleet- whipped page as devices of literary construction and not to extend the syntactical orderings of their myths. Or are they?
Iseult seaward gazing Iseult stands at Tintangel
( pale secret fair) on the mid stairs between
Allegorical Tristram or light and dark symbolism
His knights are at war
Sleet whips the page.[7:]
When Iseult and Tristram are taken off the syntactical grids of Arthurian romance (or Hope Atherton off the Puritanical grid of their written testimony) and stripped bare of their mythical significance by slicing through their original context with the materiality of Howe’s own sleet- whipped page, does it create an irreconcilable split between the materiality of literary construction and the tumultuous spirit of myth? “When you slice into the past and the future, what abrupt violence may open under you? The stories of Pandora and Psyche must have been told before the flood.”[8:] Does the opposition between “empty” and “full” become the reigning factor for readings of Howe? Are we left with the empty surfaces of the emblematic grid of 20th Century art, that even when painted in attempts to unify the spirit/ material split, are subject to unchangeability? Or when Howe reduces the richness of Swinburnian descriptive illusion to the stark recognition of a single figure’s location on a “mid stair between / light and dark symbolism,” has the illusion of the myth lost its significance with the drastic reduction to what Brian Reed calls “stick figures”? Is meaning’s source in the sparse armature of its linguistic surface- in its materiality as language? This is certainly true, but sparse, unchangeable, irreconcilable and permanently divided it is not. And a sign that has gone through the process of becoming an “empty” signifier is not “empty” at all; it is as “full” as any other sign carrying its history of meaning. The so called “empty” literary device carries with it the process of its becoming a literary device, and this shift is as full as any other myth (its strategy is meaning) contained in the representation of circulation itself. There is no mark written in the context of other marks which can remain extra-lexical[9:] “Words are like swords. “S” makes word a sword.”[10:] Howe’s ruptures are exactly counter to the modern contention that the grid is rigidly ant-mimetic. In fact, they are an exact mimesis of the functions of the modern grid itself—failing-- and through its use, Howe breaks down literary constructedness to suggest something else.
: X: Perhaps, with the case of Tristram and Iseult, Howe relocates the lovers to a place safe from the resentful lance of Mark, who can be seen as the symbol for a forced synthesis of an age old triad— the undoing of two adulterous lovers for the sake of the social contract of chivalry and marriage that eliminates the lovers autonomy. And as much as this division of the two lovers is for the sake of the synthesis of a social contract, it also ruptures the illusion of the synthesis itself which, while usurping the couple, eliminates their autonomy. This is the doubling work of the grid. It is Mark, who has splintered his Arthurian lance with his (S) word pulled from the lines of the emblematic modern grid of spatial division, who threatens distance and autonomy on an open field. Susan Howe takes the diachronic verticality of stacked myth and legend and changes the once representative distance of time and duration into a chiasmic surface.
: X: In his essay: “Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word
Squares,” Brian Reed suggests that this is only half the story. Depending on one’s
reading of the Tristram/ Iseult myths, through Howe’s syntactical ruptures, these figures can become either “empty stick figures” or “full” explications “trailing” the “clouds of glory” of the myth.[11:] As Reed points out, if we consider Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, within which Iseult’s soliloquy illuminates itself through countless descriptions of light and dark and a failure to create a distinction between the two, then the figure on “the mid stairs/ between light and dark symbolism,” becomes a full one, recalling “a precursor poet writing magnificent verse at the height of his career.”[12:] But if we consider the nearly tragic abridgement of the illustrious Swinburnian reference to the literal materiality of the statement: “between light and dark symbolism,” then readers less familiar with the Tristram/ Iseult myths, or overly familiar with it and ready to re-imagine the stories, are given the chance to reify the myths with both the materiality of its language devices and their relationship to previous circulations of the stories. The reader becomes an active participant in the meaning making process in a dynamic way previously absent from linear structural themes. This works for Howe in two ways. On one level authorial intent shifts to the reader, inevitably challenging ideology which holds that the spectator or reader must remain a passive participant. And on another level Howe’s Tristram and Iseult can both maintain their materiality as literary devices while “ trailing” the “ clouds of glory” of their precedents. And just as interpretations of Agnes Martin painting’s ( paintings Howe looked at with intrigue) shift drastically depending on the viewer’s location, so too does the interpretation of Howe’s poetics depend upon the location and point of view of the reader.
To fully engage the uses of the grid in Howe’s work we must face the dilemma set forth by W.J.T. Mitchell concerning Post-Linear poets or Language Poetry:
“The image text…that is the whole ensemble of relations between the visual and the verbal… the study of image-text relations is far from straightforward…there is no “Metalanguage” available or possible that would enable critics to speak confidently, synoptically and transhistorically about the interface between the verbal and the visual.”[13:]
This ‘dilemma’ has perhaps been a refreshing aspect of Language or Postlinear Poetry. It has forced critics to insist on “literalness and materiality” in their analyses, rather than too-abstract and falsely generalizing statements.”[14:]Only by mapping the idiosyncratic specificity of the poet’s vocation, history, and of course her words, can one begin to make productive analysis that can aid in the creation and circulation of such poetry. This can bring readers a fraction closer to understanding the limits and potentials of the subtle workings within the relationship of sounding/seeing/ reading and writing sight.
To begin to understand the “literalness and materiality” of the grid work in Howe’s poetry turning briefly to Howe’s vocation as an installation artist in the New York art world of the 1960’s and 1970’s will be helpful. Before Susan Howe chose poetry she had already chosen installation art after studying painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. She began working in New York during the linguistic turn of conceptualism and the rise of minimalism. So her work was influenced by many experimentally and conceptually minded artists working at the time such as Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and John Cage.
Again, revisiting Reeds reading of Howe; he points out that her early installations looked like her later “Word Squares.” In keeping with the early conceptualism of which she was surrounded, Susan Howe utilized unframed photocopies of seemingly boring or mundane images snatched from magazines and journals. She also incorporated her own written text. Appropriated imagery and text were brought together and displayed in gallery spaces in hyper- rectilinear formats. The texts of her early aesthetic investigations were kept small and placed within the sea of the white wall- as to interrupt the field of open space. These text bits and squares interspersed with similarly sized images formed geometrical orderings all placed on implied grids.[15:]
Surmounting the peripheral effect of the early conceptualists was the work of Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhart, whose work brings the emblematic modern grid directly to the surface for consideration. Susan Howe was also fascinated early on by the writing of Charles Olsen and Robert Smithson for their “interest in archaeology and mapping. Space. North American space—how it’s connected to memory, war, and history.”[16:] It was at the Greene Gallery in the late sixties while looking at Agnes Martin paintings that Howe made a notable transition from installation artist to poet. She had been writing “word lists” and was “scared to begin writing sentences.” At the time she wasn’t sure why: “But it just gradually happened that I was more interested in the problems of those words on the page than in the photographs I used or the watercolor washes.”[17:] Howe’s early aesthetic investigations were concerned with the effect text could have on one’s reading of an image or as was the case with one of her most noted aesthetic contemporary, Agnes Martin, how words could effect one’s reading of chromatic grids:
“I remember a show Agnes Martin had at the Greene gallery – small minimalist paintings, but each one had a title; it fascinated me how the title affected my reading of the lines and colors.”[18:]
Agnes Martin is most noted for painting grids: muted color fields with delicate, often times hand drawn, grid structures superimposed over them. The titles of Martin paintings are generally drawn from nature with titles like: Water Flower, Leaves, The Beach, Desert, Wheat, and Milk River. It can be argued that the poesis of Martin paintings and what Susan Howe saw in them was in the poetic relationship between the ‘apparent’ anti-natural structure of her grids and the effect words have on their readings.
Writing about the history of the grid in modern art Rosalind Krauss states:
“In the spatial sense, the grid states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art, flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the over-all regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.”[19:]
If one accepts the notion that the emblematic grid of 20th century art is anti-mimetic, anti-natural, and anti-real, as if something could be anti-real, then one overlooks how Howe’s work, with the addition of words on the visual field turns this notion against itself.
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1] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987.
[2:] Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992. pp. 140
[3:] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987
[4:] See, Rorty, Richard, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp.198. Rorty’s discussion about cruelty and solidarity and how it is possible to maintain liberal hope and private irony at the same time, is parallel with the functions of the grid in Susan Howe’s poetics which makes visible the possibility for a single person to be both.
[5:] See, Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
[6:] Howe, Susan, The Europe Of Trusts, From The Difficulties, Sun and Moon Press, 1990
[7:] See, Howe, Susan From Defenestration of Prague
[8:] Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/h..., 2006.
[9:] See Bernstein’s discussion about Impermeability and Absorption in, Bernstein, Charles, A Poetics, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1992…
[10:] See, Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/h..., 2006.
In this interview Howe recalls that she was interested in “ bringing from words what they were able to bring” stating: “ “S” makes a word sword.”
[11:] See, Reed, Brian, Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word Squares and Postlinear Poetics, from Postmodern Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v014... Brian Reeds article has been tremendously influential on the conception of this essay, in fact I would consider this essay an extension of many of Reed’s points.
[12:] Ibid.
[13:] Ibid.
[14:] Ibid.
[15:] Ibid.
[16:] Howe, Susan, Modern American Poetry, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Form The Difficulties 1989, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poet...
[17:] Ibid.
[18:] Ibid.
[19:] Krauss, Rosalind, Grids, You Say, October #9, 1979
[20:] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987. Unpaginated.
[21:] Ibid.
January 3, 2011
As always, loved. Love her imagery, her use of a variety of forms, & her language choices. An amazing writer. One of my favorites of her writings.
Ellie NYC
Ellie NYC
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