“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

THE INHERITED SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
IN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE POETRY
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School
of the University of Notre Dame
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Kaplan Page Harris, B.A., M.A.
________________________________
Graduate Program in English
Notre Dame, Indiana
December 2003
Stephen Fredman, Director

© Copyright by
Kaplan Page Harris
2003
All rights reserved

THE INHERITED SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
IN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE POETRY
Abstract
by
Kaplan Page Harris
If a poet assumes that the self is a product of history, then the historical poem becomes,
in effect, a new form of autobiography. This shifts the emphasis of autobiography from a
self that precedes or anchors history to a self that “comes out” of history. My dissertation is
about how this view of an “inherited self” reinvents autobiography and thereby provides an
entirely new way to read the historical epics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and the
historical lyrics of Susan Howe. I begin with an ars poetica of the inherited self in the work of
Henry Adams, whose turn from autobiography to history sets a pattern that is more or less
followed by the later poets. I look next at the seeds of Howe’s investigation of inheritance in
her early poetry and art criticism from the 1970s. In another chapter I suggest that the
documentary forms associated with historical poetry should be read as documenting
inheritance rather than documenting history as such. Because the document provides a
window onto each poet’s inheritance, the documentary form is essential for the
autobiography of an inherited self. In the final chapter I examine the tendency of each poet
to assume or “take on” historical figures as precursors of the present—as for example
certain archetypal figures for Olson and Emily Dickinson for Howe. I conclude by briefly

Kaplan Page Harris
suggesting how a reinvention of autobiography can be seen in the work of recent avant-
garde poets who assume the self is constituted not so much by history as by language or
culture.

CONTENTS
FIGURES.................................................................................................................................................... v
PREFACE.................................................................................................................................................. vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................... ix
ABBREVIATIONS FOR FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS ......................................................... x
INTRODUCTION: THE INHERITED SELF ................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1. AN ARS POETICA FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
1.1) Henry Adams and American Avant-Garde Poetry .............................................................. 17
1.2) “Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography”: Zukofsky’s Master’s Thesis ................ 22
1.3) Historical Neck Broken: Adams on Autobiography and History ..................................... 28
1.4) Ezra Pound’s “Heritage…Here, Now” ................................................................................. 37
1.5) Charles Olson’s “Antecedent Predecessions”....................................................................... 47
1.6) Susan Howe’s “Historical Imagination” ............................................................................... 55
CHAPTER 2. SUSAN HOWE IN THE 1970S
2.1) “The End of Art” ...................................................................................................................... 67
2.2) Building on Minimalism........................................................................................................... 78
2.3) “A Clutter of Characters and Quotations”: Back to Reinhardt.......................................... 85
2.4) Hinge Picture: A Poem on the Wall ......................................................................................... 96
2.5) India Wharf Sculpture and “Boston Harbor ........................................................................... 108
2.6) “Female Mariner” .................................................................................................................. 118
ii

CHAPTER 3. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND DOCUMENTS
3.1) A Documentary Life ............................................................................................................... 129
3.2) Howe’s Working Sketchbooks .............................................................................................. 141
3.3) “I Can Re / Trace / My Steps”: Finding Stella and Cordelia ........................................... 167
CHAPTER 4. HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR AN AVANT-GARDE
4.1) “I Would Be… As…” ........................................................................................................... 189
4.2) “The Archaeology We Are”: Olson’s Archetypal Inheritance ......................................... 196
4.3) “In the Grace of Scholarship”: My Emily Dickinson and Howe’s
Scholarly Prose.............................................................................................................................. 214
4.4) “Only the Human Exists”: An Emersonian Conclusion ................................................. 237
POSTSCRIPT: NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY .................................................................................... 251
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................................. 263
iii

FIGURES
Figure 2.1..................................................................................................................88
Figure 2.2................................................................................................................109
Figure 2.3................................................................................................................128
Figure 3.1................................................................................................................143
Figure 3.2................................................................................................................144
Figure 3.3................................................................................................................145
Figure 3.4................................................................................................................146
Figure 3.5................................................................................................................147
Figure 3.6................................................................................................................161
Figure 3.7................................................................................................................163
iv

PREFACE
In his talk poem “what it means to be avant-garde,” David Antin says that being avant-
garde is not, as we might expect, about having the most advanced poetic practice, but rather
about the need to “occupy the present.” 1 He explains, “all that unites us in this country is /
the present and the difficulty of recognizing it and / occupying it which is why its so
easy to slip into / prophesy and the emptiness of the future that is so easy / to occupy
because of its emptiness.” 2 The study that follows is one way to think about the attempt “to
occupy the present.” I look at three poets, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and especially Susan
Howe, who write historical poetry in ways that directly concern how each understands his or
her life in the present. I argue that if we follow these poets in assuming that the self is a
product of history, then their historical poetry becomes, in effect, a new form of
autobiography. This shifts the emphasis of autobiography from a self that precedes or
anchors its history to a self that “comes out” of history. In my view an “inherited self”
reinvents the form of autobiography, and this provides an entirely new way to read the
historical epics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and the historical lyrics of Susan Howe.
The chapters that follow are my attempt to consider the implications of seeing avant-
garde historical poetry as a new form of autobiography. I begin with an ars poetica of the
inherited self in the work of Henry Adams, whose crisis of self-understanding on the eve of
1 David Antin, what it means to be avant-garde (New York: New Directions, 1993), p. 53.
2 Ibid., p. 52.
v

the twentieth century sets a pattern which is more or less followed by avant-garde historical
poets. In The Education of Henry Adams: A Study in Twentieth Century Multiplicity (1907) and its
companion volume, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study in Thirteenth Century Unity (1913),
Adams bears witness to the “failure” of his inherited education to provide him with any
understanding of the events that unfold in his lifetime. His turn from autobiography to
history in order to understand his present is repeated later in the work of Pound, Olson, and
Howe.
If the previous chapter takes a long view by examining a thread that runs from Adams all
the way to Howe, then the next chapter takes a short view, by examining in close detail the
seeds of Howe’s investigation of her inheritance in her writings from the 1970s. I
concentrate mainly on her early poetry and art criticism, which have heretofore been
neglected in appraisals of her work, in order to illustrate how her view of inheritance
developed and how it now lies at the basis of her poetics. I examine her participation in (and
selective appropriation from) 1960s artistic minimalism, which encompasses work by Robert
Smithson, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and her husband, David von Schlegell.
The third chapter delves into the formal use of documents in historical poetry. One
objection to my argument would be to say that if historical poetry uses documentary and
citational language, which by definition does not originate in the poet, then how can we
think of it as autobiography? I argue that the historical poetry by Pound, Olson, and Howe
documents their own inheritance rather than history as such. Because the document
provides a window onto each poet’s inheritance, the documentary poem is necessary for the
autobiography of an inherited self. The majority of this chapter is devoted to Howe’s
documentary techniques in her poetry. I provide an extended examination of the working
sketchbooks, in which she first incorporates documents in her compositional process.
vi

The fourth chapter examines the relationship between the poet and the historical figures
around which much of the poetry is organized. Taking a cue from William Carlos Williams,
who refuses abstract models of history by saying that “Only the human exists,” I consider
select passages where the poets (Pound, Olson, and Howe) assume or take on a historical
figure who instructs them in the present. I look particularly at Olson’s relationship to his
archetypal figures and Howe’s relationship to Emily Dickinson.
In the postscript I briefly suggest how my argument might apply to poets who are
concerned less with history than with language or culture as it constitutes the self. If
Language Poetry assumes that the self is a product of language, then a poet who writes in the
forms associated with Language Poetry may well be writing a new kind of autobiography. A
similar argument applies to younger poets who practice a cultural poetics that is defined by
the assumption that the self is constituted by the surrounding culture or social conditions.
vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Foremost let me extend a warm acknowledgement to Stephen Fredman for directing this
dissertation. His years of teaching and guidance have been essential to my thinking on this
project. Let me also thank my committee members, Gerald Bruns, Romana Huk, and
Krzysztof Ziarek, for reading through my drafts and providing invaluable feedback. It has
been an honor to work with each one of them. I am grateful to Marjorie Perloff, who took
time out of her schedule to read my proposal at an early stage and to help me start off in the
right direction. A special thanks goes to Susan Howe, who generously spoke with me about
her work on two different occasions, once in Washington, D.C. and once at her home in
Guilford, Connecticut. I want to acknowledge the following archive librarians for their
research assistance: Lynda Corey Claassen and Steve Coy at the Archive for New Poetry,
Mandeville Collection, University of California, San Diego; Angelina Altobellis and Linda
Ashton at the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; and Judy Throm
at the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
In South Bend I want to acknowledge the support and friendship of Kremena Todorov,
Tom Butler, Becky Davis Kiene, and Jeremy Kiene. I want to thank the DC poets for their
support, encouragement and collective energy, in particular Jules Boykoff, Tina Darragh,
Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, Lorraine Graham, P. Inman, Tom Orange, Kaia Sand, Rod
Smith, Ryan Walker, and Mark Wallace. I especially want to acknowledge my gratitude to
Tom Orange for reading several unwieldy sections of this study along the way.
viii

ABBREVIATIONS FOR FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS
B Howe, Susan. The Birth-Mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary
history. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan U P, 1993
C Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1998.
E Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Modern Library,
1999.
ET Howe, Susan. The Europe of Trusts. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1990.
FS Howe, Susan. Frame Structures. New York: New Directions, 1996.
L=A Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Book. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois U P, 1984.
M Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Ed. George Butterick.
Berkeley: U California P, 1983.
MED Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 1985.
P+ Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Ed. Mark
Scroggins. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan U P, 2000.
ix

INTRODUCTION: THE INHERITED SELF
…it is an objective and reticent autobiography.
—T.S. Eliot on The Cantos 1
Neither the Academy, nor a Bibliography, nor Critical
Theory, nor the Norton Anthology of American Literature
will ever be able to organize and neutralize the conflicting
positions in Charles Olson’s Projective Autobiography.
—Susan Howe 2
If a poet assumes that the self is a product of history, then a historical poem becomes, in
effect, a new form of autobiography. For Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Susan Howe, this
shifts the emphasis of autobiography from a self that anchors or precedes history to a self
that comes out of it. In such an autobiography it is no longer necessary to include the usual
stories that make up self-understanding, such as family, career, and intellectual growth, nor is
self-representation even a basic criterion. Autobiography is written instead through questions
of inheritance, or what might be called an “inherited self.” As Howe writes in The Liberties
(1980),
Across the Atlantic, I
inherit myself
semblance
of irish susans
dispersed
and narrowed to
home
(ET, 213)
1 T. S. Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” To-Day 4, no. 19 (September 1918): 7.
2 Susan Howe, “Since A Dialogue We Are,” Acts 10 (1989): 172.
1

How each poet conceives of inheritance is obviously different. For Pound the prevailing
models are economic and aesthetic, for Olson they are archaeological and mythological, and
for Howe they are archival and gendered. How each thinks that a poem can articulate that
inheritance differs as well. For Pound and Olson, the form is a historical epic (as in Pound
stating that an “epic is a poem including history” [LE, 86]), but for Howe the form is a
historical lyric. What the poets share, however, is the assumption that the self is constituted
by history. By exploring the poet’s inheritance, a historical poem reinvents autobiography,
and it is from this perspective that I want to reconsider the great historical poems of the
twentieth century.
Traditional autobiography, by contrast, always requires the self-representation of the
writer. What is surprising is that this requirement has been left largely unquestioned in even
the most advanced studies of autobiography. As one scholar writes, “The limits of
autobiography, multiple and sprawling as they are, might conspire to prevent some self-
representational stories from being told at all if they were subjected to a literal test or
evaluated by certain objective measures.” 3 Here the problem of autobiography is located in
what kind of “self-representational stories” are possible in the context of social restrictions
against unorthodox discourse. However deserving this line of inquiry might prove, it never
questions the necessity of self-representational writing. Even when James Olney proposes an
autobiographical reading of the “Not I” in the work of Samuel Beckett, his position still
depends on autobiography defined by representation of the self in the text. 4 But for avant-
garde poets the limits of autobiography extend far beyond the limits of self-representation.
3 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2001), 14.
4 See his chapter “Not I” in Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: Chicago U P, 1998),
229-270.
2

Autobiography becomes a matter of investigating how the self is determined by its historical
inheritance, which goes behind the myopic view of the self as it can be represented in a text.
When on a few occasions each poet employs a more conventional form of autobiography
(e.g. the personal and reflective mode brought to Pound’s “Indiscretions,” Olson’s Post Office,
and Howe’s preface to Frame Structures 5 ), these self-reflections serve as a springboard for
looking into the history that shapes his or her self-understanding. Olson says: “As of a
human life, I say it is its history. It is the how. There can be no other. But there must be this
one. It is. The point is, to drag it out. There it is. That’s history” (SVH, 18). If a “human life”
is identical to “its history,” then a poem only needs to represent that history, and the result is
autobiography. This redirects the focus of autobiography from the self to its history—or in
Olson’s words, “The point is, to drag it out.”
My thesis is another way of thinking about a central principle of modernist poetry, first
promulgated by Mallarmé in his praise of the “elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who
cedes the initiative to words.” 6 This legacy, which continues in contemporary Language
Poetry, holds that because language is primary, a poem should not be structured around the
self of the poet. Rimbaud declares, “Je est un autre,” and from that point forward the lyric “I”
is freed from the necessity to be reflexive and the position of the speaker empties out.
Normally, the banished “I” of modernism has been taken to mean that autobiography is an
impossible, pointless, or profoundly contradictory exercise. A poet who still believes that a
poem can be autobiographical has several options on how to proceed. One option is to
5 I consider these works more fully in the next chapter.
6 Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1956), p. 40. Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York:
New Direction, 1982), p. 75. For a discussion of Mallarmé’s work and its place in modern poetry, see the
chapter “Mallarmé: Language and the Aesthetics of the Book,” in Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of
Language: A Critical and Historical Study, 2nd. edition (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2001), 101-137.
3

eject modernism by appealing to an authentic voice that never “ceded the initiative to
words.” Certainly there are contemporary poets who stick to this position by insisting that
modernists in Mallarmé’s camp were wrong and that we were better off in pretending the
period never happened. Another option is to go the way of the postmodernist by affirming
the “elocutionary disappearance of the poet” and appealing to language as the object of
poetry. Certainly there are contemporary poets who follow the lead of William Carlos
Williams who famously says, “a poem is made of words.” But there remains yet a third
option. For if the poet is said to be constituted by language (or by history or culture as
means of organizing language), then a poem can reinvent autobiography when it explores or
“excavates” (as Charles Bernstein once said of Robert Creeley 7 ) the nature of that
constituting process. The idea is that one does not cease writing autobiography simply
because one realizes that individual experiences are not unique or that stories of the self are
determined by language, history, or culture. As I see it, the first step of autobiography (with
the stress on auto-) is to acknowledge that nothing originates inside, that I originate
elsewhere, or that nothing belongs to me, that I belong to an other. The loss of an original
or “true” or “authentic” or “private” self does not mean the end of autobiography. If the
stories that one tells about oneself are merely rhetoric, then it falls on autobiography to
discover the sources of the rhetoric. Writing becomes autobiographical the moment it
wrestles with what it means to live as creature of language, culture, or history.
I think one reason that historical poems have not been thought of as autobiography is
that the poets and critics associated with the Pound-Williams-H.D. tradition are among the
least sympathetic to writing that seems tainted by the personal; since around the middle of
40.
7 Charles Bernstein, “Creeley’s Eye and the Fiction of Self,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15:3 (1995): 137-
4

the century, they have mounted a persuasive critique of confessional and (more recently)
identity-based verse. Confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath are criticized
for obsessing over self-complexity, for objectifying others in personal psychodramas, and for
withdrawing into a Romantic lyric that prioritizes the poet over the poem. More recently
creative writing programs have trained students to write through the lens of cultural identity,
and while the results have often contested the universality of Western subjectivity, the
deeper problem of reconfiguring the subject has seldom been rigorously pursued. Avant-
garde poets, on the other hand, are celebrated for avoiding the illusion of presence or
depicting the self in a way that is decentered or fragmentary. Even among avant-garde
practitioners, Olson can fault Pound for abusing history with the “beak of his ego” (SW, 82).
Olson wants to avoid the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (SW, 24) by situating
the self as an object in a field of other objects. A generation after Olson, the critique of
autobiographical or self-oriented writing escalates with the Language Poets, who argue that
subjectivity is a linguistic construction. “Author dies, writing begins. The subject loses
authority, disappears, is unmade into a network of relationships, stretching indefinitely….
Subject becomes simply the ‘instance of writing,’ is hollowed out by the operation of a
linguistic system” (L=A, 55), says Bruce Andrews. 8 Language becomes the real hero of the
poem, usurping the place of the lyric speaker or any of its substitutes. Henceforth it becomes
a political and ethical priority to reject poetry built on personae, confessionalism, or identity.
The same debate echoes in academic studies. Consider how Marjorie Perloff in The
Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) responds to the claim that Pound’s Pisan Cantos is a predecessor
to confessional poetry:
8 Barrett Watten: “The problem is, does this person, in what is merely an adaptation to his environment,
develop a language that we can identify as our own.” (L=A, 17). Bruce Andrews: “Language is the center, the
primary material, the sacred corpus, the primum mobile, the erotic sense of its own shared reality” (L=A, 31).
5

One hears much about the “autobiographical element” in the Pisan Cantos; the
sequence is often described as the meditation or reverie of an aging poet, confined in
his “cage” at the Pisa detention camp. But on reflection, one realizes that although
autobiography is ubiquitous in the Pisan sequence, it enters the text in a very odd
way. Most of the references are, strictly speaking, personal—Pound calls up the
names of old friends, former teachers, artists, headwaiters, and fellow inmates of the
DTC. Yet there is nothing “confessional” about these personal references, nothing
that points to the poet’s inner life or reveals his psychological complexity. Rather,
images, “each in itself illusionistic,” are brought into collision on a kind of shallow
film screen, a flat documentary surface or moveable aerial map. 9
Again we see language foregrounded while the self of the poet diminishes in importance.
Perloff interprets Pound’s collage as “illusionistic,” meaning the words are cast on a two-
dimensional surface which the reader experiences more as the play of language than as
whatever the words refer to (“…the referential process is not cut off but is subordinated to a
concern for sequential or spatial arrangement” 10 ). Perloff gives us a Cantos based not on
metaphors that indicate something hidden or behind the text, such as the poet’s psychology
or interiority, but rather on an experience of words themselves. Accordingly, the
autobiographical elements are taken not as the subjectivity of the poet, but as an effect of
language. Perloff identifies a similar effect in Howe’s poetry: “there is not… so much as a
trace in Howe’s work of the ‘I-centered’ mode so ubiquitous in the poetry of the early
seventies. Except for ‘Buffalo.12.7.41’ in Pythagorean Silence (and this only in part), I know of
no Howe poem that is directly autobiographical or personal.” 11 Perloff detects only a
“distant” self located in the “linguistic interstices” of Howe’s poetry: “Ostensibly absent and
calling no attention to the problems and desires of the ‘real’ Susan Howe, the poet’s self is
nevertheless inscribed in the linguistic interstices of her poetic text. Howe has been called
9 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, second ed. 1999 (Evanston: Northwestern, U P), 189.
10 Ibid., 182.
11 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, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990), 299.
6

impersonal, but one could argue that the ‘muffled discourse from the distance,’ the ‘collusion
with history’ in her poetry, is everywhere charged with her presence.” 12 These remarks
predate the publication of Howe’s later more directly autobiographical texts, such as Birth-
mark and the preface to Frame-Structures, but even after these works appear, many critics
continue to argue the same position. Paul Naylor contends that “mainstream feminist
critics” largely neglect Howe’s work because they are more attracted to “traditional, easily
recognizable forms of writing” like the confessional lyric; Howe’s “admittedly difficult” work
is said to “rarely produce monologic, lyric poetry in which the ‘I’ recounts personal
experience of injustice based on gender inequalities.” 13 Finally, it should be noted that even
Howe encourages a distinction between her work and confessional poetry when she says in a
1995 interview, “I do not like confessional poetry. These days, in America, confession is on
every TV program, let alone in most poems.” 14
Perloff and others made an important corrective to readings of Pound that sought to
align him with the confessional poets. Indeed Pound and Howe (along with Olson) on the
whole avoid writing poems with a monolithic “I” that takes for granted its connection to the
self of the poet. But in the long run this suspicion of self-oriented writing has made it
difficult to see that historical poems have reinvented or changed autobiography in a way that
differs from conventional forms. Only recently have the critical paradigms begun to adjust.
Perloff changes some of her earlier positions, for example, in a recent essay on the preface to
Frame-Structures. She demonstrates that Howe deploys autobiography in a way that challenges
expectations of the form. After citing several passages about Howe’s father, Perloff remarks,
12 Ibid., 301.
13 Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999), 64.
14 Ibid., 64. Naylor quotes “An Interview with Susan Howe,” conducted by Lynn Keller, Contemporary
Literature 36:1 (1995): 33.
7

“The anecdote nicely embodies the poet's heritage as she perceives it… But instead of now
moving ahead chronologically, as would most autobiographers, Howe goes back in time…”
Although Howe differs from “most autobiographers,” her work is still a form of
autobiography. 15 Christopher Beach writes: “Since the 1970s…there has been another mode
of autobiographical poetic writing which departs radically from the model first established by
confessionalists like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and more recently practiced in creative
writing workshops across the country.” 16 Beach says the work of David Antin and Lyn
Hejinian “explores the personal within the larger context of what can be called ‘cultural
memory.’” He defines “cultural memory” as “a level of interaction between the lived
experience of the individual poet and the concurrent experience of the society or culture as a
whole.” My argument coincides with Beach to an extent, but I also think that autobiography
can go beyond the level of personal experience and become an investigation of inheritance.
I can see three reasons why discussion of historical poetry has been dominated by
historical issues at the expense of autobiographical readings. First, historical poems tend to
encompass a range of historical material that falls outside the ordinary knowledge of most
readers, and this has led to a kind of decryption fever among many notable scholars.
Guidebooks like those for The Cantos or The Maximus Poems are necessary, but such a focus,
perhaps necessarily, tends to siphon attention from the question of autobiography. Second,
contemporary philosophical perspectives on history—such as Lyotard’s account of
postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives of history”—have led many
15 See Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany and Susan Howe’s
Buffalo,” (1998, see http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/langpo.html), 20-21.
16 See Christopher Beach, “‘Events Were Not Lacking’: David Antin’s Talk Poems, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life,
and the Poetics of Cultural Memory,” in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry
in Our Own Time, ed. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue (Jersey City, New Jersey: Talisman House Publishers,
2002), 367.
8

scholars to compare and contrast how contemporary poets weigh in on the same issues.
Several studies, particularly from the 1970s and 80s, such as Kathryne V. Lindberg’s Reading
Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche and Paul Bové’s Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern
American Poetry, bring together American poetry and continental philosophy in search of
mutual insight on theoretical problems of history; but again, asking questions on this scale
leaves little room for the question of autobiography. 17
But the main reason autobiography receives so little attention is that Pound’s Cantos and
Olson’s Maximus have typically been read as modern epics and thus opposed to a lyrical
impulse. The lyric is traditionally closer to autobiography than the epic. Epic poets line up
with Homer while lyric poets line up with Sappho. But in foregrounding epic conventions,
such as the “community’s heritage” in Michael André Bernstein’s indispensable Tale of the
Tribe (1980), less attention is given to the question of autobiography in the poem. In the
modern verse epic, says Bernstein, “The dominant voice narrating the poem will not bear the
trace of a single sensibility; instead, it will function as a spokesman for values generally
acknowledged as significant for communal stability and social well-being. Within the fiction
of the poem, the dominant, locatable source of narration will not be a particular individual
(the poet), but rather the voice of the community’s heritage ‘telling itself.’” 18 In the case of
The Cantos, “Pound’s own voice as a character in the poem is only intermittently heard
offering direct judgments. The rest of the time, it remains implicit, advancing the epic’s
17 For another example, some scholars have wanted to compare historical poems with New Historicist
and/or Foucauldian projects. Peter Nicholls writes, “For while Howe shared the new interest in recovering lost
and marginalized voices, her own research was already motivated by a passionate commitment to forms of
unintelligibility and disruption which ran counter to the totalizing concern which hegemony and consensus that
characterized some leading examples of the New Historicism.” Peter Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness:
Susan Howe and American History,” Contemporary Literature 37:4 (1996): 588.
18 Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1980), 14.
9

argument through the speech he now gives to others… Pound’s authorial ‘voice,’ I think, is
often implicitly and theoretically definable as that unspoken ‘marginal presence’ which
silently articulates (makes sense out of) the gaps in a printed text, a voice we only really
discover in the process of ‘speaking it’ ourselves.” 19 I agree that the voice narrating the poem
is not a “single sensibility,” but I would emphasize that Pound identifies his voice with the
“community’s heritage.” A poem featuring the many voices of the tribe is thus always
implicated in the possibilities for his own voice. His definition of an epic as a “poem
including history” should always be quoted alongside an equally revealing statement that he
made to Williams, “Most great poetry is written in the first person…” 20 Howe is
distinguished from Pound and Olson in that whereas they write historical epics, she writes a
historical lyric. Her poems are short, composed to the page, and speak from the private
rather than the public. But unlike a traditional lyric, she does not take the presence of a lyric
speaker for granted. In what is probably her most famous poetics statement, Howe writes,
“If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are
where you find yourself” (BM, 158). Her voice comes out in a quest for its historical
formation, a quest that is challenged by the fact that women’s voices have always been
mediated by patriarchal control over writing.
Even when commentators address the personal dimensions of historical poetry, the
focus still tends to minimize autobiography. This is nowhere more apparent than in an
ongoing tension between Black Mountain and Language Poets. Charles Bernstein, a leading
poet and theorist of the Language Poets, calls for a poetics based on “the actual experience
of words,” and this leads him to criticize Olson’s “excessive” allusions to historical and
19 Bernstein. Ibid., 170.
20 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters: 1907-1941 (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 8.
10

mythical sources in The Maximus Poems: “The escalating plethora of proper names,
chronologies, unsubstantiated references and quotes, shipping inventories, geographic data
constantly distract: lead away from any grounding of the poem in the actual experience of
words.” 21 Bernstein goes so far as to say that Olson treats his sources in a way that is
politically and ethically suspect: “The poem falls prey to the impulse to justify America by
the appropriation and overlaying of privileged texts (such as the Hesiodic myths, so
specifically rooted in their own geographical and historical context) that are ingeniously
contorted to appear relevant but are only relevant with the wildest leap of Gnostic
imagination.” This is a serious challenge for Olson because his entire project is aimed at
interrogating the historical and mythical roots of the present, and the insinuation of a
nationalist agenda undercuts his potential critique. What is overlooked, however, is the
degree to which Olson struggles to get outside the ideologies that are responsible for his own
self-understanding. If historical poems seem to foster nationalism, then perhaps a poem
about inheritance can foster its opposite: a rejection or subversion of a national identity. In
going deeper than the U.S. history, Olson seeks a point that can ultimately destabilize any
such justification of America.
The critical term that I wish to engage in this study is one that scandalizes many
practitioners and proponents of avant-garde poetry: historical poems as an appeal to
inheritance. Because inheritance has long been associated with unearned wealth, or with
privilege and exclusionary social practices, inheritance would not seem a good choice for the
intersection of history and autobiography. Inheritance is so often tainted by authority and by
traditions that cater to select interests. As Jerome Rothenberg says of “the inheritors” who
21 Charles Bernstein, “Undone Business” in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1986), 330-334.
11

followed the poetic forms of T.S. Eliot and W. H. Auden even well-after WWII, “the careers
of the inheritors were too often ‘literary,’ resting the idea of literature itself on a fixed notion
of poetry & poem, which might be improved upon but never questioned at the root.” 22
Similarly, inheritance betokens an obstacle to formal innovation when Olson calls for
“COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is
the ‘old’ base of the non-projective” (SW, 16).
It might surprise us that historical poets want to reach outside of history, to a “FIELD,”
an “unfilled space,” or, as Olson writes during his investigation of Mayan culture, “the
substances of history now useful lie outside, under, right here, anywhere but in the direct
continuum of society as we have had it…” (SW, 84). It is necessary to see that that this space
is not ahistorical so much as a gesture to events or people that have never been subsumed in
an official record and hence remain outside our knowledge of the past and unavailable to the
conceptual resources that allow us to think about inheritance. Only from this perspective
does it make sense to talk about inheritance in works by Pound, Olson, and Howe. They
each want an inheritance that goes beyond or beneath our received inheritance. To reach
“outside” exposes received inheritance to its shortcomings—but then it enables the
founding of an alternative, more open inheritance which has yet to be codified. Howe cites
such an inheritance when she says, “Here is unappropriated autonomy. Uncounted occupied
space. No covenant of King and people. No centralized State. Heavy pressure of finding no
content. Openers of the breach.” (BM, 49). This “Here” has the promise of unforeseen
initiative in an open space. The idea is that inheritance of the conventional kind—at it is
imposed by textbooks, national holidays, famous men and so forth—never accounts for
22 See his preface to Revolution of the Word (1974) in Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-faces & Other Writings (New
York: New Directions, 1981), 101.
12

inheritance as the full historical determination of a person. The poets respond with a radical
vision that says inheritance cannot be packaged by received history. This means that
inheritance can no longer be construed as positive knowledge. “There is no strict personal
order / for my inheritance” (M, 184), says Olson, acknowledging that not even he can tally
with certainty the currents feeding into him. Inheritance is imagined to be more “open” than
heretofore conceived, as he says elsewhere, playing on the name of an Objectivist poet:
I wanted to open
Mr Oppen
the full inherited file
of history—
(M, 367)
This insistent searching resurfaces a generation later when Howe construes inheritance as a
self-transformative pursuit; “I go in quest of my inheritance,” she declares in Kidnapped
(2002).
So inheritance is problematic because we do not know the paths that landed us in our
present situation. We do not know what violence supports the everyday world around us,
and we do not know to what extent our daily affairs are complicit in an exploitative world
order that lies beyond our immediate horizon. Inheritance is always a matter of
unacknowledged currents, and the more we discover about them, that is to say, the more we
discover about ourselves, then the less we see our detachment from that history. As Howe
says, “Knowledge, no matter how I get it, involves exclusion and repression. National
histories hold ruptures and hierarchies. On the scales of global power, what gets crossed
over?” (BM, 45). Avant-garde poets are good enough historians to recognize personal
complicity in historical events. The more they know, the more they are confronted by the
power and interests supporting that knowledge. But instead of rejecting any part of this
inheritance, as we might expect the goal of an autobiography that strives to be autonomous,
13

Howe, Olson and (even) Pound set out to recast and reconfigure the inheritance into which
they are born. If we accept that we live whatever we inherit, and if this poetry is about doing
something different with that inheritance, then suddenly the old equation is reversed: not that
art imitates life, but rather that life imitates art. Howe says: “This is my historical
consciousness. I have no choice in it. In my poetry, time and again, questions of assigning the
cause of history dictate the sound of what is thought” (ET, 13). The poets who measure their
lives according to inheritance see the history which they are taught as only part of what (“the
cause”) determines them; far more is to be found in what’s been left out, excluded, or
forgotten from the past. 23 Often it’s a matter of being unable to imagine a life-story within
the confines of established literary conventions; the poet Rae Armantrout says in her
autobiography, True, that she became a poet because none of the stories she knew applied to
her. 24 In this sense autobiography functions as a writing that relates to the other, bearing
witness to the incapacity of its representation by history. I often think of Howe as an
attorney or advocate speaking on behalf of voices which are denied a hearing in the tribunal
of history. The difference is that her poetry does not speak in the authorized language of that
tribunal. 25
Let me add one last point about how I think autobiography can be understood in avant-
garde historical poems. Mine is not an argument that says a poem is autobiographical
23 Even Pound appeals to an initiative that has never been recorded in history. He says we must know
history in order to learn what “remains for us to do.” Pound writes: “My pawing over the ancients and semiancients
has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once for all, better than it can ever be done
again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions
as those which launched the thousand ships, it is quite certain that we come on those feelings differently,
through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only
some ages transmute them into matter of duration” (LE, 11).
24 See Rae Armantrout, True (Berkeley: Atelos, 1998).
25 See Lyotard’s notion of a differend, which is a witness that is forced to speak in the idiom of a tribunal,
but the idiom is unable to represent the suffering of the witness. See The Differend: Phases in Dispute, trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1988).
14

ecause of cryptic references to a poet’s private life. It’s true for example that Howe’s poems
contain indirect allusions to her father and son’s name, “Mark,” in wordplay on the verb or
noun “mark.” Several critics take this as reason to call Howe an autobiographical writer.
Another example would be the sheer fact that The Maximus Poems has so much about the
history of Olson’s home base, Gloucester, and this has led some commentators to think of it
as an autobiography. In a similar way, some commentators contend that Howe is an
autobiographical writer because she incorporates historical material that relates to her
personally. A source text for Secret History of the Dividing Line is by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
and because it was edited by Howe’s father, the poem appears somehow autobiographical.
From such a view, what inevitably follows is a close reading that unpacks personal allusions
like “Mark” or where she took a phrase from Holmes. 26 The problem with this view is that it
depends on a conventional definition that says personal references are a sure indicator of
autobiography. But given the ubiquity of personal references, or at least subjective bias, in
any given text, then it would lead us to concur with the theorist of autobiography who once
said, “Autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it.” 27 What slips out of such an
argument is the more profound possibility that a poem might rethink what autobiography
means.
For a poet who assumes that the self is inherited, the writing of autobiography shifts
from an interior or personal view to the wider field of the history that produces the self. The
poem is still autobiographical because it focuses on the inheritance that constructs the self.
The self is in effect turned inside out, no longer the center of its world, but embedded or
entangled in a world that extends far into the past. For each poet there is no self that is
26 This approach to an autobiographical dimension in Howe’s work can be seen in Fiona Green’s essay,
“‘Plainly on the Other Side’: Susan Howe's Recovery.” Contemporary Literature 42.1 (2001): 78-101.
27 Candace Lang, “Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 6.
15

defined apart or independently from its history. Howe assumes that her self is determined by
language, so her inquiry to find the history of that language is at its heart an autobiographical
inquiry. A comparable argument applies to Pound, who assumes that his self is determined
by the material forces of the past, and to Olson, who assumes that his self is determined by
the archetypes of the past. The poet does not narrow the scope of autobiography to the
immediate terrain of personal memory and experience, but turns to the life that history has
bequeathed on the present. This view of autobiography is towards the a priori inheritance of
the self, however differently each poet conceives of his or her particular inheritance. Of
course a reinvention of autobiography would not be necessary had an earlier form of
autobiography not come to be seen as obsolete or gravely misguided. In the first chapter we
consider what motivates each poet to see his or her self-understanding as wrong and what
prompts a deeper investigation of inheritance than has heretofore been undertaken.
16

CHAPTER 1. AN ARS POETICA OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
1.1) Henry Adams and American Avant-Garde Poetry
In American literature the writer who delves most extensively into the relationship
between autobiography and history is Henry Adams, specifically in The Education of Henry
Adams: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity and in its companion volume, Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres: A Study in Thirteenth Century Unity. The Education is an autobiography about not
having an autobiography, meaning that no stories that come down to him (his “education”)
apply to his experience of the modern world. He is stuck in old habits while everything else
changes: “his education was chiefly inheritance” (E, 26). Like the poets, he seeks to
revolutionize that inheritance by turning to historical study. Whereas the poets in this study
seldom produce works that “look” autobiographical, Adams provides a kind of logic for why
autobiography and history are linked together, and in so doing, he helps us to see that
autobiography is an underlying dimension of avant-garde historical poetry. In the following
chapter, then, I discuss the various ways that Adams can provide a conceptual basis or an ars
poetica for the yoking of autobiography and history.
It might be objected at the outset that since Adams is a canonical figure, the alignment
of him with the poets simply amounts to recycling the same canonical writers at the expense
of a comprehensive genealogy of each writer’s works. The best response to this hazard
comes from Paul Bové who notes that unlike other canonical authors, “Adams never
induced a school into being, or, to put it differently, there were never critical apologists for
17

Adams’s work. Borrowing a figure from Michel Foucault, we can say Adams has never been
‘an initiator of discursive practice,’ as were Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. What this means is
that his work never set in motion a series of intellectual and institutional actions that, taken
together, form some sort of ‘-ism’ or ‘science’.” 1 Rather than a widespread following, Adams
attracted individual writers, many of whom, such as R.P. Blackmur, Thomas Pynchon and
Louis Zukofsky, were mavericks in their respective areas. Nor is Adams sufficiently
established and influential that he would dominate the intellectual background of any of the
poets. He is never a mythological figure of authoritative presence, such as for example
Sigismundo Malatesta is for Pound, John Smith and the founders of Gloucester are for
Olson, and Emily Dickinson is (at times) for Howe. However much the Adams family has
been mythologized—including the valorization of John Adams in The Cantos—Henry Adams
is too close to the twentieth century poets to have the necessary aloofness for an
irreproachable mythological figure.
It might be useful to observe that insofar as age difference goes, the consecutive writers
in this study were born at fairly even distances apart. Adams was born in 1838, Pound in
1885, and Howe in 1937. A half century separates Adams from Pound, but a half century
also separates Pound from Howe. Olson, born in 1910, falls midway between Pound and
Howe. Dates of publication for many of the major works by these writers overlap as well.
The Education, though privately printed in 1907, was not available until 1918, when it was
posthumously published. Adams’s late works were coming out around the same time that
1 See Paul A. Bové’s “Abandoning Knowledge: Disciplines, Discourse, Dogma” in New Literary History vol.
25, no. 3. (Summer 1994): 600. Bové also has a book forthcoming on Adams. Until then, see his three essays
and a response, which I refer to below. See “Giving Thought to America: Intellect and The Education of Henry
Adams,” in Critical Inquiry vol. 23, no. 1. (Autumn 1996): 80-108, the response to it by Loren Glass, “Giving
Thought to the Audience: A Response to Paul Bové,” and Bové’s subsequent response to Glass, “Policing
Thought: On Learning How to Read Henry Adams,” both in Critical Inquiry vol. 23, no. 4. (Summer 1996): 933-
946.
18

Pound was putting his full energy into The Cantos. By comparison, Howe began writing
poetry in the early 1970s, which fell between the publication of the second (1968) and the
third (1975) volumes of Maximus, and incidentally, about the same time Cantos I-CXVII were
first available as one “complete” volume (in the U.S. in 1970). Many of the poets would have
found their books listed for sale in the same catalogues.
As for Adams’s reception, the majority of the poets look at him less as a writer of
autobiography than for his observations on history. A prime example is T.S. Eliot’s “A
Skeptical Patrician” (1919), a little-known and brief review of The Education of Henry Adams
that appeared in the English journal Athenaeum. For our purposes, the most intriguing part of
the review is that for all of the virtues Eliot finds to praise in The Education—Adams’s
skepticism, curiosity, conscientiousness, and honesty—he is not really sure how to classify it.
“It is doubtful whether the book ought to be called an autobiography,” he says, “for there is
little of the author in it; or whether it may be called Memoirs—for there is too much of the
author in it; or a treatise on historical method, which in part it is.” 2 Nor does Williams treat
the book as an autobiography, but views it instead as a flawed pedagogical tract against
which to situate his alternative curriculum in The Embodiment of Knowledge (1928-1930). By the
1940s Eliot and Pound also took The Education primarily as a pedagogical tract and, like
Williams, as not a very good one at that. In one of their plans to reform society, Eliot and
Pound, in partnership with George Santayana, proposed to create a curriculum so effective
that no one would suffer the educational “failure” of Adams ever again. In a missive to
Santayana, Pound proposes “a desperate attempt to save further generations from the
horrors of past education,” 3 and by this he meant the “past education” associated with
2 T.S. Eliot, “A Sceptical Patrician,” The Athenaeum (May 23, 1919): 361.
3 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 338.
19

Adams. Although the three of them never completed this project, the episode provides an
impression of the low regard that was generally held for Adams by many writers of the next
generation.
When it comes to Adams as a historian, Pound is even more critical. Upon receiving
from Zukofsky several books by Adams, along with a strong recommendation, Pound writes
back to say that he appreciates some of what Adams has to say about the Jefferson
administration, but this minor praise is far outweighed by his steady condescension. Years
later, upon receiving A-“8”, the section of Zukofsky’s long poem that quotes extensively
from Adams, Pound chides, “If you had EMPHASIZED the Gold Bug/ whatever, instead
of sending me the Chartres, it might have enlightened me more effectively.” 4 On another
occasion Pound says that he prefers for a “still workable dynamo” not Henry Adams but
rather the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams: “The MAIN
implication is that they stand for a life not turned into bits” (SP, 152). Adams is accordingly
reduced to a figure of cultural fragmentation (“bits”) who has nothing to offer the
succeeding generation. By the time of Guide to Kulchur (1938) the arguments against Adams
are so advanced that Pound writes an entire chapter called “The Decline of the Adamses”
that characterizes the Adams family as the “tragedy of the U.S. over 160 years” (GK, 254).
Later in his “Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States” (1944), Pound
relents insofar as he advises reading Adams’s history of the Jefferson and Madison
administrations, but he specifies that we are to heed it only for historical details; it is “[l]ess
interesting for a specifically Economico-Monetary study” (SP, 182), meaning that for Pound
Adams has failed to sufficiently comprehend historical processes.
4 See Pound/Zukofsky Letters, 174. Letter is dated June 7, 1936.
20

Pound’s use of history in writing poems has been traced to several predecessors, but
Adams is seldom among them. Many critics have noted for example that Pound adopted
techniques for incorporating historical material from Browning’s Sordello: “I take your whole
bag of tricks” (P, 229), Pound says to Browning at the beginning of “Three Cantos” (1917). 5
That Adams has not received similar credit as a predecessor can be attributed to several
reasons, one of them being the fact that he is not primarily categorized as a poet, despite that
he did write some verse. Even then, Pound’s dismissive remarks make it unlikely that they
could ever be connected by a story of influence: “Henry Adams with a familial and inherited,
but very very discrete chip on his somewhat feminine shoulder lacked, on his own implicit,
but never explicit confession, the one quality needful for judging action. Adams never
guessed right… He never foresaw” (SP, 149). But such remarks cannot obscure the fact that
Pound follows closely in Adams’s footprints when he argues that the problems of the
present must be approached through a revolution of historical understanding. However
much he takes issue with Adams’s particular version of history, Pound agrees with the basic
form of the question. Both come to view the disruptive circumstances of the twentieth
century as historical problems that can be solved only by means of a more rigorous
investigation than heretofore available. They are one of a kind when they recoil from
inherited history, but then delve deeper into the past, struggling to revolutionize inheritance
in such a way that it speaks to the present. And the affinity between them, despite the many
5 See Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing. “Browning’s way of quarrying his poem
from a complex of historical sources entailed concentrated work over a period of time, the labour of study and
research supplementing the discipline of the lyric poet. Pound was attracted to Sordello partly because its
method of composition set it apart from the main current of Victorian romance. Where, say, Tennyson’s Idylls
of the King evoked the leisurely distances of conventional romance, Browning plunged his reader into a historical
period which was both unfamiliar and complex. That his main sources should supply a range of conflicting
accounts was, from this point of view, an advantage, since it allowed him to weigh and modify the facts in
order to arrive at his own interpretation” (37-38).
21

easons not to expect it, can be seen in a roundabout manner through the work of a younger
protégé of Pound who strongly identifies with Adams.
1.2) “Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography”: Zukofsky’s Master’s Thesis
The one poet in the Pound tradition who is unstinting in his support of Adams is Louis
Zukofsky. His support is signaled first in his master’s thesis and then in extensive quotation
of Adams in “A”-8. The thesis, “Henry Adams: a Criticism in Autobiography,” which puts
the weight full-force on the term “autobiography,” is unusual because it surveys Adams’ life
and writings in a form that is not so much a monograph or biographical narrative as a
documentary compilation of exemplary passages from his writings, with little or no
commentary by Zukofsky. More than any other poet in the twentieth century, Zukofsky
exploited the potential of documentary (or citational) forms, as seen in works such as “Poem
beginning ‘The,’” Bottom: On Shakespeare, A Test of Poetry, and large sections of “A”. The
thesis came before these works and demonstrates that from early on he was thinking about
such forms in relation to Adams. As Zukofsky says, “Henry Adams dearly loved to show the
facts bottom up” (P, 93). Just so, Zukofsky argues provocatively against the usual
assumption that documentary forms are non-subjective or avoid the personal expression of
the writer when he says, “In [Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres], whatever Adams translated,
either the poetry of the court, or the Chansom de Geste, or the cathedral arch, or the
Miracles of Our Lady, he rendered not only the spirit of an age, but his own portrait.” 6
6 This quote is taken from an earlier draft of the thesis, prior to its revised publication in Hound and Horn
(1930). “Henry Adams: Detached Mind and Poetic Undertow: A Criticism in Autobiography,” May 7, 1924.
Louis Zukofsky Papers, Box 13, File 9, Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, 47. I will
bracket this reading of an autobiographical dimension to documentary forms until my third chapter when it can
be more fully discussed.
22

Even the best readers of Zukofsky have provided only an initial gloss on his interest in
Adams. The relationship between them deserves special attention, however, because the
thesis is the longest piece in Zukofsky’s collected essays, more than twice as long as the next
longest piece, and it is also the earliest piece in the collection. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley is
the most dubious about what attracted Zukofsky to Adams, whom she denigrates as
“representative of a defunct American aristocracy.” 7 Ignoring the materialist and even
anarchist side of Adams (let alone his democratic convictions) that would have made him an
appealing figure for a left-wing poet, Stanley argues that Adams stood for the entrenched
political society that Zukofsky sought to overcome. In “The Adams Connection,” Barry
Ahearn more persuasively observes that despite the many differences between the two
writers, including differences such as age, class, city, ethnicity, and religion, “Time and time
again Zukofsky tended to see himself as Adams’ successor.” The extent of this identification
is made clear by a letter Zukofsky wrote to Lorine Niedecker which Ahearn quotes: “Just re-
read Education H.A. What a book! I believe he had buzzin’ in his head my Bottom but
didn’t bother to tell anyone.” 8 This refers of course to Zukofsky’s elaborate study, Bottom: On
Shakespeare, which is over half filled with quotations. Perhaps one reason that Zukofsky saw
this connection with Adams was because both of them (to quote again) “dearly loved to
show the facts bottom up.” Charles Bernstein suggests that the roles of historian and poet
enjoy a kind of reciprocity: “Zukofsky’s elected affinity with Adams, in which he casts
7 Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: U
California P, 1994), 26.
8 Barry Ahearn, “The Adams Connection,” Paideuma, vol. 7. No.3. (1978): 479. The letter is from
Zukofsky’s unpublished letters, courtesy of the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at
Austin, and Celia Zukofsky. Peter Quartermain claims that he “sees more and more of Adams in Zukofsky’s
work.” See his Disjunctive Poetics: from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (New York: Cambridge UP,
1992), 70-89. As Mark Scroggins observes, the thesis contains the “seeds ” of Zukofsky ’s documentary
writing,as later exemplified in Bottom:On Shakespeare. See Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofksy: Towards an
Epistemological Poetics (Tuscaloosa:U Alabama P,1998), 86.
23

Adams as poet in the cloak of historian, sets the stage for his use of Adams in “A”-8, where
it might be said that he casts himself as historian in the cloak of poet” (P+, xi).
That Zukofsky reads Adams as a poet is clear. The original subtitle of the thesis was
“Henry Adams: Detached Mind and Poetic Undertow: A Criticism in Autobiography.” 9 As a
passage that did not make it into the revised version (and that has been mostly crossed out in
an earlier draft) reads,
As far as it is known, Adams resorted to verse for the expression of his thoughts
only twice in his life. 1. once, when death made him seek for a vision of things; and
again, when he found this vision in the Virgin of Chartres. In both instances the
technique is surprising. There are no beginner’s inversions for the sake of the line
rhythm or rhyme; the writer varies the [caesura] successfully; he knows when to use a
word at the end of the line to call for an image or a feeling, or when to run lines on,
one into the other; he knows the effect of naturalness that is obtained through
feminine endings in a blank verse line; he knows enough to write as naturally as one
speaks. The vowels are clear so that the lines are resonant. 10
Zukofsky also treats Adam’s prose as a form of poetry; an early essay by Adams is said to
give “the impression of precise phraseology and order of thought—two prerequisites not the
least important for a poet; and of hidden paradox not in the least dispensed by a wit” (P+,
97). Zukofsky adds, “Passage after passage [of Adams’s historical writing] must be quoted to
give an adequate idea of the sentence rhythm, which always meets the subject with a master’s
grace. Poetry, in the simple direct phrasing, is concentrate” (P+, 106).
9 Louis Zukofsky, “Henry Adams” (1924 version). The original thesis is in a folder which has written on it,
“the growth of a poet.”
10 Ibid, 34-35.
24

Zukofsky not only thought of Adams as a poet but as a poet in his own camp. In a
“Postscript” added to the thesis when it was published in The Hound and The Horn (1930),
Zukofsky proposes that his fellow poet William Carlos Williams was of a like mind to
Adams. This point is regrettably missed in Prepositions +: The Complete Prose of Louis Zukofsky:
Expanded because the thesis and the postscript are divided into two separate sections with
the postscript being grouped alongside several other pieces on Williams. Zukofsky further
obscures the collection by supplying no other bibliographic information than the dates of
publication, but in 1930 when the thesis and the postscript were initially published, he clearly
wanted his readers to associate Adams and Williams together. It’s plausible that Zukofsky
felt his thesis was limited because it dealt strictly with Adams—that adding the Williams
piece as postscript might translate it from the academic context in which it was written to
the poetry world he was entering; he could thus dress up an academic piece as avant-garde.
Moreover the version that appeared in The Hound and the Horn was already a revision of the
thesis that he had written in 1924 when studying at Columbia (though once more
Prepositions+ obscures this fact). 11 Of course the original academic version of the thesis did
not make any reference to such a nameless poet as William Carlos Williams.
Like the thesis, the postscript does not proceed by an organized argument but rather by
a series of loosely arranged observations. Zukofsky proposes that Adams and Williams are
connected despite the extreme dissimilarity of their backgrounds. As the son of Russian
Jewish immigrants, Zukofsky likewise had a background dissimilar to both of theirs, which
perhaps explains why he observes, “Since there has been no actual contact of subject matter
in [Adams and Williams], the parallel can be no more than a metaphor. This granted, there
11 Prepositions+ only alludes to “a few brief additions 1928/9” (P+, 130). The later version had several
excisions as well.
25

emains the fact that two minds, with approximately a quarter of a century between them,
have reacted as Americans, though along different lines, towards what might be termed the
European unchanging—or in the words of Williams, ‘the ancient springs of purity and
plenty.’” 12 Zukofsky hopes that cultural differences can be superseded, or at least held
together, in an American context, which is defined against Europe (or the old world) where
social divisions are more rooted and binding. Adams and Williams are said to reveal artistic
and political possibilities that fundamentally transform the past—possibilities that are viable
in the unprecedented world of the U.S. but closed off in Europe.
Zukofsky explains the relationship of each writer to the past through his elaborate
reading of Adams’s Mont St. Michel and Chartres and two prose works by Williams: A Voyage to
Pagany, a novel, and In the American Grain, his idiosyncratic book on American history.
Zukofsky praises Adams for a “submission” to history that thereby gains an “imaginative
completeness.” 13 In casting himself as a tourist, Adams does not stand over the past in a
position of authority, for example as an expert historian, nor does he force us to follow a
“tiresome itinerary,” as in some neatly packaged historical excursion. Adams’s work becomes
what Zukofsky calls a “celestial Baedecker” because it lets the past speak for itself. Adams is
a historian as Williams is a poet: the work of both should be “not in ideas but in things.” For
Zukofsky, Adams provides a model for thinking. Adams surrenders the imaginary position
of detached objectivity and opens himself to discoveries that are “other” than the modern
world. This does not mean that Adams is somehow absent from his writing. His signature is
all over his engagement with history because, according to Zukofsky, only he would want
expose the limitations of the “American mind”: “What was intended to be impersonal has
12 Louis Zukofsky, “Beginning again with William Carlos Williams,” Hound and Horn IV, 2 (Jan-Mar, 1931),
261.
13 Ibid, 261.
26

the element of the personal diffused throughout the design. The struggle of American mind
for the ciborium not its own casts the spell of tragedy through the calm of the structure.”
Zukofsky draws an explicit connection between Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres and
Williams’s novel Voyage to Pageny in that each is about the experience of American tourists in
Europe, and so they enact an encounter between two cultures with markedly different
relationships to the past. But unlike Adams, Williams possesses a “recalcitrance” that “makes
for anything but tragedy.” Whereas Adams draws an old history to its close, Williams opens
up a new history—for example in In the American Grain. Hence the apt title of the postscript,
“Beginning again with William Carlos Williams” (though once again Prepositions does not
provide this point of information). Considering that In the American Grain is a precursor for
Olson’s Call Me Ishmael and Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-Mark, the juxtaposition
of Adams and Williams in the postscript to Zukofsky’s thesis effectively extends Adams into
the historical poetics that is at the heart of this study.
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1.3) “Historical Neck Broken”: Adams on Autobiography and History
…his education was chiefly inheritance…
—Henry Adams, (E, 26)
In The Education of Henry Adams, autobiography provides a means of dissecting or
breaking down a self, not of building one up. Autobiography neither reconstructs Adams’s
life nor retrospectively justifies his actions and choices nor rationalizes his limitations nor
apologizes to necessity. In The Education, rather, autobiography is a vehicle for scrutinizing
his experiences while acknowledging at every turn the resistance of those experiences to
complete understanding or “education.” Autobiography becomes a self-reflexive form of
writing insofar as it allows Adams to seek the “forces” (as he calls them) behind his
sensibilities, the reasons why he knows and acts or fails to know and fails to act in the world
in a certain way. For Adams, autobiography is an attempt to wrap his mind around his
inheritance and to grasp how the past determines his present being. Whereas the tendency in
scholarship is to treat autobiography as a purely constructive genre, as if it involved an
elaborate representation of the author’s self, Adams takes autobiography in the opposite
direction. This distinction is made apparent when he cites the seminal autobiography of
Western literature, Rousseau’s Confessions, and says it “erected a warning against the Ego” (E,
xxxviii). For Adams, the virtue of Rousseau is his awareness that a person is largely a
creature of social conditions—which is where autobiography must focus in order to really
understand a person. Just so, at the very outset Adams alerts us that his main concern is not
personal experience, which might be expected from autobiography, but rather the
“education” that provides whatever sense he can make of his life. As he says, “The object of
study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to
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his patron’s wants. The tailor’s object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or
elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to
them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers” (E, xxxviii). So
Adams proceeds with how he got his own “garment,” viewing it as a product of his times,
his inheritance, and all the limitations, personal flaws, and prejudices that they entail. In so
doing, autobiography turns away from myopic self-attention to examine the historical causes
of the education that has been given to him.
In Adams, we expect to see a writer gifted with the best education that nineteenth-
century New England could provide. He enjoyed the advantages of a family that was a
virtual American dynasty. The Education relates his years at Harvard where he excels in his
studies, especially in writing, and where he is elected to the prestigious position of Class
Orator during his senior year. He then travels widely in Europe and even studies for a period
in Berlin. There he also receives the all-important lesson of “education reversed,” meaning
the education to be got from “time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged;… it came from
the despised beer-garden and music hall; and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen” (E,
80). Another period finds him in London serving as private secretary to his father, Charles
Francis Adams, who was minister to England during the Civil War. There he absorbs an
“insider’s view” of politics, which proves a tremendous addition to education. Summarizing
his education is difficult because it never really comes to a halt. The story of his education
unfolds throughout the book, including long stints as editor of the North American Review and
as professor of history at Harvard, and travels across Europe and the rest of the world, most
notably in Eastern Asia and the South Pacific. Along the way, from his college years right up
to the end of the book when he is actually writing it, we glimpse his prolific writing which
29

encompasses histories, biographies, poetry, two novels, numerous essays, and of course the
autobiography itself.
But if it seems like Adams is ready to deal with the rest of what occurs in his life, then
we quickly find this not to be the case. The paradox of The Education is its long and drawn-
out insistence that his education is a failure. The ubiquitous message is that his great
education is woefully inadequate to the changing world around him. Education is found
unreliable and each lesson a disappointment, so that a “passionate hatred of school methods
was almost a method in itself” (E, 38), and “…he had to admit that nine-tenths of his
acquired education was useless, and the other tenth harmful” (E, 253). The broken promise
of his “Harvard Stamp” brings the realization that “four years of Harvard College, if
successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had
been stamped” (E, 55). As the book is set up, nearly every chapter concludes with the loss of
one type of education or another: “his attempt at education in treason having, like all the
rest, disastrously failed” (E, 109); “Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst”
(E, 313). At one point he is left feeling so disjointed that he recognizes in himself what
postmodernists call a fragmented subjectivity: his “identity, if one could call a bundle of
disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain; but his life was once more broken
into separate pieces; he was a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a
new attachment” (E, 209).
Adams thinks his education is a failure because it is always behind the times. “[H]is
education was chiefly inheritance” (E, 26), as he writes near the beginning. It is behind the
times because unprecedented developments in science, changes in economic and political
power, and in the 1890s his family bankruptcy leave him feeling utterly unprepared for life:
“One found one’s self in a singular frame of mind—more eighteenth-century than ever—
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almost rococo—and unable to catch anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution”(E, 284). When
he encounters an event that cannot be assimilated to his education, he describes “his
historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (E, 383). It is perhaps
the combination of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination that most contribute to his
impression of educational failure. Consider that he devotes roughly eight full chapters to the
period, as if tripping and stumbling over the war, unable to build a meaningful narrative out
of it. He wonders, “What motives or emotions drove his masters on their various paths, he
made no pretense of guessing motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before
which he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always a matter of simple-minded
surprise” (E, 105). He is gripped during the war by a sense that politics are controlled by
forces that he is helpless to comprehend, much less affect or change: “To the end of his life
he labored over the lessons then taught. Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel’s
metaphysical doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to understand” (E,
150). Lincoln’s assassination brings about “a world so changed as to be beyond connection
with the past” (E, 209).
Adams was not alone in these convictions. The Civil War, which was disastrous to the
idealism that his generation had inherited, led many of his contemporaries to have deep
misgivings about the viability of American democracy. As Louis Menand says in The
Metaphysical Club,
For the generation who lived through it, the Civil War was a terrible and traumatic
experience. It tore a hole in their lives. To some of them, the war seemed not just a
failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas. As traumatic wars
do—as the First World War would do for many Europeans sixty years later—the
Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it. Those
beliefs had not prevented the country from going to war; they had not prepared it
for the astonishing violence the war unleashed; they seemed absurdly obsolete in the
new, postwar world. The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South,
but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It
took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to
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find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the
conditions of modern life. 14
Menand refers primarily to the intellectual culture that gave birth to pragmatism in the works
of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.
Although Adams was never a pragmatist, he was friends or colleagues with several of them;
Adams and Peirce were born in Boston in 1838 and in 1839, and they attended Harvard
during the same years. The difference with Adams is that more than psychology, philosophy,
mathematics, or other fields commonly associated with pragmatism, he conceives of himself
and the events around him ultimately as the products of history; this is also what makes him
resonate with the historical poets of this study. In the view of William James, however,
Adams was an overly deterministic thinker. On this point Paul Bové distinguishes Adams
from pragmatists like James:
We should say to the pragmatist: What of the forces that propel the emergence of
what is not yet established? That surprise us as Henry was surprised by near
bankruptcy? What of the intellectual who both elementally shares in that driving
force, as its intelligence or agent…and brings its emergence to attention, analyzes it,
shows the people what in fact “they” have made, or, if we prefer, what has been
made? These intellectuals can show—we should always remember Adams’s
commitment to democracy!—which elements of force they can, with proper
intelligence, direct or modify, if not in politics, then in and through culture and art;
and they can warn of which forces cannot be controlled so that fit institutions and
practices can be built to contain or deflect their worst effects. 15
Adams fits Bové’s conception of an intellectual because he is willing to see his education as
comprised of outdated and bootless paradigms, and thus he is better able than the pragmatist
to clear the ground for an encounter with the radically new. Furthermore, in taking to
historical study, Adams confronts rather than ignores another problem that dogs
pragmatism—namely, its emphasis on practice and application of philosophy at the expense
14 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), x.
15 Bové, “Giving Thought to America,” 91.
32

of conceptual systems or structures. As Theodore Adorno has argued, the pragmatist “clings
to the standpoint of those who cannot think beyond tomorrow, beyond the next step,
because they do not know what they will live from tomorrow.” 16 For Adams, however, to
inhabit the present is always a question of where the forces that determine the present have
come from, but more importantly, where those forces are going in the future.
In Adams’ view, history is responsible not only for his education but also for those parts
of his experience that cannot be explained by education. Education is simply his relentless
effort to gain some footing despite being continually knocked down by forces that
undermine any kind of reasoned response. As he states at one point, “That he had to
educate himself all over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old
education, was the only certainty; but how he was to do it… he had not an idea, and no one
to teach him” (E, 243). It is the continued defeat of his education by the emergence of the
new and unheralded, or by what he calls “a rupture in historical sequence!” (E, 340), that
prompts a return to history again and again. He explains, “Historians must undertake to
arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and
effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but
commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag
them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed
themselves required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in
vain to find out what he meant”(E, 383). Adams asks historians (himself in particular) to
justify historical study by more than the accumulation of pure knowledge. He wants to
awaken historians to the underlying assumptions that govern how they construct their
histories. Failure to ask those questions leads to an unreflective practice and perpetuates the
16 Theodore Adorno, Prisms, tran. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 94.
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same “sequences… called stories, or histories.” For Adams, historians are at their worst
when they fail to realize that historical study must continually be revolutionized in order to
recognize and inhabit an elusive present. Adams was aware that the new forces he witnessed
at the beginning of the twentieth century did not come out of nowhere but emerged
historically from “hidden” conduits which his education must seek out: “Where he saw
sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of
measure.…but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one
method, he would try as many methods as science knew”(E, 383).
So he renews historical study, struggling each time, as if from scratch, to uncover a more
dependable sequence between his present and the past. Only from that sequence does he
think his education, and hence his self-understanding, will be responsive to the world around
him. His well-known solution is to take everything that is disorienting about his world, its
fragmentary and disjunctive nature, or what he calls its “multiplicity,” and relate that to some
period of the past which can be characterized by its “unity.” He explains: “History had no
use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation.
Everything must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure…” (E,
378). The historian’s “object,” he says, “is to triangulate from the widest possible base to the
furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon”
(E, 395). The idea is that historical sequence can be triangulated by reaching back into the
past and retracing the course of events that lead to the present. In other words, one end of
the triangulation (or the sequence) always points to himself, and hence the work of the
historian is a form of autobiography. The problem Adams found is that when you start
looking for where you come from, the answers have a way of reaching back further and
further in time: “Education went backward… Education began at the end, or perhaps would
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egin at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step
took it back to the sixteenth”(E, 73). (Here Adams sounds much like Olson when he says he
“had to learn the simplest things / last” (M, 56) and when he proclaims, “backwards I
compel Gloucester” (M, 185).)
For Adams, education eventually went back to the thirteenth century, and the
“triangulation” that resulted is stretched across his two most celebrated works: The Education
of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A
Study in Thirteenth Century Unity. He identifies multiplicity with the “Dynamo” at the Chicago
Exposition, an event that “defied philosophy” (E, 339), and by this he means the philosophy
of his modern education. For Adams, the Dynamo symbolizes the new age of his lifetime, so
new that it overturns everything he knows as a historian: “Between the dynamo in the gallery
of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal
fracture for a historian’s objects” (E, 381). He tries, at first, to explain the Dynamo by a
sequence that relies on “men,” “society,” “thought,” and even “time,” but none of these is
conclusive. Instead he concentrates on “force” (E, 383) as a measure of the sequence that
produces the Dynamo. Remember that for Adams, “History had no use for multiplicity; it
needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything must be
made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure…” (E, 378). The historical
sequence of force becomes meaningful when he connects it back to the Virgin of Chartres in
thirteenth century France:
The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist
might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value.
Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever
felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power,
natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the
track of natural energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex
source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions.
(E, 389)
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The thirteenth century Virgin of Chartres is not a unity in the sense that it is monolithic or
unambiguous. It would be wrong to say that unity lacks complexity. For Adams, the Virgin is
characterized by unity because the culture of medieval France was so profoundly organized
around her. Just as in the thirteenth century the Virgin penetrated the people’s hearts,
coordinated work and power, and structured social relationships, so does the Dynamo for
the modern world. He discovers that the twentieth century which appears so complex and
inexplicable is in fact organized around everything that is associated with the Dynamo, and
this includes the acceleration of scientific change, but more importantly the power of the
finance that makes such scientific projects possible and then puts them on display in
Chicago. It should be recalled that people traveled from across the world to see the
Exposition, as if they were on a religious pilgrimage to a medieval cathedral. It mesmerized
the crowds, exerted the power of a spectacle, despite how few understood what it signified.
Like the Virgin, it holds a kind of “force” over society because of the awe or “faith” that
people have in it. Adams even says that faith is his best way to describe his, as well as
everyone else’s, awestruck reverence for the Dynamo and all it stood for. Perhaps today the
Dynamo would be live television news coverage, the economy, or the internet.
Adams puts in question the education comes down to him and seems to provide the
only stories, or autobiographical possibilities, that he can tell about himself. He comes to
view his education as limited whenever he opens his eyes to the changes occurring around
him, which is to say the forces of modernity, especially as those forces are defined by the
power that they hold over people’s lives. The twentieth century is a time when he thinks that
autobiography can never be written according to the same rules again. He sees
autobiography and history as joint enterprises because he thinks the present is always
changing in a way that, however obscure, is ultimately determined by the past.
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Autobiography, as he comes to see, is empty without being grounded in history. He must
thus look away from the present and back to history in order to occupy his world again. This
shift of attention sets a pattern that we can follow in later poets, even if each differs in how
inheritance is composed. Adams sheds his received but failed inheritance, looks for a history
that has been previously withheld, and then reconstitutes his inheritance accordingly. In the
next section I will address how this pattern is realized by each of the poets in this study.
1.4) Ezra Pound’s “Heritage… Here, Now”
Society is inherited…born you is, of your Mother as you are via
the part played in it, of Your father. The return Up the tree is
as decisive as the part you play Suspended in the genesis, that
you were born. The Tree comes down colored by the airs and
light of the datum. There is a discourse. There is a grammar.
There is a sentence you do have. It happens also to be a motive
of things that you are not, but which you do…You are not free
otherwise than to perceive.
—Charles Olson (CP, 358)
Like Adams, the poets Pound, Olson, and Howe experience the mismatch of inherited
self-understanding with the changing modern world. Each poet claims to have a historical
consciousness, meaning no grounds for self-understanding outside of inheritance, but then
unforeseen circumstances make the received inheritance seem outdated or bootless, and
even harmful should it be maintained. Although each poet adopts different and frequently
competing strategies of historical investigation, they share the same drive to recast or
reconfigure history according to a different inheritance that speaks to the present. The
historical poetry and poetics built on this inheritance provide an autobiographical adventure
that can be perceived in the work and that differs, as I discussed in the introduction, from
readings that marginalize the question of how each poet is implicated in the historical
37

configuration. To reiterate, in assuming that the self is inherited, the historical poetry
becomes in effect a new form of autobiography, even when traditional forms of
autobiography are absent.
The moments when Pound testifies to the failure of inheritance can be heard throughout
his work, but they are often difficult to pick out because we are more accustomed to the
image of him standing on top of inheritance in order to establish the authority of his
enlightened sensibility. But there is an opposing tendency in his writing towards extreme
self-doubt, at times so profound that it echoes Adams’s failure to grasp his relationship to
the world around him. Particularly in Pound’s early poems, a common theme is his
uncertainty about contemporary life. In “On His Own Face in a Glass,” for example, self-
existence is troubled by the many voices that seem to live inside a single speaker:
Oh strange face there in the glass!
O ribald company, O saintly host,
O sorrow-swept my fool,
What answer? O ye myriad
That strive and play and pass,
Jest, challenge, counterlie!
I? I? I?
And ye?
(CE, 34-5)
The poem plays on the feeling of not knowing oneself. A self-reflective act, as might happen
at any time, but as dramatized here by contemplating one’s reflection in the mirror, produces
doubt that any single foundation (“I? I? I?”) underlies selfhood. More fragmentary than
whole, the self appears divisible by a host of others. In this Pound might be taken as ironic
or sincere, or perhaps a bit of both, as if he is mocking those who are self-obsessed to the
point of seeking ontological self-certainty in the bathroom mirror. What the poem does not
provide, however, is any reason, other than by some inborn habit of self-reflection, why a
person would think that he or she is a hodge-podge of conflicting voices. That reason is
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made more apparent in the adjacent poem found in A Lume Spento (1908), which is
appropriately titled “Masks”: “These tales of old disguisings, are they not / Strange myths of
souls that found themselves among / Unwonted folk that spake a hostile tongue…? (CE,
34). In this poem an unchanging or unitary self is vulnerable to “hostile” social conditions,
and the ability to assume “old disguisings” (i.e. to assume diverse roles like the “myriad” in
the first poem) is a defensive or protective gesture.
In distinction, another early poem reveals anxiety that history will grant him only the roles
that have been ordained by the past, hence mocking his dream of becoming a major poet.
“Histrion” (1908) is like the above poem in that it is self-reflective and focuses on the status
of the “I,” but it differs in that the self is depicted as a creature of history. Whereas in the
first poem a mutable “I” is associated with self-reflectivity, and in the second poem
(“Masks”) with defensive or protective gestures, in the following poem, it is associated with a
historical condition:
No man hath dared to write this thing as yet,
And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great
At times pass through us,
And we are melted into them, and are not
Save reflexions of their souls.
Thus am I Dante for a space and am
One Fancois Villon, ballad-lord and thief
Or am such holy ones I may not write,
Lest blasphemy be writ against my name;
This for an instant and the flame is gone.
‘Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere
Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I”
And into this some form projects itself:
Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine;
And as the clear space is not if a form’s
Imposed thereon,
So cease we from all being for the time,
And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on.
(CE, 71)
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Adams formulated his inheritance according to the Virgin and “force”; Pound formulates his
according to the “souls of great men,” “holy names,” and “Masters of the Soul.” These
include Christ and John but also literary antecedents like Dante and Villon. In the poem the
“I,” already set off in quotation marks, is treated as a construct—the “I” not self-sufficient
but a repository or channel for history. The problem for Pound is that the “souls of great
men” infuse the “I” but momentarily, “for an instant and the flame is gone.” The ordinary
world of this “I” is by comparison dark and uninspired. Pound’s “I” must capture the flame
in order to write an unparalleled poem. But in order to rise above any dependence on
momentary flickers of historical greatness, he must internalize that greatness in his own
being. He must transform himself into a glowing “I” that can sustain itself without needing
to harness an older “flame.” This gesture retreats from inheritance insofar as Pound wants to
shake his dependence on literary masters, but it does not fully shake off the burden of
history, because it is only possible to write unparalleled verse by knowing what has come
before. As he says around the same time, “My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients
has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once for all, better than it can ever be
done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still
feel the same emotions as those which launched the thousand ships, it is quite certain that
we come on those feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual
gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into
matter of duration” (LE, 11). This may seem to be more a matter of searching for poetic
technique than for history or inheritance, but again, because Pound sees himself as a product
of the older “flame,” his own self-image is always implicated in the search for poet
predecessors. If Pound can find nothing that remains “to do,” then he is effectively without
an autobiography, without a self-story that can participate in history.
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Pound has made the discovery that autobiography is more often selected than created,
and that the only selections available are those bestowed by the past. Somehow, the person
Pound fashions himself into, or the role he fills in the present, must be founded on earlier
poets. The danger is that knowing more and more about his forerunners means having less
and less of an “I” to call his own, and consequently a diminished contribution that he could
make in comparison with what history had already accomplished. Pound was in a
paradoxical situation; by thirty years of age he wanted to know more about poetry than
anyone else alive, but such knowledge would mean being all the more enmeshed in the past.
Only by his digging and research, by his getting himself further caught up in the past, could
he become autonomous in the present and in effect break from his history,.
Shortly thereafter, in his volume Personae (1909), Pound projects various facets of his
personality into more fully developed speaking roles, of whom all are historical in some way,
including a troubadour, a countess, a crusader, and even a “poor clerk.” That the roles he
assumes are autobiographical is apparent from his later comments: “In the ‘search for
oneself,’ in the search for ‘sincere self-expression,’ one gropes, one finds some seeming
verity. One says, ‘I am’ this, that, or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one
ceases to be that thing… I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off,
as it were, complete masks of the self in each poem.” (GB, 85). But notice that Pound is
skeptical that he can understand himself through “sincere self-expression” or by putting
some representation of himself into words. Rather, he discovers that the words are strange
and resist a realist portrayal of himself: “with the words scarcely uttered once ceases to be
that being.” Like Mallarmé, whose uttered “flower!” is the “flower which is absent from all
41

ouquets,” 17 Pound’s “search for oneself” leads him to the masks of Personae which, however
much he tries to speak them, are never identical with himself. From this point, Pound moves
away from masks into the impersonal work of Imagism (and then Vorticism); “Direct
treatment of the thing” becomes the primary imperative. Words become the center of the
poem: not Pound projecting onto the words but rather the words of the poem projecting
onto the reader. The organizing structure of his poems goes from personae to image—not a
visual image, but rather a verbal arrangement—then to vortex.
Still, however much Pound’s mature work increasingly departs from the use of lyric
personae and moves toward the impersonal modes of Imagism, Vorticism, and the epic
framework of The Cantos, he never completely disposes of an “I” that struggles to understand
its (or his) historical condition. After WWI, his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” echoes this
self-questioning: “Asking to be rid of…/ bewilderment” (P, 197) to understand the “current
exacerbations” (P, 199). But the strategies for self-understanding that he adopts—both
aesthetic, as in his belief that poems should foster an ideogrammic model of language, and
economic, as in his attack on the corruption of governments by “usury”—finally end up
being unable to account for the history of the twentieth century as he actually experiences it.
Nearly throughout his life Pound finds himself “out of key with his time” (P, 185) and
caught in one imbroglio or another that painfully lays open his historical blindness.
In a moment I’ll discuss when Pound felt most in “key with his time” and thought he
was sufficiently “rid of…/ bewilderment” to grasp the intricacies of his time in history, but
first consider late in his career, when he is sent reeling back to a voice with similar
17 See Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1956), 42. The famous paragraph reads: “When I say: ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which
my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music,
essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.”
42

sentiments as his early lyrical personae poems. In the following lines, for example, Pound
situates himself in a position of profound vulnerability, where every detail of his surrounding
denotes another loss brought about by historical change:
as the young lizard extends his leopard spots
along the grass-blade seeking the green midge half an ant-size
and the Serpentine will look just the same
and the gulls be as neat on the pond
and the sunken garden unchanged
and God knows what else is left of our London
my London, your London
and if her green elegance
remains on this side of my rain ditch
puss lizard will lunch on some other T-bone
sunset grand couturier.
(C, 536)
This is the well-known portrait of a besieged Pound in Pisan Cantos. Originally this section
was to feature Pound nearing the end of his epic with the paradisiacal portion of his journey;
it was to be what Adams would have called an education that was not a failure. But the
majority of these cantos were composed when he was held prisoner for a period at an Army
detention camp outside Pisa. The scene is dramatically rendered by the outdoor “cage” in
which he was held for several weeks—which is intermittently mentioned in the cantos—
until health problems prompted his relocation in a medical ward. Luckily it had a typewriter
that allowed him to compose the fragments that later became these cantos.
In the Pisan Cantos Pound revises his relationship to history by revising earlier cantos. In
“Canto I” Pound portrays himself descending into the underworld and listening to the
voices of ghosts such as Elpenor of The Odyssey. As Jean-Michel Rabaté remarks, Pound
shows us that “modernism is systematically ‘haunted’ by voices from the past, [which] shows
in an exemplary way the ineluctability of spectral returns.” 18 But as the European front of
18 Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996), xvi.
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WWII drew to a close, Pound abruptly found his relationship to history turned inside out.
No longer was he the enlightened witness of history, but instead he was the one being
witnessed by everyone else. In Pisan Cantos the role of “ΟΥ ΤΕΣ/ a man on whom the sun
has gone down” (C, 450), falls to Pound himself. His effort to write a modern verse epic
comes to naught: “put me down for temporis acti / ΟΥ ΤΕΣ” (C, 519). By staging himself in
the “cage,” he symbolically joins the “men of no fortune and with a name to come” (C, 534).
He is surrounded by camp prisoners, some of whom are executed, “Till was hung yesterday
/ for murder and rape with trimmings” (C, 450), and he even insinuates that he could be
executed at any moment: “Will I ever see Giudecca again? / or the lights against it…” (C,
552). Other prisoners harass him for the very intellectual strengths that he brought to his
effort: “Hey Snag wots in the bibl’? / wot are the books ov the bible? / Name ‘em, don’t
bullshit ME” (C, 450). Another evocation of “no man” points directly to the cage:
Nor can who has passed a month in the death cells
believe in capital punishment
No man who has passed a month in the death cells
believes in cages for beasts
(C, 550)
The sequence concludes from the vantage of having been in this cage: “If the hoar frost grip
thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent” (C, 560). The self that is circumscribed
in the cage is defeated, tired and uncertain of its existence. Unlike the cocksure cantos of the
nineteen-thirties, the self presented here lacks a solid ground on which to speak
authoritatively of history. This resonates with Adams in that each writer is tossed into a
predicament for which he feels wholly unprepared and totally at its mercy. The question is
how one reads the following passage. Is Pound simply taking his punishment as
confirmation that he was right along? Or does his position in “the tent” have a humbling
44

effect? The question is whether the “new subtlety” leads him to stick by his guns, or whether
it constitutes a wholesale revision of his earlier commitments:
there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent
whether of spirit or hypostasis,
but what the blindfold hides
or at carnival
(C, 540)
It seems to me that the “new subtlety of eyes” signals the shedding of yet another
autobiographical layer, one that no longer suites his relationship with the world around him.
“Canto 81” continues: “What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross / What thou
lov’st well shall not be reft from thee / What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage / Whose
world, or mine or theirs / or is it of none?” (C, 540-541). The equation of “What thou
lov’st” and “thy true heritage” is repeated a few lines later to emphasize this point. James E.
Miller has suggested that The Pisan Cantos, especially here in “Canto 81” and in the next
canto, “appear to move toward an extraordinary understanding or illumination” that he calls
Pound’s “vision of life” and “vision of death.” He explains,
The whole of the [Pisan Cantos] seems to weave the many previous themes of the
Cantos together and bring them to some kind of resolution (or unresolved balance)
in these climactic insights. But the image that emerges finally is not of Pound
mercilessly exposing civilization, or of Pound triumphantly revealing the energies of
history, but of Pound painfully sifting through the fragments of his life searching for
what remained, what meaning they might reveal, what finally he could hesitatingly
assert. There is some swagger here, but it tends to get lost in the inundation of
memory. 19
I think Miller is right insofar as he describes the movement in the poem towards Pound’s
individual plight, but I think that the “extraordinary understanding and illumination” should
be more qualified. Like Adams, Pound’s insight is that he does not grasp his relation to the
world around him. Previously Pound believed he had grasped the intricacies of his
45

inheritance, but the experiences at Pisa “broke his historical neck,” to borrow from the
phrase from Adams. It is important to see that the repeated line, “What thou lov’st well is
thy true heritage,” is a tautology. The object of his love is never specified, nor is his true
heritage. Feeling overburdened, he discards a weight that cannot be carried (the “dross”), but
once again, that weight remains as ambiguous as the true heritage. Here in this late canto at
what should be the climactic moment of his epic, the lines offer only a tautology—which
reduces his epic to an empty affirmation that cancels itself out. Many other critics have read
this passage in a very positive light, as a hard-won affirmation despite the surrounding
despair. In my view, however, Pound’s ambition for and his confidence in a poem
“containing history” disintegrates at this moment. What remains is his recognition of the
failure to achieve that poem. Perhaps one reason these lines are so repetitive is because
Pound genuinely does not know what will happen next. Repetition is a form of waiting,
standing in place before the moment of change, when he does not have an inkling of what is
next on the horizon..
As Pound waits, refusing to reaffirm his earlier commitments or to spell out the “new
subtlety,” he withdraws into the fragile self that we recognize from the earlier lyric personae
poems. He ends “Canto 81” by appealing to a “flame” much like we saw in “Histrion,” in
which the “flame” of historical figures give shape to his “I”:
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.
(C, 542)
19 James E. Miller, The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic (Chicago: U
Chicago P, 1979), 83.
46

Pound has not abandoned his essential dichotomy of active-versus-passive practices that are
measured by whether they advance or corrupt a culture during a specified historical period.
Reclaiming a “live tradition” will establish the necessary connection of himself to his world,
similar to what we saw in Adams’s historical work. While Pound recognizes that his advance
has been blocked by a historical predicament that gets the better of him, he stubbornly
stands behind his effort (“error is all in the not done”). He can affirm diffidence only, and
hope that it won’t falter on the next try. In yet another affinity with Adams, Pound’s
“diffidence that faltered” echoes Adams’s educational failure.
1.5) Charles Olson’s “Antecedent Predecessions”
Olson is similar to Adams in his effort to keep up with the changes wrought by the
twentieth century by investigating their historical causes. He is similar to Adams too in that
he suffered repeated failures and had to redirect his inquiries time and again. During the
early 40s he devoted himself to domestic politics, working within political institutions,
including a job in the Office of War Information during the Second World War and a stint
on Roosevelt’s reelection staff. As Sherman Paul writes in his masterful study, “We must not
forget the war in any calculation of Olson’s work. His choice of the vocation of poet is
clearly a response to it even though the decision was delayed by other anxieties and
uncertainties…. Olson wrote his first poems in 1940, at the age of thirty, and did not decide
for poetry until 1945, when, having gladly served in political offices under Roosevelt, he
turned in disgust from Truman’s politics…” 20 Olson believed he could influence events,
partly through his conviction that he would be appointed Postmaster General once
47

Roosevelt was reelected. After being disillusioned in these efforts, he then devoted himself
full-time to being a poet. Olson’s turn from domestic politics to poetry, and more
specifically to historical poetry, parallels the turn made by Adams when he decided not to
embark on a life of political service and chose instead a literary vocation.
But more the personal stakes in Olson’s turn to historical poetry are evident in the three
autobiographical stories of The Post Office, a short volume that constitutes his most
conventional foray into narrative prose. Written in 1948, just as his poetry was first
appearing in journals and magazines, these stories constitute, according to the subtitle, “A
Memoir of His Father.” They deal with a few memories from his boyhood, such as ice
fishing with his father and a tailor who was “closer to older roots” (PO, 19) and thus left a
strong impression on Olson. The title story, the longest and most crafted of the three, is
about how he inherited his extraordinary interest in American history from his father. This
inheritance came as a mixed blessing, however, for at the time his father was caught up in a
struggle against his superiors at the Post Office. These two themes of the story are
interwoven, so that it begins with Olson and his father attending the 300th anniversary of
the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth, but on a holiday that his father took without permission.
His father’s holiday had first been granted but then rescinded at last minute, as Olson says,
“to get back” (PO, 32) at his father who had been actively trying to mobilize the postal
unions. “Postal workers do not have the right to strike,” Olson explains: “On top of that
their organizations have tended, because their officers must wheedle and act mostly as
lobbyists on Congress, to continue the same men in national office for unhealthy periods of
time. The upshot is, the rank and file are about as spiritless a group of workers as you can
20 See Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry, 2. See also the first
chapter of Robert von Hallberg’s Charles Olson: A Scholar’s Art.
48

imagine and their officers have more in common with the Post Office officials than with the
men they represent” (PO, 29). His father was resisting this situation, and he was repaid for
his efforts with a series of punishments, the worst being that for the rest of his career he was
removed from the mail route that had been his lifeblood. In effect, he was blackballed, and
in the end he was “only 52 when he died.”
Olson firmly believes that his father’s actions were heroic: “He was the resistance of a
man, my father, the cry of the individual that he be allowed the time and conditions to do his
work, as they used to say, right” (PO, 46). But Olson knows, too, that his father’s resistance
was destined to fail because he did not grasp the changes that were occurring in the U.S. In
response, Olson wants to locate his struggle on another level than his father could
understand. Had his “gravely wounded” father understood things differently, explains
Olson, then he would see “his struggle outside both Sweden and America, as part of this
ambiguous battle all human society is now, for good or evil, engaged in” (PO, 28-29). By a
shift in perspective, his father’s apparent defeat becomes the ground on which a new effort
can begin; Olson redefines human agency based on a collective measure of action and a
global-historical scale. In a revealing passage, he says he spent the last years of his father’s
life trying to show him this new perspective: “I argued that, if he were to pitch his energies
true, he needed to free himself from the narrow area of recrimination into which the enemy
had maneuvered him” (PO, 29).
His early poem “The K” demonstrates how this global-historical self might be
understood. “Take, then, my answer: / there is a tide in a man,” writes Olson, imaging this
self positioned on planetary scale, a self which is actually himself, imagined as the “tumescent
I” (CP, 14). Given that his earlier ambitions in official politics have collapsed, Olson
displaces agency to another measure: “Our attention is simpler” (CP, 14). He acknowledges
49

that he is his father’s son, and thus bound within inheritance, but he realizes, too, that such
inheritance is no longer efficacious in directing action. “I shall not see the year 2000 / unless
I stem straight from my father’s mother / break the fatal male span” (CP, 14). Will Olson,
given his limitations, but faced with situations that demand response, “sing… one unheard
liturgy” (CP, 14)? Olson answers in the negative, that his business is not simply to make it
new: “Assume I shall not / Is it of such concern when what shall be / already is within the
moonward sea?” (CP, 14). For Olson, then, what matters is not what is new, but what is
“already” there.
In “The Resistance,” Olson explains that the twentieth century has reduced human
beings to raw materials. People become on bare remnants, to such an extreme degree, he
explains, that the sole remaining site from which to launch a resistance is the body: “When
man is reduced to so much fat for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale,
he has to begin again, one answer, one point of resistance only to such fragmentation, one
organized ground” (CP, 174). An apparent retreat must in effect become the starting point
for a new form of resistance: “It is his own physiology he is forced to arrive at… It is his
body that is his answer, his body intact and fought for, the absolute of his organism in its
simplest terms, this structure evolved by nature, repeated in each act of birth, the animal
man… This organism now our citadel never was cathedral, draughty tenement of soul was
what it is: ground, stone, wall, cannon, tower. In this intricate structure we are based, now
more certainly than ever (besieged, overthrown), for its power is bone muscle nerve blood
brain a man, its fragile mortal force its old eternity, resistance” (CP, 174). The
unmistakable context for Olson’s comments is the Holocaust, notably in his allusion to the
reduction of human beings “to so much fat for soap”; twentieth century genocides are never
far from Olson’s concerns, as is evident in “La Préface.” But we should not lose sight of the
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fact that the “body intact and fought for” resonates strongly with his father, who “fought
back from the start” (PO, 53), even as his body withered. In “The Post Office” some of the
details that stand out the most concern his father becoming weaker and eventually dying
fourteen years after his demerits began: “It was a sudden death, cerebral hemorrhage, the
first shock on Thursday paralyzing the right side, the second one, Saturday morning, getting
his heart” (PO, 52). In many ways his father’s resistance exemplifies the kind of “body as the
last stand” that Olson’s essay calls for: “It was the trouble that brought it on. Shortly after
[his father’s death], I discovered that it was the very year, 1920, that had begun the annual
checkups with the doctor which were dramatized for me by the urine bottle” (PO, 53). For
Olson, his first vision of a worldly struggle is represented in the picture of his father’s
deteriorating body.
While “The Resistance” is clearly framed by broader events of twentieth century history,
there is an enduring personal significance that lurks in the background of Olson’s argument.
The issue is elaborated in “The Present is the Prologue,” written in 1952, which attempts to
summarize his poetics in one concise statement. This incredibly candid piece suggests a
degree of autobiography of which he himself had been unaware in his previous writing:
“what strikes me (and I now suspect has much more governed the nature of my seven years
of writing than I knew) is, the depth to which the parents who live in us (they are not the
same) are our definers” (AP, 39). Who Olson is, what he inherits, does not spring from
inside him but comes down to him from the past. Olson’s poetics boil down to his
injunction that “the work of each of us is to find out the true lineaments of ourselves by
facing up to the primal features of these founders who lie buried in us…” (AP, 39). A
personal meaning governs the creation of a historical poetics, a relationship which cannot be
underestimated in reading Maximus. “There are only two live pasts—,” writes Olson, “your
51

own (and that hugely included your parents), and one other which we don’t yet have a
vocabulary for, because the West has stayed so ignorant, and the East has lived off the old
fat too long. I can invoke it by saying, the mythological, but it’s too soft. What I mean is that
foundling which lies as surely in the phenomenological ‘raging apart’ as these queer parents
rage in us” (AP, 40). The first of these pasts, Olson’s self and his parents, can be recognized
as the past that Olson carries in his own memory, which in another context would be a
standard autobiography. The second of these pasts is the one that develops a few years later
into his conception of a “Human Universe.” The latter has perhaps received the most
attention because the creative drive of his poetry and writings is towards uncovering this
“foundling” defined by an individual active in an environment. While Olson’s reputation is
based largely on this latter, mythological side of his thought, we should not so quickly put
aside the other aspect that he wants to explore, the immediate history of his own parents,
with whom he is “still, at 40, hugely engaged… in fact more engaged with them now than
with that [he] spend so much time on in [his] 20s and 30s…” (AP, 39). He adds, fusing
autobiography and history into the same horizon: “I have spent most of my life seeking out
and putting down the ‘Laws’ of these two pasts, to the degree that I am permitted to see
them…simply because I have found them in the present, my own and yours, and believe
that they are the sign of a delightful new civilization of man ahead” (AP, 40).
“The Present is the Prologue” has been a problematic text for some readers. George
Butterick suggests that Olson recanted it years later at Berkeley for being too imitative of
Pound. 21 But it seems to me that here, in his first years of setting forth with The Maximus
Poems, the text yields a special hermeneutic value for establishing the personal stakes of a
21 Butterick suggests that this text is “Probably the ‘flagrant autobiography of myself… imitating Ezra
Pound’ which Olson refers to at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, apparently written the night of the 1952
presidential election” (AP, 90).
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historical poetics. In this respect, the text charts two sides of his thought, history and self,
that will continue to receive attention throughout his career. In any case it lends a
perspective on a line such as the following, underscoring the autobiographical and historical:
“That a man’s life/ (his, anyway) is what there is/ that tradition is// at least is where I find
it/ how I got to/ what I say” (MP, 48). Olson advises Ed Dorn in his “Bibliography” that he
must recognize the “intimate connection between person-as-continuation-of-millinnia-by-
acts-of-imagionation-as-arising-from-fierce-penetration-of-all-past-persons, places, things
and actions as data” (AP, 7). Olson wants to know the make-up of a person as a
“continuation-of-millennia,” and he contrasts this recognition to the usual way we picture
the past, with an “unhappy consciousness of ‘history’—and which begets ‘culture’ (art as
taste, inherited forms, Mr Eliot—indeed Mister Pound as he preaches the ‘grrrate bookes’)”
(AP, 7).
Olson’s struggle, from Call Me Ishmael through The Maximus Poems, is to reimagine the
self, “to open/../the full inherited file/ of history” (M, 367), and this incrementally occurs
from the mold called “Pacific Man” in the former to Bigmans and then Maximus in the
latter. In “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld],” which was written in 1954, during his
time at Black Mountaineer, but which was not published until the second volume of
Maximus, Olson draws together autobiography and history via an intersection that he will
years later recognize as “topos” (Muth II, 33-34). Here, the intersection is manifested in his
realization, “I come back to the geography of it” (M 184). The spatial coordinates are
bounded on all sides: “To the left the land fell to the city, / to the right, it fell to the sea”
(ibid), and bounded as well, it would seem, by his own personal memory:
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall engineers…
53
(ibid)

Going back to the kernel of this “first memory,” Olson meditates the inheritance that
determined who he became: “It is the imposing / of all those antecedent predecessions, the
precessions // of me, the generation of those facts / which are my words, it is coming //
from all that I no longer am, yet am,/ the slow westward motion of // more than I am //
There is no strict personal order / for my inheritance.” (M, 184). This in fact dissolves the
“personal order” of his “first memory” and opens himself up to the “antecedent
predecesssions” that are responsible for his coming into being. In a similar vein, another
poem Olson stages a scene where the “dead” are asleep inside him and he must awaken
them to stimulate his awareness of the inheritance to which his present day life is subject:
As the dead prey upon us,
they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of my being! 22
Incidentally, these lines come from a poem occasioned by Olson’s car breaking down.
Having just discussed Adams’s historical neck breaking, it’s hard for me not to draw a
comparison, however distant the two might seem. Some event jolts each out of the everyday
and gives rise to thoughts about what historical forces are affecting them, even when such
forces are acting without anyone being aware of them. As Olson says, “my memory is/ the
history of time” (M, 256).
22 Charles Olson, Selected Poems. Ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: U California P, 1997), 72.
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1.6) Susan Howe’s “Historical Imagination”
Howe frequently features individuals who are faced with extreme circumstances that
strip them of habitual responses and leave them unguarded for whatever violence is
threatening. These individuals are often figures from American history, such as Mary
Rowlandson or Hope Atherton, but Howe has twice written about being personally caught
in such circumstances. “THERE ARE NOT LEAVES ENOUGH TO CROWN TO
COVER TO CROWN TO COVER” (1990) and “Frame Structures” (1995) treat the same
incident, through from different angles, about her father enlisting shortly after Pearl Harbor
was attacked. In “NOT ENOUGH LEAVES,” she writes, “Our law-professor father, a man
of pure-principles, quickly included violence in his principles, put on a soldier suit and
disappeared with others into the thick of the threat to the east called West” (ET, 10). “Frame
Structures” begins immediately from this point but adds a “treasured memory of
togetherness”: “On Sunday December 7, 1941, I went with my father to the zoo in Delaware
Park even now so many years after there is always for me the fact of this treasured memory
of togetherness before he enlisted in the army and went away to Europe” (FS, 3). The fact
that each piece prefaces a collection of earlier work, first in the short preface to The Europe of
Trusts and second in the long introductory essay to Frame Structures, suggests that the incident
holds a special interpretive value for “framing” her poetics in general.
As Howe is at pains to convey, her father enlisted and left the rest of her family alone
during this turbulent period of history. “I was never sure what my father was doing in the
army,” she writes, “Then I was never sure of anything what with his rushing away our
changing cities and World War banging at the windows the boundless phenomena of
madness” (FS, 6). In a sense her inheritance is poised between two countervailing forces: on
55

the one side is a world war and on the other side is her family. The family is her most
immediate inheritance because it promises shelter and security and a means of understanding
the world. But the war is also her inheritance because the war takes her father away and
determines her earliest formative memories: “For me there was no silence before armies.” So
Howe’s autobiography is not confined to a strictly familial inheritance but encompasses (or
is encompassed by) the war as well. Autobiography and history are not independent of one
another because autobiography (family) can be threatened by history (war)—just as no doubt
the waging of war would be impossible without fathers who were so ready to enlist:
“American fathers marched off into the hot Chronicle of global struggle but mothers were
left…” (ET, 10). The intertwining of the personal and the global is apparent down to her
very syntax which links events that might normally be thought of as separate and
autonomous: “In Buffalo New York, where we lived at first, we seemed to be safe. We were
there when my sister was born and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor” (ET, 10). Howe’s
inheritance includes family and war. As she says in “NOT ENOUGH LEAVES,” “This is
my historical consciousness. I have no choice in it. In my poetry, time and time again,
questions of assigning the cause of history dictate the sound of what is thought” (ET, 13).
This statement makes an interesting argument that autobiography can no longer be confined
to family or private life and cannot ignore (however unintentionally) the course of world
events and the lives of others beyond its immediate horizon. According to a “historical
consciousness,” the horizons of history and autobiography are identical; as Howe says there
is “no choice in it.” Just as Adams breaks his “historical neck” because of the Civil War and
the forces which are unleashed on U.S. society, Howe finds her “historical consciousness”
violently wrested from her family by the world war and its uncertain outcome.
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It should not be surprising if this story of youth wracked by the reality of life starts to
sound like a romantic narrative, for because both Adams and Howe describe the loss of
innocence in the face of events for which they are completely unprepared. For Adams, the
education that promised to support him is broken as he matures. Howe generally avoids
romanticizing her youth, except for one interesting moment in the aforementioned
autobiographical scene with her father. This can be found in the “Frame Structures” version,
but it’s omitted from the “NOT ENOUGH LEAVES” version. Howe describes the zoo
trip with her father as a “treasured memory of togetherness before he enlisted in the army
and went away to Europe” (FS, 3). The other version makes no reference to a lost state of
tranquility. On the contrary, it resolutely declares, “For me there was no silence before
armies” (ET, 9), and thus posits violence as a formative condition. So which is it? How are
we to reconcile a “treasured memory of togetherness” and “no silence before armies”? It’s
possible that Howe provides a brief glimpse of tranquility in the first version when she says
her “law-professor father, a man of pure principles, quickly included violence in his
principles, put on a soldier suit and disappeared with the others into the thick of the threat
to the east called West” (ET, 10). So her father’s “pure principles” in fact precede the
experience of “no silence before armies,” and they hence provide a kind of tranquility before
violence. But this does not clarify the matter because her father so “quickly included
violence in his principles” that the whole basis of such tranquility is thrown into question.
We are led to conclude that what seems like tranquility is never in fact tranquil. It is the armies
that always come first. Yet because the second (and more recent) version insists on calling
the scene a “treasured memory of togetherness,” the implication is that moments of
tranquility are highly desirable, even if they are self-deceptive.
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I think that critics miss the point when they argue that these two pieces establish an
autobiographical subject “behind” her poems. Eric Murphy Selinger thinks that in “NOT
ENOUGH LEAVES,” “Howe sets her own work in a loosely autobiographical framework”
through an intentional “concealment and exposure, poetic self-fashioning and shameful,
biographical nakedness.” 23 Nicky Marsh thinks that in “Frame Structures,” Howe “appears
to construct an authorial persona whose absenteeism was one of the confounding
characteristics of much of her earlier work.” 24 In my view, however, what the pieces establish
is that an autobiographical self cannot be assumed at the outset because history will not
allow it. For Howe’s “historical consciousness,” autobiography must be divested of the self
that no longer “works” in new and unprecedented historical circumstances. Her father
enlisted and her family felt first-hand the violence and uncertainty of war, so her
autobiography could no longer rely on the “ego” or the “subjectivity” associated with
traditional family-based autobiography. Like Adams, Howe writes an autobiography about
not having an autobiography. This is consistent with Howe saying at the end of the zoo
scenario, “Historical imagination gathers in the missing”(FS, 3). What is “missing” is the
support of an inherited ego that would act as a shield or buffer when faced with impending
catastrophe. The inherited ego is in effect dead.
Upon closer inspection, we see a key difference between the two versions of her story.
Whereas the first version suggests that “historical consciousness” dictates her investigation
of history, the second version suggests that “historical imagination” is necessary because no
received history and thus no inherited self (or ego) is viable. What’s missing is a treasured
memory, a “Daddy held tightly to my hand” (FS, 3), or any other inheritance that might
23 Eric Murphy Selinger, “My Susan Howe,” Parnassus 20:1 (1995): 372.
24 Nicky Marsh, “‘Out of My Texts I Am Not What I Play”: Politics and Self in the Poetry of Susan
Howe,” College Literature 24:3 (1997): 125.
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guide and protect her. She is surrounded by others referred to as the “prepared people,” with
“everyone talking of war in those days” (FS, 3). But suddenly she finds herself in a profound
uncertainty which is connoted by what is “missing.” What’s missing in “Frame Structures” is
in fact the “historical consciousness” that was cited in “NOT ENOUGH LEAVES.” I think
this can be explained by saying that her historical consciousness is preserved or sustained by
her historical imagination. Historical imagination must assume the forefront when historical
consciousness encounters the void of the “missing.” This leads to an interesting conclusion:
Howe’s autobiographical self is constituted by a historical consciousness that lacks a viable
history out of which to write itself, and it remains the task of historical imagination to
negotiate this lack.
Thus far I have focused on the autobiography of writers who sense the failure of
education—of being behind the times or obsolete—and hence feel unable to face the
turmoil of the twentieth century without a complete overhaul of inheritance. I want to close
this chapter with a discussion of the moments when Pound, by contrast, felt the most
confident in grasping his historical situation. During much of his career Pound assured
himself (and his readers) that he knew exactly what he was talking about in his views on
history. The reason that autobiography is relevant is because he cites his personal authority
in making historical arguments. Even as early as “The Serious Artist” (1913), he falls back on
the personal credentials that a critic brings to the table: “I have been challenged on my use
of the phrase ‘great art’ in an earlier article. It is about as useless to search for a definition of
‘great art’ as it is to search for a scientific definition of life. One knows fairly well what one
means. One means something more or less proportionate to one’s experience. One means
something quite different at different periods of one’s life…It is for some such reason that
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all criticism should be professedly personal criticism. In the end the critic can only say ‘I like
it,’ or ‘I am moved,’ or something of that sort. When he has shown us himself we are able to
understand him” (LE, 55-56). The last part tells us that while criticism is a matter of relative
judgments, the position of the critic is an absolute factor in any evaluation. This is not an
appeal to personal authority as such, but rather a view that authority must be proven by a
critic by showing his or her credentials. Likewise, in “Patria Mia” (1912/1913), Pound
stipulates the need to know the individual person of the artist: “With the real artist there is
always a residue, there is always something in the man which does not get into his work.
There is always some reason why the man is always more worth knowing than his books are.
In the long run nothing else counts. In reading the true artist’s work in bulk one is always
vaguely aware of this residue, but it is precisely the sort of man who has it in him, that is
shunted out of commercialized publication” (EPSP, 111). His view that we must know the
position of the critic or artist is most pronounced when he claims to possess an exclusive
authority because of his family’s American roots—a point that caught Williams’s attention
before that of anyone else:
And America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about the place?
Your père only penetrated the edge, and you’ve never been west of the Upper Darby,
or the Maunchunk switchback…. Would [H.D.], with the swirl of the prairie wind in
her underwear, or the Virile Sandburg recognize you, an effete easterner as a REAL
American? INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!… You have the naïve credulity of a Co. Clare
emigrant. But I (der grosse Ich) have the virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood, for
nearly three centuries. 25
This quotation (from a letter excerpted in the prologue to Williams’s Kora In Hell) features
Pound bombastically touting his American roots in contrast to the more recent arrival of
Williams’s family, namely his English father and his Puerto Rican mother. However facetious
Pound might be, the message is clear: his three centuries worth of American heritage is
25 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1971), 11.
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supposed to give him a far superior perspective on matters, especially if the subject is
American history.
Pound treats the issue more fully in his specifically autobiographical work,
“Indiscretions, or Une Revue de Deux Mondes” (1923), which is a long meditation on his family
and American heritage. Written as a “fragment” of a larger unfinished work, it was intended
as Pound says to demonstrate “the state of prose after Ulysses, or the possibility of a return
to normal writing” (PD, 51), and he adds, to be a foil to Williams’s The Great American Novel.
Although it has received less attention than his other prose works, partly because it’s not
included in any of his major collections and partly because it does not deal extensively with
poetry or aesthetics (as for example is the case with Gaudier-Brzeska), it merits our attention
because it provides an indicator of how Pound thought he had been influenced by history. It
is a statement of both his personal limitations as well as his strengths. It also provides a
framework for seeing a personal dimension in his other historical projects, which tend to be
less overtly autobiographical, such as The Cantos. That said, any key to unlocking the
autobiography in Pound’s work that we might take from “Indiscretions” is complicated by
the irony that characterizes his tone throughout it. Pound embellishes most of his childhood
stories, recounts an array of zany characters in his family, and recites family legends with a
flamboyant style that is clearly meant to be comic. He refers to himself in the third person as
“the infant Gargantua,” as if to suggest a tongue-in-cheek, Rabelaisian attitude to the piece.
Dispersed throughout are stories replete with local-flavor, such as one about an elephant
that escapes from the circus and “the cowboys out after it, letting off their six-shooters into
its rear” (PD, 39). Still, however comedic the results are, it should be recognized that such
details as the cowboys are designed to establish Pound’s credentials as a rugged American.
The family stories associate Pound with a first-hand experience in American culture,
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investing him with an authority that would be prohibited to an “outsider.” Furthermore,
Pound laces his work with a series of racist comments that are obviously not ironic but meant
to further establish his familiarity with American culture. For example he says, “The ‘race-
problem’ begins where personal friendliness ceases” (PD, 30), and he then spends two pages
supporting his claim, even imitating stereotyped voices as if to prove his familiarity with such
so-called “friendliness.” In fact, Pound’s reputation is probably stronger because he rarely
adopts this straightforward autobiographical mode; the personal standpoint for his abusive
language in “Indiscretions” comes off as markedly more callous than does the use of such
language in a “poetic” or nondiscursive form such as The Cantos. There is more ambiguity in
the latter, and a casual reading will not always reveal, for example, the unrelenting anti-
Semitism that continues even in the later Cantos.
Pound starts off wary that autobiography can adequately capture the history that informs
it. “It is one thing to feel that one could write the whole social history of the United States
from one’s family annals,” he writes, “and vastly another to embark on any such Balzacian
and voluminous endeavor” (PD, 6). He admires but ultimately distrusts the premise of the
bildungsroman that the life of an individual could be an allegory for a nation or people.
Instead, he inverts Balzac’s “human comedy” and marshals the history of the U.S. to write
his family annals. This leaves the weight of history on the shoulders of each member of his
family, who become products or symptoms of historical forces. As Pound says of a
grandmother who lived in Montana, “From her presumably I derive my respect for the
human being as an individual, my dislike of herding, and of the encroachment of one
personality upon another in the sty of the family” (PD, 11). Notice too that his link to
Montana associates him with the farthest reaches of the Western frontier. The logic of his
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stories is historical determinism. Pound argues that everything in life is inherited, or almost
everything:
We are all, in the words of Æsop, descended from Jove, and if all out ancestors
are an influence, one can only suppose that in their geometric progression from
two to sixty-four and thence on to egregious numbers and remoteness, the exact
bearing of a given and deceased x n upon a given and living x m is subject for the
sentimental romanticist. Or perhaps it may be held that the actions of one’s
ancestors, especially if recited to one in childhood, tend to influence one’s
character and materially to exhaust one’s interest in a given subject or subjects.
(PD, 7)
Pound’s mode of writing is like a conversation with many antagonistic voices flying at him at
once, so he anticipates an unsympathetic reader who objects that his reminiscence is no
more than that of a “romantic sentimentalist.” Pound is more than willing to claim that a
child is the product of its total surroundings, and the sole exception allowed for himself is
that he became bored by those surroundings. He believes that being overexposed to a
culture negates how much a child absorbs; the child (or a child like Pound) becomes bored
with that culture and hence achieves a degree of critical reflectivity, perhaps the kind that
leads one to become an expatriate poet.
Here Pound slips in a theory of historical agency that uniquely applies to him. He
explains that unlike others he can maintain a safe distance from opinions that were passively
absorbed in youth: “I might reasonably say that I received personal and confidential reports
on these matters [American politics as discussed by his family] at a very early age and that my
interest had suffered etiolation.” (PD, 7). From an older vantage point, Pound looks back
and says, “A certain amount of bait is swallowed by all of us; familiar consciousness or even
elderly garrulity may prevent one from swallowing bait which had already been taken by
one’s immediate forebears” (PD, 7). The apology (for swallowing bait) lets Pound do two
things simultaneously: he can first lay claim to his American inheritance, but he can also say
that he is able to resist that inheritance. “Etiolated (ref. two paragraphs higher), that is, to the
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extent that one had no intention of allowing these things to obtrude upon one’s own future
action, even though one may in the safety of twenty years’ lapse, and from the security of the
Albergo Pilsen-Manin… admit their value as literary capital—in part” (PD, 7). From the
standpoint of his adult life in Europe, Pound tries to convince the reader that he has
sublimated the limitations of his youth, but also transformed them into a literary advantage.
He portrays himself as a person both with and without a history. Whereas another person is
locked in his or her inherited biases, Pound suggests that he can enjoy multiple perspectives:
“The Italian ‘Così son io,’ is a priceless heritage from the renaissance, but it is egocentric and
possibly inferior to my grandmother’s recognition of the demarcation and rights of
personality” (PD, 12). Only Pound enjoys the wisdom of the Italian Renaissance and his
grandmother. He is able to exult in being an American while at the same time exult in the
opposite position of not being American. Pound has what might be called a paradoxical
Americanness. His allusion to the “value as literary capital” of his early experiences dispels
any misconception that his impossible Americanness is confined strictly to his private life
and does not also include his literary creations. 26
In sum, “Indiscretions” follows two interconnected trajectories in accounting for
Pound’s relation to history. On the one hand, he claims to inherit a privileged American
background, but on the other, he claims to have autonomy from that background. To give
one more example, Pound begins by confessing that he inherited his politics at an early age.
“It comes over me… how much they must have talked politics,” he recalls, adding “that a
child of six should lift up its miniature rockingchair and hurl it across the room in
displeasure at the result of a national election can only have been due to something ‘in the
26 An earlier poem emphasizes less the private life than literary capital, and not that that “capital” is
reinforced by his allusion to contracts and trade: “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman— / I have detested
you long enough… / We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us.” (P, 90).
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air’; to some preoccupation of its elders, and not to its own personal and rational deductions
regarding the chief magistracy of the Virginian Republic” (PD, 32). Then he adds, “I merely
feel that in the years before I remember anything there must have been infinite discussion of
‘Demys’ and ‘G.O.P.’”(PD, 33). But then, insisting on the contrary, Pound does not
represent himself as the All-American, born with all the advantages and disadvantages of a
culture that he could never abdicate. Against an absolute or fixed inheritance, Pound says,
“It cannot, according to Dante, be settled wholly upon factors of heredity, and the manners
that ‘makyth’ a man in one time or place would certainly unmake him in other” (PD, 23). We
should observe that Pound’s knowledge of Dante’s philosophy actually performs the
distance that he claims from his American roots. Although Dante would certainly be a
household name even in the U.S., this specific knowledge of Dante (exhibited in Pound’s
quotable memory) is something that he would possess because of his exclusive education. By
contrast, Adams would say that the manners that “makyth” him (his failed education) are
obsolete in the twentieth century, and so he sets out in search of a new inheritance for a new
age.
Jumping ahead to consider a more controversial period in his career, Pound can once
more be found correlating his life in the present with his American inheritance when he
justifies his assertions in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1933/1935):
The heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren
is HERE, NOW in the Italian Peninsula at the beginning of fascist second decinnio,
not Massachusetts or Delaware.
To understand this we must have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the first
fifty years of United States history AND some first-hand knowledge of Italy 1922-33
or 1915-33, or still better some knowledge of 160 years of American democracy and
of Italy for as long as you like.
(JM, 12)
The historical context of these remarks, Italy 1933, should not distract from the possibility
of reading an autobiographical dimension as informing them. Pound assumes authority
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through his unique combination of an American inheritance and his “first-hand” witnessing
(and support) of Italian fascism during Mussolini’s rise. The title Jefferson and/or Mussolini
frames the intersection of autobiography and history along an axis that connects Jefferson
and Mussolini (the “heritage… is HERE, NOW”). This axis runs straight through Pound
himself. We might even suppose that the “and/or” conjunction of the title stands for Pound
himself. He alone stands between Jefferson and Mussolini, joins them, and alone is capable
(in his view) of assimilating the merits of each political model.
I’ve closed this chapter with Pound because whereas some of his writings correspond to
the pattern of a failed autobiography that must rethink inheritance, as for example “On His
Own Face In A Glass,” he is a foil to the pattern in the majority of his writing. Unlike
Adams, who was never fully certain of what the historical forces of his lifetime would yield,
Pound became confident about his knowledge of history for long stretches of his career. For
Adams, education was an ongoing project. He could never complete his autobiography; he
could only establish the need to continually negotiate what history had in store. The same
pattern is imprinted on the work of Olson and Howe, who testify to the failure of education
and then spend the rest of their careers rethinking inheritance—more of which will be seen
in the rest of this study. Pound, on the contrary, begins in a world of hesitancy and
uncertainty much like Adams, but departs for more stable ground when he sets out to write
a poem including history. In such writing his autobiography is not presented as a failure but
as a resounding success, the source, even, of his historical authority. It was only when that
ambition to write a poem including history eventually failed him that he ended up back
where he started, with a voice of persistent uncertainty, that began in the Pisan Cantos and
remained for the rest of his writing life.
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CHAPTER 2. SUSAN HOWE IN THE 1970S
2.1) “The End of Art”
In the end is my beginning.
—Susan Howe, “The End of Art” (1975)
The seeds of Howe’s autobiographical inquiry can be found in a number of critical
pieces that she wrote in the middle of the 1970s, after several years as a painter and when
she was first turning her creative energy to poetry. A case in point is her essay, “The End of
Art,” which appeared in The Archives of American Art Journal around the same time that
Maureen Owen published Howe’s first volume of poetry, Hinge Picture (1974). The essay
focuses on both art and poetry. Her main subjects are Ad Reinhardt, Ian Hamilton Finlay,
and Robert Lax, and she touches briefly on Eugene Gomringer, Kasimir Malevich, and
Thomas Merton. John Palattella, one of the only critics to even notice the essay, is right in
describing it as “Howe’s attempt to begin mapping a genealogy of her aesthetic.” 1 The essay,
along with a second and shorter piece on Reinhardt from a year later, demonstrates Howe in
the first steps of exploring her inheritance. We see that this exploration is highly personal
when she says in the final paragraph, “In the end is my beginning”; for an essay with the
commanding title, “The End of Art,” such a closing statement makes the autobiographical
subtext unmistakable. The essay is about her personal “end to art,” as she gradually put
1 John Palattella, “An End of Abstraction: An Essay on Susan Howe’s Historicism,” 74.
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down the tools of painting and turned to writing poetry. This “turn” has become a basic part
of her reputation in recent years, but despite the occasional commentary that borrows from
the lexicon of painting—such as Bob Perelman who says that she “uses // the page like a
canvas” 2 —there have yet to be any studies that directly deal with her early artistic
foundations. One of my goals in this chapter is to correct this lack of attention to her early
work. But more importantly, the early work lets us follow the development of Howe’s
poetics as she begins to write historical poetry based on an inherited self. Whereas the last
section took the long view by examining the intersection of history and autobiography from
Adams all the way through Howe, this section takes the close view by examining in detail the
same intersection as it develops exclusively in Howe’s early writing.
Reinhardt is the central figure of both the longer essay and the shorter follow-up piece.
It was his papers in the Archives of American Art that Howe researched while writing her
essay, and it was his correspondence and collaboration with Finlay and Lax, as well as
Thomas Merton, that provided the backdrop for her discussion. Reinhardt is internationally
known for the large black paintings he created in the 1960s. In them he paints a canvas all in
black, or black but with barely discernable black squares inside of it. His work is at once a
development of abstract expressionism and a break from its model. Unlike abstract
expressionism, the black paintings negate any elements that could be associated with the
personal expression of the artist. A work of abstract expressionism bears signs of the artist’s
activity, or “action” as in so-called “American action” painting. Reinhardt literally takes such
action out of the picture. He aims for an absolute abstraction, a stark black color with no
intervening tensions or relationships. This has earned him the reputation as “Mr. Pure.” In
2 Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1996), 7.
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his writing he invokes the tautology “art as art,” which gestures to a complete separation of
the work from the self-conscious artist. The artist is said to communicate nothing to the
viewer. The artwork lacks message, representation, or semantic content. Howe is evidently
intrigued by this view of art. In describing his “dark color” paintings from 1956, which
preceded the black paintings, Howe writes, “Here were truly simple paintings; simplicity was
their mystery. Paintings that offered no compromises. Paintings that forced the viewer to
search for what was offered” (EA, 2). The black paintings are comparable to John Cage’s
musical composition 4:33, which has no scored notes but which requires a pianist to sit
ready to play for a count of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Reinhardt and Cage (we
could name many others) create works that withdraw not only from the representation of
ideas, pictures, sounds, or words, but even from the idea of representation or a world where
representation is possible.
From the tendency of her later historicism we might expect Howe to provide a historical
account of Reinhardt and the other artists. But in the essay she is concerned rather with the
theme of classicism that underlies his black paintings and the concrete poetry of Finlay and
Gomringer and the visual-oriented poetry of Lax. It’s not even clear that history is an
important consideration. She approaches classicism according to a transcendental
conception of language in which language proper does not bear the imprint of history or
time. History is relevant only insofar as the ability to recognize or appreciate a transcendental
(or “universal”) language varies during different historical periods. Howe writes:
Gomringer saw a universal poetry. The languages of the world were slowly moving
towards unity. Abbreviations used in slogans and advertisements had brought about
a new sensibility. Now the idea of a sentence could be stated and understood in one
word. This simplified use of language seemed to mark not the end of poetry but a
beginning. New words, freed from the baggage of past associations and restored to
their primitive simplicity would recapture the power they had lost. The new poet
could be concerned with clarity and conciseness.
(EA, 2)
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History is understood as an impediment to the “universal poetry” that lies beyond us.
History is just a “baggage of past associations” that must be discarded, for the poetry of the
future is to be based on a “primitive simplicity.” Such a view of language holds the promise
of renewed certainty and power for its practitioners. In this we recognize the dream of other
modernists who sought to restore a pure language, such as in Pound’s ideogram.
Finlay, who Howe claims as a “spiritual descendant of Gomringer” (EA, 3), is another
main subject of her essay. While Finlay departs from Gomringer insofar as he takes concrete
poetry off the “printed page” and turns it into a plastic art, he shares the conviction that “the
esthetic of concrete art is valid only insofar as it is the manifestation of the eternal classical
spirit” (EA, 3). Howe explains that the language of modernity is defined by its ephemerality.
Because language is most fully realized in the fleeting nature of “slogans and advertisements”
(EA, 2), people are forced to get information by quickly absorbing an endless flow of sound
bites. Finlay creates concrete poems like sound bites by limiting them to a few simple words.
But whereas a slogan rushes by and disappears, his concrete poems are built in natural
settings such as forests or swamps. As Howe explains, “[Finlay] has made poems in stone,
wood, glass, and concrete. Now the land he owns and lives on in Scotland has become his
poem” (EA, 3). The words are carved into a durable material in order to achieve a
permanence or gravity analogous to classical ruins. Finlay thus aspires to a classical form but
not in a way that rejects modernity; rather, he builds on the conditions of modernity and
then ultimately seeks to go beyond them. Howe cites as an example Finlay’s poem
“Fisherman’s Cross,” which is an octagonal block with the word “ease” in the center,
surrounded by the word “seas” eight times (twice at the top, twice at the bottom, and twice
to the left and right). It is an apparently simple and straightforward poem characterized by
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unity rather than tension in its form or content, but under Howe’s extended gaze, the poem
springs suddenly to life. She characterizes it as
a poem whose visible structure is identical to its structure. A concrete poem is
concrete. No longer print on white paper, no longer the Universe of the blank page
as in Mallarmé, but the silent voice of stone on stone. Form and content are one.
Like the black paintings, the edges—demarcations—are blurred but definite,
either/or. The two words, seas and ease, are as close in value as two blacks are close.
Here the words are close visually and rhythmically. The ea combination in the middle
is in my memory as the ea in eat, ear, hear, cease, release, death, and east, where the
sun rises. These are open words and the things they name are open. There are no
vertical letters, just as there are no sharp sounds to pull the ear or eye up or down.
Life (seas) rhymes with Death (ease)…
(EA, 6)
For Howe, the virtue of the poem is its simplicity, it refusal of baroque or lavish design. She
admires Finlay for his creation of complexity while using a restricted set of variables: the two
words, “seas” and “ease.” This simplicity lets her own response be playful and enlivened
rather than predictable and mundane. From the “ea” sound she finds “open words.” Her
attention to the poem is both aural and visual, so in a sense her reading points in two
directions: backwards to her painting and forward to her poetry. It is worth noting that
Howe chose to write about a poem that thematizes the sea, for this points to her own
incorporation of nautical iconography, which I will discuss later in this chapter.
Finlay helped to clarify why classicism was at stake in his work in letters he sent Howe
during the preparation of her essay. The letters also reveal that he was eager for readers to
connect his work with Reinhardt, and that he wanted the story of their interaction made
known. Howe cites their correspondence, as well as his 1966 letter to the poet Robert Lax
“asking for an introduction to Ad Reinhardt, whose work he had seen and admired” (EA,
3). Soon after this introduction, Finlay, Lax and Reinhardt began to collaborate, and the first
result was a special issue featuring their work in the magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (POTH).
Their interaction unexpectedly extended to Merton, who attended Columbia University with
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Reinhardt and Lax and was close friends with both of them. “Merton and Lax later
converted to catholicism and, although he never joined an organized religion, Reinhardt was
intrigued by their reasons for doing so. Merton’s decision to join the Trappists monastery
was an important enough event for Reinhardt to have listed, in his biographical resume, the
day he tried to talk Merton out of it” (EA, 3).
Why Howe makes a point of discussing Merton is not initially clear, other than the fact
that a remarkable synergy had been brewing since the time that he and the others were at
Columbia. But his presence soon makes sense when she goes back to discussing Reinhardt
and uncovers a scriptural subtext to his black paintings. Reinhardt and Merton are taken as
an example of artistic spirituality (Reinhardt) replacing or reinventing religious spirituality
(Merton). As Howe observes, “There is a remarkable and probably coincidental similarity
between Reinhardt’s description of his black paintings and the description of the holy city of
Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation” (EA, 3). Then she sets two passages side-by-side so
that we can see for ourselves:
A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas 5 feet wide 5 feet high, as high as a man, as wide
as a man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no
composition), one horizontal form negating, one vertical form (formless, no top, no
bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) noncontrasting (colorless)
colors, brushwork, brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte flat, free hand painted
surface… which does not reflect its surroundings—a pure, abstract, non-objective,
timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is
self conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but Art
absolutely (no anti-art)
Ad Reinhardt
And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth. And he
measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the
breadth and the height of it are equal. And the measured the wall whereof, an
hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the
angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper; and the city was pure gold, like
unto clear glass.
* * *
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And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb and the
temple of it. And the city had not need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in
it; for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
Saint John the Divine
Howe’s juxtaposition of Reinhardt’s description of a painting and the passage from
Revelations makes a convincing case that Finlay is not the only artist in this essay whose
work is imbued with what Howe calls a classical spirit. Howe adds that the above passage is
by the “same John, of course, who wrote ‘I am Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the
end the first and the last’”(EA, 4). Reinhardt makes a similar statement in his attempt to
create a work that transcends an ordinary human experience: “no top, no bottom,
directionless.”
It should be noted that Howe does not draw a strong distinction between a classical and
a religious spirituality, and in this sense her essay does not follow the conventional
opposition of Greek and Christian traditions. The artists in question share a more general
sense of piety and seriousness in their work which is encompassed by her appeal to classical
and religious spirituality. In citing a collaborative special issue of the Lugano Review (1966)
that contained work by Lax, Reinhardt, Finlay and Merton, who by then was known as Father
Merton, Howe observes, “The spiritual affinity that bound the three Americans together
allowed them to remain close intellectual companions for all their adult life, and of course,
had an effect on the work they produced” (EA, 4). For spiritual themes to be present in
Lax’s work would have not been as surprising because he and Merton had converted to
Catholicism. But Reinhardt and Finlay are both thought of as avant-garde, so they present a
different matter. Howe discusses how a religious sensibility enters their work: “Both [Finlay
and Reinhardt] liked to be thought of as unsentimental classicists—classicists who had
purged their work of all biographical revelation—yet they brought to their work sensibilities
that are romantic and even religious. Reinhardt in particular viewed painting as a ritual
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process” (EA, 5-6). It’s worth adding that Finlay was recommending works to help Howe
understand classicism, such as Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, his short,
uncompleted book on the Pre-Socratics (or the Pre-Platonics as Nietzsche says to separate
Socrates and Plato). 3
The essay concludes by connecting everything that we have heard about Reinhardt and
the concrete poets to Howe’s personal artistic concerns: “The work of these three men—
two poets, one painter—is classical and romantic, impersonal and personal, a reconciliation
of opposites. Always there is a sense of Order and Repose. They tell us that to search for
infinity inside simplicity will be to find simplicity alive with messages. In my end is my
beginning. Finding is the first act”(EA, 7). The sequence of reconciled opposites culminates
with what I take to be the underlying foundation of Howe’s own work: “to search for
infinity inside simplicity will be to find simplicity alive with messages…Finding is the first
act.” The affirmation of “my beginning” is like a pledge or a personal resolution. The
simplicity of concrete poetry or black paintings is not the end but rather the “first act” for
Howe. The last sentence of the essay—which is the only sentence to back away from the
tone of a disinterested essayist—adopts Reinhardt’s words for her own: “One color, one
colorness, one light, one space, one time”(EA, 7). Here a line from Reinhardt’s contribution
to POTH has been transformed into Howe’s voice in the essay. It resembles a chant, perhaps
a chant that clears the mind for the “first act” of “finding” in which infinity surfaces in the
simplicity of one color, one colorness, and so on. We already have an impression of what
such finding would look like because we have already heard Howe say, “Here were truly
3 As Howe tells Lynn Keller, “For a couple of years I had a correspondence with Ian Hamilton Finlay
because I had written an article for the journal Archives of American Art about artists and poets (Ad Reinhardt,
Robert Lax, and Ian Hamilton Finlay). Finlay was one of the great letter writers. He had me following all sorts
of leads and all of them very much affected what I was doing.” See Lynn Keller, “An Interview with Susan
Howe,” Contemporary Literature 36:1 (Spring 1995): 20.
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simple paintings; simplicity was their mystery. Paintings that offered no compromises.
Paintings that forced the viewer to search for what was offered” (EA, 2). The act of finding
occurs when Howe looks at Reinhardt’s black painting and sees in it a passage from
Revelations. She finds the simplicity alive with this particular message.
This raises a point about the development or “lineage” of Howe’s work. A genealogy of
Howe’s work that cited neoclassicism would presumably hearken back to her forerunners in
historical poetry, such as Pound and Olson, or perhaps H.D. and Robert Duncan. But “The
End of Art” locates her lineage with the neoclassicism of Reinhardt and Finlay, while saying
nothing about her expected precursors in modernist poetry. Howe is writing about her own
“End of Art” where “art” literally means her painting. Poetry is certainly on her horizon—in
fact the author’s note to the essay indicates that her most recent book is Hinge Picture, so we
know that poetry has been on the horizon for a short while and that even as she writes art
criticism, she is comfortable calling herself a poet. But the future direction of her work is not
yet in place, certainly not as a historical poet. Reading this essay, one might guess that Howe
could just as easily have wound up doing a form of concrete poetry. Possibly her work is still
in some sense concrete poetry. Her technique of scattering words across a page foregrounds
the materiality of language much like poetry by Finlay or Lax that depends on the shape of
letters and the visual interaction of words or word fragments.
It’s difficult to demonstrate that Howe’s remarks about simplicity (and simplicity as the
goal of classicism) reflect on her personally and that the “End of Art” is about her own
artistic practice and not merely about Finlay and Reinhardt. The difficulty is compounded by
the fact that Howe’s paintings from the period before her poetry remain relatively
unavailable. (More often it is the case that we are limited to her retrospective comments,
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such as, “First I was a painter, so for me, words shimmer. Each one has an aura. Lines are
laid on the field of a page, so many washes of watercolor,” as she says in a statement on her
poetics.) Despite these obstacles, there are clues that she was striving to achieve simplicity
during at least one stretch of her career. The clue comes from a brief comment in a 1968
interview with David von Schegell, then Howe’s partner and later her husband. About
midway through, the interviewer remarks that “Von Schlegell’s young wife [sic] and small
daughter came in to say good-bye before going for a walk.” 4 Although Howe remains
unnamed, her presence catches the interviewer’s attention for a moment, and the
conversation, which up till then had been strictly about von Schegell’s work, turns briefly to
one of her paintings. “‘My wife is a painter,’ [von Schlegell] said when they were out of
earshot. He pointed to a large canvas above the table—three or four stained-in curves of
clear color. “I’m always amazed at the way she can just lay that color so cleanly,’ he said.
‘When I painted, it was always so labored and muddy. I don’t like much contemporary
painting.’” I don’t want to put too much weight on this statement, but given the silence
about Howe’s early painting, such scraps are all we have to go on. But the word von
Schlegell chooses to describe the painting—“cleanly”—is I think carefully chosen and gives
us something to go on. To my ears “cleanly” sounds like Howe’s description of the “clarity
and conciseness” in Reinhardt’s painting. Von Schlegell’s amazement at the clean manner in
which the colors “lay” on the canvas lets us know the work possesses none of the
trademarks of expressionism: drippy like a Pollack or later versions of that method in the
1960s. Von Schlegell’s harsh dismissal of paintings that are “muddy” clenches the point;
Howe would not strive for simplicity with a muddy painting. I would speculate, moreover,
that had there been words on the canvas or other elements of linguistic experimentation,
4 “The Artist Speaks: David von Schelgell,” interview with Jay Jacobs, Art in America (May-June 1968), 54.
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then von Schlegell or the interviewer would have mentioned them. Linguistic elements
would have merited greater attention than “three or four stained-in curves of clear color.”
This painting either predates Howe’s word drawings, which seems to me the most probable
case, or at least runs concurrent with them, as if Howe were painting “clean” paintings half
the time and linguistic experiments half the time. Are the elements of this painting clear and
stained-in so the viewer can see through them? Are we then to say that the paintings
possessed simplicity that operated according to similar principles as the black paintings of
Reinhardt, but with transparency instead of his opacity? Any guess here would be too
speculative. Furthermore the time between the 1968 interview and the 1975 essay allow for
many conceivable changes in Howe’s painting. One change is certainly the word drawings
that initiate her turn towards poetry (and needless to say reinforce an affinity with concrete
poetry). So it remains open whether Howe was striving for simplicity in the painting. Still,
“The End of Art” tells us something else that is certain. It tells us that had Howe been
painting abstract works of simplicity prior to the word drawings, then in 1975 she is
searching for a single conceptual model to account for both kinds of work. This conceptual
model is the classicism claimed by both Reinhardt’s black paintings and Finlay’s concrete
poems.
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2.2) “Alive With Messages”: Building on Minimalism
Barbara Rose had some really good pieces on Ad Reinhardt,
there was Reinhardt’s own writing, Don Judd and Robert
Smithson were busily producing manifestos. Richard Serra,
Joan Jonas, Don Judd, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert
Morris, Carl André, John Cage, Agnes Martin… the work of
these artists influenced what I was doing.
—Howe, interview with Lynn Keller 5
…my sensibility was very much formed in the sixties.
—Howe 6
One question to ask about Howe’s essay is why she chooses to write about Reinhardt.
One direction to look for an answer is in her association with minimalist sculptors in the
1960s. Minimalist sculpture was first introduced to larger audiences at “Primary Structures”
(1966), the famous exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. Participants included
Donald Judd, Carl André, Robert Grosvenor, Ronald Bladen, Robert Morris, and, most
importantly, David von Schlegell. 7 The sculpture that first appeared was often sizable but
spare and economical in design. It was seldom representational or expressive. It was often
constructed from industrial materials, such as brick, plexiglas, painted wood, or welded
metal. According to the art critic Barbara Rose, some of the key influences on minimalism
were Kasimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp (particularly for Morris), and Ad Reinhardt. It’s
worth noting that these same three artists are featured in Howe’s early writing. Malevich is
5 Keller, ibid., 4.
6 Ibid., 19.
7 For a recent discussion of this exhibit which, included many of the major minimalist sculptors to emerge
in the sixties, see “Theory on the Floor: Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum, New York, April 27-June12,
1966,” in Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (Berkeley: U California P,
1998), 220-235.
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discussed in “The End of Art,” particularly in relation to Finlay’s poem “Homage to
Malevich” (EA, 6), and Duchamp provides the title and an epigraph for Hinge Picture. The
picture that gradually comes into view is that Howe is extremely well-versed in the world of
minimalism.
In Rose’s essay “ABC Art” (1965), which was the first substantial account of sculptural
minimalism, she discusses the unlikely influence of Reinhardt:
No one, in the mid-fifties, seemed less likely to spawn artistic progeny and admirers
than Ad Reinhardt. An abstract painter since the thirties, and a voluble propogandist
for abstract art, Reinhardt was always one of the liveliest spirits in the art world,
though from time to time he would be chided as the heretical black monk of abstract
expressionism, or the legendary Mr. Pure, who finally created an art so pure it
consisted of injecting a clear fluid into foam rubber. His dicta, as arcane as they may
have sounded when first handed down from the scriptorium, have become nearly
canonical for the young artists. Suddenly, his wry irony, aloofness, independence, and
ideas about the proper use and role of art, which he has stubbornly held to be
noncommercial and nonutilitarian, are precisely the qualities the young admire… 8
Rose stresses that many artists were selective in what they took from Reinhardt. Many
refused to follow his classicism and even went so far as to subvert or parody it. Some
preferred asymmetrical or ambiguous forms, such as simple boxes (for example sculpture by
Donald Judd), which would leave open the question of whether the work could in fact be
thought of as art. For the minimalist, a box could just be a box, without needing to make any
presumption about its aesthetic value, much less having to invoke the precedent of classical
art. For Howe, by contrast, it is precisely Reinhardt’s classicism and his striving for purity
that she celebrates. At one point Rose describes Reinhardt’s work as a “classic art” because
of its geometric foundations. For Howe, his classicism is less a matter of geometry than of
the resemblance of his writings to scripture, as well as his emphasis on simplicity and his
transcendental aims.
8 Barbara Rose, Autocritique: Essays on Art and Ant-Art 1963-1987, 64. This essay was first published in Art
in America (October-November 1965).
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Alongside Reinhardt, it’s useful to think about the role of the painter Agnes Martin in
Howe’s artistic background. Despite there not being any correspondence between them,
Martin was regularly featured in magazines and journals that Howe was reading during this
period (such as Artforum 9 ). “I can’t express how important Agnes Martin was to me at the
point when I was shifting from painting to poetry,” says Howe in an interview from many
years later. “The combination in Martin’s work, say, of being spare and infinitely suggestive
at the same time characterizes the art I respond to…” 10 It is again a matter of “simplicity
alive with messages.” Martin was close to Reinhardt, and was likewise a major influence on
minimalism. Where he is famous for his black paintings, she is famous for her “grid” and
“line” paintings that began to appear in the sixties. These works intersect with Howe’s
discussion in “The End of Art” because Martin makes a similar appeal to classicism: “I
would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian,
Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be
eclectic. One must see the Ideal in one’s own mind. It is like a memory of perfection.” 11 In
1972 Martin spoke at a retrospective of her work in Philadelphia which Howe attended.
There Martin remarked,
I don’t believe in the eclectic
I believe in the recurrence
That this is a return to classicism
Classicism is not about people
and this work is not about the world
…
9 See for instance the retrospective articles on Martin’s work in the April 1972 issue of Artforum.
10 Howe continues: “And in poetry I am concerned with the space of the page before the word interrupts
it… It’s like the sky, because—though the sky has color and white isn’t the absence of color, anyway—it’s
clear.” See Lynne Keller, “An Interview with Susan Howe,” Contemporary Literature 36:1 (1995), 7.
11 Agnes Martin, Writings, (Ostfilden: Cantz Verlag, 1991), 19. This edition reprints notes that Martin
deposited at the Institute of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and were first available in the
catalogue for the exhibition, Agnes Martin, (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, U of Pennsylvania,
1973). The Cantz edition includes texts that were deposited by Martin but not printed in the catalogue.
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Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world
It represents something that isn’t possible in the world
It’s as unsubjective as possible 12
These prescriptions resurface in Howe’s essay, and the enigmatic form and spare stylistics
even anticipate her later prose. Martin explains that “recurrence” is a “return to classicism,”
and recurrence is certainly a key feature of Howe’s early poetry (as for example in the
passages from Hinge Picture discussed later in this chapter). Martin eschews painting that is
based on representational principles and instead sees her work as a movement away from the
world. Clearly some principle of transcendence must operate in the painting, but not as an
experience for the artist or viewer since the painting is “as unsubjective as possible” and
“not about people.” Her paintings bring about a sense of transcendence by separating a
modern world of “the eclectic” from a world beyond the “Ideal in one’s own mind.”
Martin’s rejection of eclecticism is the flip side of Howe’s appeal to simplicity.
But what’s interesting is that from one book to the next, Howe’s poetry is better
described not by its simplicity but rather by its eclecticism: its inclusive and exploratory
approach to historical texts, archival sources, acoustical range, spatial complexity, and so on.
The latter remains what is most prized about her work. Here for example are a few ways that
her poem Thorow (1990) has been described: “The poem moves from its initial paratactic
lyric sequences to the non-linear visual criss-cross composition of the last few pages and the
sibylline fragments of the conclusion.” “The poem’s language hoard, at the outset of the
poem… turns bit by bit into the extreme sound play, pun, neologism, and etymological word
formation found in the manifestoes of Khlebnikov, even her page layout… comprises
mirror fragments, doubling, and shards of found text.” 13 These descriptions, which I take to
12 Ibid, 37.
13 See Marjorie Perloff on Howe’s “Thorow” in 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2002), 172.
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e an accurate account of her poetic language, never once allude to any sense of simplicity.
So the question is how her work arrives at this point when she starts in the 1970s with such
regard for simplicity. For rather than a poetic equivalent to the simplicity of Martin’s grid
and line paintings or Reinhardt’s black paintings or Finlay’s concrete poetry with its spare
use of words, Howe’s work becomes increasingly more complex and layered.
Here I think we need to deal more fully with Howe’s claim in the essay that “to search
for infinity within simplicity is to find simplicity alive with messages.” The relationship
between simplicity and infinity is a problem that practitioners of minimalism sought to
address, and it was exposure to those practitioners that influenced Howe’s artistic
development. Robert Smithson, for example, who was affiliated at times with the
minimalists, employs a vocabulary that corresponds in some ways with Howe’s writing. In
his 1966 essay on minimalist sculpture, or what he calls the “new monuments,” he remarks,
“Time as decay or biological evolution is eliminated by many of these artists; this
displacement allows the eye to see time as an infinity of surfaces or structures, or both
combined….” 14 Smithson advocates artwork that reduces distraction and mental clutter and
clears the mind of intellectualism that would interfere with the reception of an artwork. He
has a strong distaste for art that is baroque, elaborate, or eclectic. Although he never writes
about the value of “simplicity” as such, he believes fully in the responsibility of art to
eliminate certain conceptions (in this case conceptions of time) that impede our ability to
perceive infinity. In this sense he is like Howe in emphasizing artworks that give rise to
infinity, but notice that for Smithson infinity arises in “surfaces or structures, or both
combined” and that for Howe infinity arises in being “alive with messages.” Whereas
14 Emphasis added. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (Artforum, June 1966), in
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: U Californian P, 1996), 11.
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Smithson understands the world according to geometry, Howe understands the world
according to language.
Another affinity between Smithson and Howe concerns the “reconciliation of
opposites” that is so important to her essay. As Smithson writes, “[The new monuments] are
not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction
of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of
centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has
little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-
Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.” 15 His
account of “past and future… placed into an objective present” describes a reconciliation of
temporal opposites. The reconciliation of opposites is also a recurrent theme in Howe’s
commentaries on art. During 1976 she was writing brief exhibition reviews for Art in
American. Here is what she wrote about an exhibit by Julius Tobias:
Titled This Way In, This Way Out, the constructions appear to be barriers and at the
same time to form a passage. To step inside and walk the length is a disconcerting
experience: you feel pinpointed, isolated and self-conscious. Outside, your attention
shifts to the objects: how they sit in space, how the light hits them. The steel, while
satiny, is not highly reflective; it seems, rather, to absorb light…The material and the
height of the elements make the work eerily suggestive of an escalator going neither
up nor down. 16
What is a “satiny” steel that does not reflect light but absorbs it? Again, the theme is the
reconciliation of opposites. A stationary escalator “going neither up nor down” is strongly
reminiscent of Reinhardt’s black paintings—“no top, no bottom, directionless”—so in
15 Ibid., 11.
16 Susan Howe, “Julius Tobias at Alessandra.” Howe reviewed a total of four exhibitions (all in New York)
for Art in America. Exhibitions reviews are not indexed by the magazine nor are reviewers listed in the table of
contents, so here is the list:
“Julius Tobias at Alessandra” (May-June, 1976): 109.
“Robert Kushner at Solomon” (July-August, 1976): 102-103.
“John Duff at Willard” (September-October, 1976): 111.
“Romare Beardon at Cordier & Ekstrom”(November-December 1976): 122.
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Howe’s view this is clearly a crucial feature of what makes an artwork successful. It’s
nowhere more apparent than in her review of John Duff’s sculpture Hanging Spiral (1975):
“All of Duff’s new pieces deal, in a precise and inventive spirit, with polarities and
similarities—spirals in squares, openings that are closed, sculptures that are paintings,
fragility and toughness.” 17 This is not to say in a vulgar way that Howe is projecting her own
artistic bias onto work by other artists. Other exhibitions that she reviewed plainly did not
correspond to her interests. But when she is at her most laudatory, her personal leanings can
be clearly heard. Even when she reviews poetry a few years later, it is still a reconciliation of
opposites that she most esteems. She emphasizes the “construction of equivalencies” in P.
Inman’s Platin and its complex movement “[f]orward in a backward direction.” 18 And again
she cites a relationship similar to that between simplicity and infinity: “like a plainsong
fragment, [Inman’s] series can be endlessly interpreted.” In the next section we will see this
most important reconciliation of opposites, namely between simplicity and infinity, or what
can also be called purity and eclecticism.
17 Susan Howe, “John Duff at Willard,” Art in America (September-October, 1976): 111.
18 Susan Howe, review of P. Inman’s Platin, In The American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry, ed. Ron Silliman
(Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 555.
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2.3) “A Clutter of Characters and Quotations”: Back to Reinhardt
The year after “The End of Art,” Howe wrote a brief but revealing follow-up piece on
Reinhardt, turning her attention from the black paintings to the comics and satires he
created from 1945-1961. At first the glance the collection edited by Thomas B. Hess, The Art
Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, appears unrelated to her artistic concerns. Whereas the
black paintings are a world of classical and spiritual themes, the comics and satires are a
world of irreverence and humor. For Reinhardt, the butt of the joke is anyone who buys into
the prevailing ways of thinking about art, as for example in an “art history” textbook or a
thematically coherent museum exhibit. At the same time, the comics and satires are his way
of putting together another kind of history. He once wrote to Hess: “What kind of past
ought I make these days in this time? (this time of whorologies.) Should this be left to
critichronolicers and art chronometricians, like you?” 19 Reinhardt’s hostility to Hess is a
friendly jab at a well-known art critic, but it illustrates his characteristic irreverence towards
institutions that support art and settled habits that limit thinking about art. Howe writes:
The enigma of Reinhardt and his comics is that while constantly calling for the clarity
of abstraction he called for it with a clutter of characters and quotations plucked
mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries; Reinhardt, who arrived at the spare purity
of the black paintings, was an image-collector in the omnivorous Victorian style. He
cut pictures form old grammars, almanacs, encyclopedias, travel guides and minor
compendia of art history… Pictures, people and props were introduced, reintroduced
and placed in bizarre and absurd situations, as were the quotations.
(AR, 37)
It’s not difficult to hear a prefiguration of Howe’s poems in the “clutter of characters
and quotations plucked mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries,” even if she is describing
19 Susan Howe, review of The Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, by Thomas B. Hess (1975), in Art in
America (Mar-April 1976): 35-37. Henceforth abbreviated as AR.
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comics, of all things. She stresses that Reinhardt used strictly historical sources to create his
comics: “Two important sources he drew on were Thackeray’s illustrations for his own
books… and the illustrations Cruikshank, Worth and Brown did for Dickens” (AR, 37).
Moreover, because it prefigures her own quest for inheritance, we should note that she
draws a connection between Reinhardt’s historical work and his sense of self-understanding:
“[Reinhardt] knew what he was about when he made use of these predecessors [Dickinson
and Thackery], both of whom hark back to a time when satirist and illustrator were often
one” (AR, 37). In the coming years many of the same sources feed into Howe’s poetry,
especially Dickens. In Cabbage Gardens, for example, published the same year as the book
review, she plucks an entire passage from Bleak House: “Dare I hint at the worse time when,
strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or
starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to
be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be part of
the thing?”(FS, 81). Notice that this passage is about a “great black space,” which calls on
similar terrain as the black paintings. And not only is the quotation plucked from a historical
source, but it refers once more to searching in simplicity.
The comparison between Reinhardt and Howe goes deeper than making the obvious
point that whereas he uses historical pictures, she uses historical texts. In fact, like Reinhardt,
Howe also drew on pictures in a few of her poems from the seventies, though unfortunately
this practice cannot be appreciated in any of her collections. The available poems in her
Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 feature pictures at the beginning or end of each work,
but none of the pictures are arranged like comics. By far the best example of Howe working
with pictures as comics is her poem “Sally” from Telephone #13 (1977) which begins with a
collage of illustrations that is strikingly reminiscent of Reinhardt’s comics. (See FIGURE 2.1)
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Although the main body of the poem is made of language, the first page, which is a title page
of sorts, is a bizarre collage of picture cut-outs from 19th century sources.
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FIGURE 2.1
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Howe describes Reinhardt’s comics in words that hold true for her own creation:
“pictures, people and props… introduced, re-introduced and placed in bizarre and absurd
situations…” At the top sits a military bunker with a flag perched at an angle. Beneath it is a
medical diagram of a doctor peering into the mouth of a patient. The caption reads,
“Examining the Stomach by Electric Light.” This is Howe being comic. In the center of the
collage is a family tree with the patriarchal line running down the middle. The tree has no
specific names, only relations such as great-grandfather, grandfather, father, uncle, brother,
mother; female relations are on the outer branches, but not the main trunk. At the bottom is
where descendants of the male line would normally be continued, but instead there is a black
plain or gully and the words, “The Bottomless Pit.” Again, this is Howe’s comic side.
Around the family tree are several other illustrations including rapiers, fences, cattle under a
tree, a “pinnace” (a kind of boat), a baptismal font, and a Jack-boot (for spurring a horse). At
the bottom are three quotations with various uses of the word “Sally,” taken from Tennyson,
Steele, and Washington Irving. Two sets of dictionary definitions round out the collage. The
second definitions reads, “Sally (probably from the name Sally) 1. irish the European house
wren 2. british, Stone Fly.” What these multiple definitions suggest is a surplus of reference.
Sally means too many things to pin down. It is like the messages heard in the simplicity of
the black paintings; here the simple name of Sally is alive with meaning. Perhaps the most
important meaning of Sally for Howe is the one that is not cited in the definitions and not
suggested from the illustrations: “Sally Gap” refers to a famous land formation outside of
Dublin. “Sally” is thus implicitly about Howe’s personal connection to Ireland. “Sally”
combines poetry (in the rest of the work) with a picture collage and both are constructed
with cuttings from historical sources. Visual elements continue to be decisive in her later
poetry, suggesting that art has never really stopped being a dimension of her work. Howe’s
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ecent attention to the notebook doodles of Charles Sanders Peirce in Pierce-Arrow almost
certainly hearkens back to this early work. The Midnight (2003) contains pictures from her
uncle’s library of 19th century novels, especially Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of
Ballantrae.
Let me go back to Howe’s claim that Reinhardt “knew what he was about when he made
use of these predecessors.” No elaboration is offered, and Howe leaves her reader to guess
at the remark, which is highly intuitive and does not follow from either what has already
been said nor what she says in the next and final paragraph. What is compelling about the
remark is that it suggests Reinhardt has personal motives for his work. It seems that he shed
so much of himself in the years leading up to the black paintings that he had to be
reintroduced to things from the ground up. Cutting up, collecting, and rearranging pictures
from the past was his way of attending to particulars, of thinking without the support of
whatever system or hierarchy might lead to generalization. In seeking to shed his habits
(such as given by “critichronolicers” “chronometricians” ) Reinhardt recalls the modernist
idea of the artist disappearing into the work of art. The difference is a didactic epilogue that
Howe adds to the end (“he knew what he was about”), wherein the artist reemerges from the
work with a radically new vision of self and world. Such a didactic epilogue foreshadows
Howe’s poetry, where she writes a new kind of autobiography through history, or what I am
calling an inherited self; like Reinhardt, the poetry helps her to know what she is about.
Although written in reference to Reinhardt, the didactic epilogue is the first moment in all
her writing that a conception of the inherited self vividly appears. Ten years later in My Emily
Dickinson Howe repeats the exact same claim: “Not to put forth my Self, but to lose and find
it in diligent search.” (ED, 46).
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If the only goal of this chapter were to explore the ending of Howe’s art and the
beginning of her poetry, then I would stop here. Perhaps I would demonstrate that
Reinhardt’s method of cutting out pictures can be used as a template for a close reading of
her poems. Establishing the precedent in Reinhardt’s comics also corrects many of the one-
dimensional narratives about the development of her poetry; she certainly draws on the
historical poetry associated with Pound and Olson, but she cannot be wholly accounted for
by such categorization. But the book review bears further signs of the changes that her
poetry was undergoing at the time. At the very end of the review is an intriguing claim:
Although Hess quite rightly points out the influence that both Joyce and Beckett had
on Reinhardt, I sense something American and isolate. Ad Reinhardt used these
satires to reach the black paintings. “Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper we must
go, if we would find out the heart of man; descending into which is as descending a
spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed
by the spiralness of the stair and the blackness of the shaft.” Melville said this in
Pierre. The black paintings of Reinhardt and the white whale of Melville are perhaps
the same.
(AR, 37)
The repetition of Reinhardt’s full name in the second sentence is an indication that we
should latch onto this line, for it gets at an important message that Howe wants to convey.
So we should take the quotation that comes after it all the more seriously—but notice that
the paragraph does not initially identify who said it. It might be Hess or it might be
Reinhardt, as if he is cutting quotations from his sources again. Only after reading the
quotation do we learn that it came from Pierre. In her first essay on him Howe found that
Reinhardt manifests an “eternal and classical spirit” and that his writing on the black
paintings has a “remarkable and probably coincidental similarity” to a passage from
Revelations. Here the point of comparison is no longer a scriptural text but an antecedent in
American literary history. This sentence, then, is like a snapshot of Howe in the midst of
moving from the classicism of her earlier essay to the historicism of her poetry: “The black
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paintings of Reinhardt and the white whale of Melville are perhaps the same.” Here, for the first time in
all of Howe’s writings, American history and literature provide the vocabulary for
understanding the present.
There is nothing about why this change has taken place. In the earlier essay, history
enters the discussion strictly in the capacity of “sources” for Reinhardt and the concrete
poets. History is understood to be a source which an artist might choose to incorporate in an
artwork or poem. Nothing in the earlier analysis historicizes the artists themselves. But here
Melville is not cited as a source. When Howe suddenly quotes Melville in the last sentence of
the book review and claims that his white whale and the black paintings are the same, the
change in Howe’s perspective is glaring. Knowing what we know about her impending
historical poetry, it’s almost like the whole of her poetics is carried in this line and waiting to
enter the world. Note, by contrast, that the appeal to a classical spirit could be shared by
Reinhardt and Finlay. They could probably also share the influences of Beckett and Joyce.
But according to the book review, Pierre belongs to Reinhardt’s inheritance, and it is part of
what sets him apart and makes him “isolate and American.” Hess first cites Joyce and
Beckett as the “twin heroes” 20 of Reinhardt’s comics, and Howe responds by aligning him
with an American precedent. She is seeking an alternative language for describing American
artists whose accomplishments have so often been measured in terms of European
modernism. Hence her recourse to Melville for such a vocabulary.
20 “The twin heroes of this effort, for Reinhardt, were Joyce and Beckett. The spirit of the former presides
over Reinhardt’s lust for cataloguing and naming everything in the world (i.e., the art world, his world). You
hear Joyce in the tropes, oxymorons, onomatopoeia and alliterations, in the lilt of the language, in the dirty
jokes, plays on names, scholarly, almost pedantic references. Beckett’s characters who sesne the universe
darkling about them, who stoically watch each sin qua non slip away, find their mirrors in Reinhardt’s last
paintings.” See Thomas B. Hess, “The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt,” Artforum (April 1972): 47. Reprints an
excerpts from The Complete Art Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt, by Thomas B. Hess.
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One question is why she cites both Pierre and the white whale? I’m not trying to
oversimplify, but wouldn’t just one allusion to Melville have been more than enough to
make her point? To call on Melville’s two greatest novels in order to make a single comparison
to the black paintings suggests that her interests (her points of comparison) are multiplying
as she moves away from contemporary art and veers in the direction of American history
and literature. From this moment forward her work will be increasingly dependent on
historical frameworks, and increasingly those historical frameworks will be personal.
At just a glance the book review would not seem to count for much. It comes not more
than a year after her longer and more substantial essay for the Archives of American Art.
The Melville equation comes only at the end and in the last sentence, as if an afterthought,
perhaps in order to bring the review to a close. Nothing else in the essay suggests that great
changes in Howe’s thinking are afoot. But notice that two decades later Howe says in
retrospect, “Now I can see minimalist art of the sixties and seventies as an American
movement rooted in Puritanism.” 21 This is the final way of looking at the black paintings,
and it rounds out what I want to say about the changes her work underwent in the mid-
seventies. First Barbara Rose and the minimalists think of Reinhardt as “Mr. Pure.” Then
Howe finds a scriptural subtext to Reinhardt black paintings, and Mr. Pure becomes St. John
the Divine. The decisive moment occurs when the black paintings are equated with the white
whale. Although the Melville equation does not yet evoke Puritanism, it suggests that
American history is gradually working its way into Howe’s horizon.
21 Keller, ibid., p. 4. See also Howe’s essay “Sorting Facts” for more on her sense of a Puritan inheritance:
“Seventeenth and eighteenth-century American Puritan theologians and historians like Roger Williams, Anne
Bradstreet, and Cotton Mather were obsessed with anagrams. Seventeenth-century American Puritans were
iconoclasts and animists at once. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, H.D.,
Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and John Cage are among many
North Americans who inherit this feeling for letters as colliding image-objects and divine messages”(SF, 331).
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What follows is a very personal move towards history. This can be seen by comparing
Howe with Finlay. In “The End of Art” Howe interprets Finlay’s classical spirit as meaning
that his work speaks in a voice given to him by the past. Howe’s historicism follows a similar
logic. She comes to realize that her voice is inherited. Exactly what that inheritance is
remains a mystery, which is only partially disclosed at this point in her career. We can place
the Melville equation within months of the time when Howe read to her dying aunt the
entirety of Richard Sewell’s biography of Emily Dickinson (in the fourth chapter I will
discuss Howe’s March 1976 letter to Sewell). The sentence from My Emily Dickinson quoted
above ties these threads together: “Not to put forth my Self, but to lose and find it in
diligent search. Obedience and submission to one will, was the journey of return to the
sacred source human frailty had lost. Puritan theology at its best would tirelessly search
God’s secrecy, explore Nature’s hidden meaning” (ED, 46). I think 1975-1976 are the years
when Howe’s quest for her inheritance begins to gain speed. Her quest first leads her to a
specific author (Melville), then another (Dickinson). Then, in the coming years, inheritance is
found in voices that have been omitted from the historical record (such as Hope Atherton),
antinomian authors at the heart of American canons, and even a Dickinson who has been
suppressed from the historical record by her manuscript editors. We can modify her earlier
claim that to search inside simplicity is to find simplicity alive with messages. As Howe turns
to poetry, she discovers that to search within inheritance is to find inheritance alive with
messages.
Before examining how her early quest for inheritance plays out in her poetry, I want to
suggest that her reading of Reinhardt resonates with the debates about American
exceptionalism. The claim that Reinhardt is “American and isolate” and is therefore
discontinuous with European culture participates in a value system that privileges an
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American lineage, often at the expense of a more detailed historical picture. The strong
appeal of Howe’s work may consist in the fact that it affirms distrust of organized power
and imagines that the isolated individual will be capable of self-sovereignty once the power
of authority is exposed—such an appeal is the best and worst of Emersonian self-reliance.
Years later in My Emily Dickinson Howe again valorizes being American and isolate:
“Emerson said the American scholar ‘must be an inventor to read well… He that would
bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ Emily
Dickinson across the ocean from George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was isolated,
inventing, SHE, and American. Isolation in nineteenth century England and American was spelled the
same way, but there the resemblance stopped. Poe, Melville, and Dickinson all knew the falseness of
comparing. Stevens and Olson later—the boundless westwardness of everything. Ancestral
theme of children flung out into memory unknown” (MED, 20, my italics). It might seem
that Howe’s appeal to her Irish heritage would disrupt a monolithic insistence on being
American, but upon closer inspection, even her Irishness amounts to another form of
exceptionalism. In an interview she once said that for many centuries Ireland was the
farthest western point in the world. I’m not sure what the debates on exceptionalism would
finally tell us about the value of her work, if only because so much of her work combines
self-reliance with self-vulnerability, and her version of historical progress is always measured
by a backward and fragmentary viewpoint. It’s worth observing that her review of
Reinhardt’s comics coincides with the publication of Sacvan Bercovitch’s monumental study
The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975). Exceptionalism had been a subject for literary
historians well before then, and no doubt Howe would have known the idea at least through
Perry Miller, who was a family friend from childhood and who even dedicated his study
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Errand into the Wilderness (1956) to Howe’s parents, “Mark and Molly Howe.” 22 Still, her
equation of Reinhardt with Melville might strike many as unimportant because it sounds like
an afterthought that has been dashed off because a “book review” needs to reach closure
within an allotted space. It does not seem a serious argument when she claims to “sense”
something “American and isolate” about Reinhardt. Nothing further is elaborated, and we
are asked to accept without any objection that what Melville and Reinhardt are doing is the
same.
2.4) Hinge Picture: A Poem on the Wall
Howe’s first published book, Hinge Picture (1974), does not readily fit my argument that
her poetry can be read as a quest for inheritance and thus as a new form of autobiography.
The publication notes for Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 indicate that “the principle
source for Hinge Picture is Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” This
makes an ambitious choice for a first book, for it says that history is of great concern for the
poet. But it is misleading to say that Gibbons is the principle source, for in point of fact there
are just as many passages taken from the King James Old Testament, and so that makes two
principle sources. More importantly, the material from those sources and the way that Howe
incorporates it resonate more with the classical and spiritual themes in “The End of Art”
than with the historical concerns in her later poems. She focuses on what Gibbon says about
Roman history, and gives little attention, if any, to the eighteenth-century English historian
himself. Similarly, she uses scriptural citations but without foregrounding the complexities of
historical interpretation and without noting any relation between the citations and the
22 See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1964).
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eligious history in her later poems (such as the Great Awakenings in the Connecticut River
Valley or the Antinomian Controversy). Hinge Picture is unique among Howe’s work in that it
straddles her art and her poetry, forming as it were a kind of hinge. On the one side is the
copious material from Gibbon and King James which points an insistent arrow back to the
classical and spiritual themes of her writing on art. On the other side is the fact that the
language found in those sources has been turned into poems, becoming, to borrow an earlier
phrase, “alive with messages.” In fact, in the original Hinge Picture there is a final section
containing a series of what look like poetic exercises, as if she is learning to work in new
form, namely that of poetry. The exercises are even grouped under headings such as
“Similes,” “One word too many,” “time or tense,” and “linking and weaving sentences.” In
Hinge Picture Howe is hard at work examining how source texts can be made into poems—
even if Gibbon and King James are not yet texts associated with inheritance like her later
readings in New England and Irish history.
Let me go back to Hinge Picture to examine how these combinations play out. We know
from interviews that Howe originally created Hinge Picture on a wall in her studio and that she
did not think of it as a poem until it was seen by Ted Greenwald, with whom she had been
taking a poetry workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. As Howe tells Lynn Keller,
For a couple of years [in the mid-seventies] I kept a space in part of Marcia Hafif’s
loft on Crosby Street and went down one or two days a week to work there. Before
we moved out of New York I had started making environments—rooms that you
could walk into and be surrounded by walls, and on those walls would be collage,
using found photographs (…a kind of quotation). Then I started using words with
that work. I was at the point where I was putting words on the walls and I had
surrounded myself with words that were really composed lines when a friend, the
poet Ted Greenwald, came by to look at what I was doing and said to me, ‘Actually
you have a book on the wall. Why don’t you just put it into a book? 23
23 Keller, ibid., 6.
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Perhaps the most telling statement is that Howe felt she was making “environments.” The
epigraph by Duchamp hearkens to the creation of space: “Perhaps make a HINGE
PICTURE. (folding yardstick, book…) / develop the PRINCIPLE OF THE HINGE in the
displacements 1st in the plane 2nd in space” (FS, 32). It’s worth noting that the first version
of Hinge Picture (the book) contains two additional epigraphs that were removed when it was
collected for Frame Structures. The second epigraph is by the poet Harry Crosby, and it vividly
recalls the black paintings: “I uproot an obelisk and plunge / it into the ink-pot of the /
Black Sea” (from his Vision). The third epigraph is by Kafka, and it evokes self-
transformation through a limit experience: “Beyond a certain point there is no return. This
point has to be reached.” 24 Juxtaposing these epigraphs with Gibbon and The King James
Bible seems familiar because it corresponds to the strategy in “The End of Art.” Whereas
earlier she juxtaposes Reinhardt with St. John, here she juxtaposes Duchamp, Crosby and
Kafka with Gibbon and the Bible.
When Howe takes material from her two sources, Gibbon and the Bible, she literally
maps a spatial environment. Take for example the following two passages which are
arranged on the same page. Howe derives the first from Ezekiel 48:31-34 and the second
from Gibbon’s chapter “The Reign of Justine”:
The Gate of Reuben
The Gate of Judah
The Gate of Levi
The Gate of Joseph
The Gate of Benjamin
The Gate of Dan
The Gate of Issachar
24 Susan Howe, Hinge Picture (New York: A Telephone Book, 1974). The Kafka epigraph is “from a
fragment from his notebooks.” In my discussion of Hinge Picture I will quote from both the versions where
there are important differences. The unpaginated original will be cited HP. Frame Structures will be cited FS.
When a passage appears in both versions I will quote Frame Structures because it is more widely available.
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accessible passes roman forest craggy
and the pyranees melt a moist valley
flesh and milk euxine bulwark
the lesser and flexible strength
conducting ramparts the real their
God and valiant magi following
white matter of the brain and spinal
cord a long white city ALBA
The Gate of Zebulun
The Gate of Gad
The Gate of Asher
The Gate of Naphtali
(FS, 37)
As in the list of biblical gates, Hinge Picture guides its reader through a series of “accessible
passes”: a “roman forest,” the “long white city ALBA,” and other ancient settings: locations
of events from Roman and Biblical history, archaic place-names, sites of army maneuvers
and enemy ambushes. Howe has her poem follow an assortment of rivers, mountains,
shores, and it passes through foreign locales and people known only through hearsay and
myth. Settings are filled out through a melange of contextual associations including persons
(hierarchical social structures alluded to through kings, princes, emperors, politicians, magi,
magicians, soldiers, women, and children), cultural knowledge (living accommodations,
economic means of sustenance, animal, plant and mineral catalogues) and religion (largely
through founding events of The Old Testament but also through gospel figures and
events)—all of which make for a difficult and confusing poem to follow. Howe strews
spatial language throughout the poem but, ironically, gives the modern reader no easy
roadmap and certainly no “accessible passes.” The results would have been even more
dislocating had such place-names been on the walls of a studio and surrounding the viewer.
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Ironically, then, because so much of the book is without “accessible passes,” I feel
compelled to seek as much guidance as possible from her writings on art. Again, a fair
amount of traction can be made by comparing the following passage with a “simplicity alive
with messages”:
invisible angel confined
to a point simpler than
a soul a lunar sphere a
demon darkened intelle
ct mirror clear receiv
ing the mute vocables
of God that rained
a demon daring down in h
ieroglyph and stuttering
(FS, 33)
Where to start with this complex passage? It is full of partial phrases and words that yield
little in the way of meaningful discourse. Like a black painting, the passage must be stared at
before it comes alive with messages. Picking through it, however, a handful of meaningful
phrases begin to appear. For instance, “a point simpler than / a soul a lunar sphere,”
compares with the simplicity of minimalism. Several phrases refer to language or to
impediments to communication. An “invisible angel” evokes a messenger (an angel), but for
some reason its messages cannot get through (because it is “confined”). The phrase “demon
darkened intelle / ct” alludes to a certain kind of mindset or approach to thinking; or it
perhaps continues from the earlier statement, so that the “point” is “simpler than / a soul
[and] a lunar sphere [and] a / demon darkened intelle / ct.” It may amount to saying that the
“invisible angel” can be found in extremes of simplicity: beneath soul, lunar sphere, and
demonic intellect. So “receiv / ing the mute vocables of God” raises the issue of divine
language, hence language that is outside of speech: language of a constituted (as opposed to
constitutive) subject. But the line breaks disrupt the words “intelle / ct” and “receiv / ing”
as if to suggest that something is interfering with the reception of these “mute vocables.”
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Language is cited again in the last line in “h / ieroglyph” and “stuttering,” which are two
kinds of language that are excluded in the modern world. Hieroglyphs depend on the
simultaneity of words and pictures, and stuttering is an interruption of language. 25 Overall,
the passage resists paraphrasing, which suggests there are many existent forms of language,
but that such forms are often impenetrable and seldom overlap.
Given the extraordinary use of fragmentary language and textual citation, it is doubtful
that there could be any fleshed-out speaker for the poem. But despite the fact that for a
good three-fourths of it the poem resists the representation of a “self,” the position of a
speaker can be gathered from several key passages, such as the following:
Remembered a fragment of the king’s face
remembered a lappet wig
remembered eunuchs lip to lip in silent profile kissing
remembered pygmies doing battle with cranes
remembered bones of an enormous size as proof of the existence of giants
remembered torso of a swimming girl
remembered the squeeze of a boundary
(FS, 41)
A likely model for this passage is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1970). Here are a few lines
typical of its repetition-based form:
I remember trying to convince my parents that not raking leaves was good
for the yard.
I remember that I liked dandelions a lot.
I remember that my father scratched his balls a lot.
I remember very thin belts.
I remember James Dean and his red nylon jacket.
I remember thinking how embarrassing it must be for men in Scotland to
have to wear skirts.
I remember when Scotch tape wasn’t very transparent. 26
25 Recall here Olson saying of Billy Budd, “The stutter is the plot”; Howe later cites this in an interview,
though I see no reason that in the early 1970s she would be quoting it specifically from him. For Howe’s
allusion to Olson on stuttering see her Talisman interview collected in The Birth-Mark, 180-181.
26 Joe Brainard, I Remember, (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 36.
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After the first volume Brainard published I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More
(1973), and the ongoing work (which totaled more than a thousand of the “I remember”
entries) was celebrated inside as well as outside the world of avant-garde poetry. The I
Remember format is still regularly assigned to poetry students. 27 It’s conceivable that Howe
was exposed to I Remember at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York, where she attended
numerous readings in the early seventies and even took a poetry writing workshop taught by
Ted Greenwald. (This all happened, by the way, well before Howe became close to leading
figures of Language Poetry, many of whom did not take on prominent roles at the Poetry
Project until after 1975.) If Howe’s passage is read as a response, then the most striking
aspect becomes the ironic subtraction of an “I” before each entry. Whereas I Remember
creates the semblance of intimacy with Brainard, Hinge Picture conveys an anonymous
memory. Whereas Brainard pares memory down to the least details necessary to
communicate a memory, Howe avoids construing memory around a picture that would be
transparent to the reader. What is remembered is notably different as well. Brainard
remembers his childhood and adolescence, in particular the flavor of mid-twentieth-century
Americana (through James Dean’s red nylon jacket for example). In Hinge Picture Howe
remembers fragments of ancient history. A few of Howe’s entries come straight from
Gibbons, such as the battle of pygmies and cranes in Chapter XXV of Decline and Fall. In this
poem the past is brought into the present, but without congealing around a definite speaker.
Still, the position of the speaker is evoked in the forming and unforming of memory. It’s as
27 Brainard wrote to Anne Waldman: “I am way, way up these days over a piece I am writing called I
Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is
because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And
that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody….”, summer 1969, quoted in Ron Padgett’s Afterword
(2001) to Joe Brainard, I Remember, p. 171. Pagett further describes Kenneth Koch using the I Remember format
because it was “natural for [teaching children to write poetry.] Since then, thousands of poets and teachers have
used this format in classrooms across the country…” (174).
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if the cogito is forced to constantly waver between self-certainty and self-doubt; in a telling
line that was omitted from the later version, Howe writes, “I am am I” (HP, unpaginated).
In fact, in this rather simple passage, Howe evidently runs up against the limits of
classicism. It helps to first follow Agnes Martin as she grounds the “remembered” passage
by equating “recurrence” with a “return to classicism.” As she was quoted earlier, “I don’t
believe in the eclectic / I believe in the recurrence / That this is a return to classicism.”
Indeed, each “recurrent” line further resonates with classical themes because what is
remembered comes straight out of Gibbon. But Hinge Picture is not straightforward because
its picture of the past is paradoxically incomplete and such a return, as Martin advocates, is
constantly frustrated. It is one thing for Martin to say, “One must see the Ideal in one’s own
mind. It is like a memory of perfection.” Howe seems to understand and even appreciate
this appeal, but she does not possess the requisite “one’s own mind” that could manage “a
memory of perfection.” This is of course not her fault; rather, the world she has grown up in
has foreclosed that possibility. Ironically, Howe uses recurrence in a manner that leads not to
classicism but to the eclectic:
clutching
my Crumbl
ejumble
among
Tombs and
in Caves
my
Dream
Vision
(FS, 51)
It’s tempting to say the poem is eclectic because neither the Gibbons nor the biblical
material belongs in any direct way to Howe’s inheritance. She does not have a total view of
that past but sees it rather as a “Crumbl/ejumble.” Or, perhaps such material belonged to
her parents’ generation, in particular the Harvard of her father’s family, but it does not have
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a place in Howe’s inheritance. To borrow Pound’s terms, I do not think Hinge Picture is a
poem that coheres with the classical foundations that it sets out from. The “Dream Vision” is
“clutching…among /Tombs and / in Caves.” Even the what it clutches—a “Crumbl /
ejumble”—is broken in the middle.
While a classical spirit might have been promising to the older artists who influenced
Howe, it would not have found support among younger artists and poets of her generation.
The hip setting of St. Mark’s Poetry Project during the early 1970s was in large part anti-
academic. Heavy-handed quotation from Gibbons would have been too reminiscent of high
modernists like the later Eliot and his followers. Poets in New York (where she was at the
time) frequently used found material, but this meant having a sharp eye for the fast-paced
culture of urban life and then composing an intense and witty reaction to some oddball
particular. But an intense reaction to a classical text was for some other kind of poet.
Gibbon and scriptural language would not likely have had much currency among Language
Poets either, many of whom were suspicious of Olson’s historicism. According to the new
avant-garde, critique should be based on the experience of language, not an idiosyncratic
history that could be fathomed only by specialists. As Charles Bernstein says of Maximus,
“The poem falls prey to the impulse to justify America by the appropriation and overlaying
of privileged texts (such as the Hesiodic myths, so specifically rooted in their own
geographical and historical context) that they are ingeniously contorted to appear relevant
but are only relevant by the wildest leap of a Gnostic imagination.” 28
Olson and Pound had just recently gone down the path of classicism, and for many
readers, the ideological underpinnings of those projects had resulted in their failure. If Howe
wanted to be a poet instead of an artist and if she wanted to find an avant-garde community
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in which her work would have a readership, then she could not go down the same path.
Language Poetry entailed (or entails) critiquing the production of modern life by language.
Whatever relevance King James and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have on modern
life is not easy to see. (A good question, however, is whether such sources may in fact be
more urgent if the person was born and raised in the Cambridge academic culture of Howe’s
childhood, but beyond such a sheltered setting, the urgency diminishes.) In the seventies
when Language Poets look to history, it is to recover ignored or suppressed poets and to
ground their poetics; such antecedents for them include Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky,
Russian Formalists, and Wittgenstein, among others. What Hinge Picture did have going for
itself in terms of poetic experimentation, however, was its form. Having taken scissors to the
source texts and splayed them across walls (or pages) in irregular shapes and arrangements,
all the while forcing attention to the words themselves, Howe participates in a
thoroughgoing avant-garde. Her antecedents in this respect range a full century of avant-
garde visual poetics, from Mallarmé Un Coup Des Dicé to Olson’s spatial attention in
“Projective Verse” (and especially as Howe later claims Maximus IV, V, VI). The hinge, in
fact, is quite possibly aimed at Olson’s notion of open versus closed verse. Where Olson
wants his reader to choose one or the other, a hinge in fact connects both the opened and
the closed.
I think that Howe must have been sensitive to the diminishing value of classicism in the
poetry world of the seventies. With this in mind, the final page of Hinge Picture strikes me as a
farewell to the classicism that she had taken from her artistic antecedents (Reinhardt, Finlay,
Martin, and minimalists). By the end there are no more “accessible passes” to classical
28 Charles Bernstein, “Undone Business” (1984), in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern U P, 2001), 334-335.
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sources, and in the following passage the “din” is an arrow that indicates the direction her
work is heading:
far off in the
dread blindness I
heard light eagerly
I struck my foot
against a stone
and raised a din
at the sound the
blessed Paul shut
the door which
had been open
and bolted it
(FS, 56)
The otherworldly “light” and the “sound” are evidently dead-ends. The last lines are a flat-
out rejection: “the blessed Paul / shut the door which had / been open and bolted it.” It
does not seem that the poem rejects the past but rather that the past rejects the poem. This
is notably one of the few glimpses of The New Testament as opposed to The Old
Testament. But rather than Paul inaugurating a continuous and unbroken line with the
beginning of Christianity, he locks it away in an immemorial past. In Hinge Picture a distant
spirit has been tried but found unfeasible in the end.
One issue that might qualify my argument about Howe’s sources is whether there is
something American in her choice of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. I ask this question as a lead-
in to Howe’s embrace of American history in her subsequent poetry. In a general the choice
of Gibbon anticipates her investigations of American history because both focus on the
impact of power and violence. But there is a more specific reason why Gibbon would have
been a timely and relevant choice. Although Decline and Fall was written during the rise of the
British Empire, it was sparked by anxiety about the loss of colonies and the end of British
rule. From this angle Gibbon might have struck a chord with a historically-minded American
writer at a time when the U.S. was expanding into South America and Southeast Asia. Given
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the context of the Cold War and the Vietnam era, when U.S. empire was facing its own
crisis, it’s conceivable that Howe’s choice of Gibbon was, if not deliberate, then at least
swayed by the current political climate.
It is fitting to note that Adams repeatedly names Gibbon his forerunner in The Education
of Henry Adams. The need to understand the history of empire that drove Gibbon beckons
again in Adams’s lifetime. He writes, “Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be
America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic
scheme of evolution. No law of progress applied to it. Not even time-sequences—the last
refuge of helpless historians.” (E, 91). The Roman Empire came to an end, and the same
fate met England, but still the historical explanations do little to enlighten Adams on what is
going to happen to his country in the coming century. The least he could do was follow
Gibbon’s undertaking: “The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
posing for Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist to the depths of his sub-
consciousness, and it was well for him that he should be nothing else…” (E, 92). It’s from
this moment that Adams becomes the “tourist” going in quest of the historical situation in
which he finds himself: “Substitute the word America for the word Rome, and the question
became personal” (E, 92). After Hinge Picture, Gibbon disappears from the horizon of
Howe’s concerns. References to a “classical spirit” disappear from her writing. She becomes
like a “tourist” in quest of her inheritance. Her poetry turns increasingly to her American
history, which is to say her inheritance from Puritan colonialism, Irish Immigration, the areas
of Boston, Buffalo, and the Connecticut River Valley and other vestiges of her family’s past.
In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine her poems from this period in which the
problem of inheritance is located closer to home, and the intersection of past and present
takes shape for the coming years.
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2.5) India Wharf Sculpture and “Boston Harbor”
Perhaps I am making Howe’s turn towards history and inheritance sound too sudden
and too deliberate, when in fact the changes happened much more gradually, extended over
several years, with quick retreats and advances along the way, and encompassed not only her
art, poetry, and prose, but also her participation in the sculpture that her husband was
creating. Take for example David von Schlegell’s India Wharf Sculpture, a large sculpture that
overlooked Boston Harbor. During 1972 Howe photographed the construction of it, and
one of these photographs is currently reproduced on the cover of Frame Structures (See
FIGURE 3.2). In the photograph only one of the four sections can be seen, but it still gives
a sense of its shape. When completed, the sculpture had four identical sections, each with
two planes coming together along a common edge. Each section looks like a three-
dimensional L-shape, which is already apparent on the cover of Frame Structures. One plane
lays flat on the ground, while the other extends in the air at an oblique angle. The four
sections are arranged two-by-two, with the angled surfaces leaning to the outside. It’s not
apparent from the book photograph, but each section eventually would be covered by
smooth sheets of stainless steel. The completed sculpture reaches to enormous dimensions:
60’9” x 58’10” x 15’7”. Because none of the individual sections touch any adjacent section,
and because the surfaces lean outwards, the sculpture creates a large empty space in its
center. The completed sculpture alongside the surrounding waters of Boston Harbor gives
the impression of a dry-dock in which a boat would rest during its construction.
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FIGURE 2.2
India Wharf Sculpture is site-specific, coordinating its empty center with a shipyard that
thrived on the same spot in the nineteenth century. A typewritten note on the back of one of
Howe’s photographs which are found in von Schlegell’s papers explains, “Donald McKay
Shipyard. 1973 East Boston. During the 19th Century the greatest clipper ships were built
here.” 29 The sculpture itself says nothing explicit about such ships. Like Reinhardt’s black
paintings, the sculpture lacks a message or a picture and offers the viewer only an empty
center of silence and mystery. But von Schlegell has found a way to make the sculpture
29 David von Schlegell Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Box 2, File name:
“Photographs I made while David was building Harbor Towers Piece of Drydock across Harbor that build big
clippers in part we used to visit. Donald McKay Shipyard.” This is in Howe’s handwriting.
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speak. In its empty center is precisely where history is invited to enter. History is by
definition a lack of presence, which the sculpture evokes through its own withholding of
meaning. The effect is to create a dialogue of sorts between the two forms of absence. The
sculpture might be characterized as a memorial, but only insofar as it commemorates
absence through its own structured absence. In this respect a dry-dock is doubly meaningful:
once constructed and ready to sail, the ship leaves an empty place where it stood. India Wharf
Sculpture is another example of finding “simplicity alive with messages.”
It may not seem fair game to introduce von Schlegell’s sculpture into a discussion of
Howe’s poetry, but in fact there are several moments of what I would call indirect or loose
collaboration between them, and this invites contemplating their work together. For example
the original version of The Liberties included von Schlegell’s drawing “Crossing the Ninth
Wave,” which Howe says is “part of the poem.” 30 Another coincidence of interest can be
seen in Von Schlegell’s 1979-1980 sculpture in Indianapolis, which was based on
Pythagoreas, and Howe’s book Pythagorean Silence (1982). It was also Howe’s decision to
“frame” Frame Structures with a photograph which she took of his sculpture, forcing the
reader to ponder the relevance of India Wharf Sculpture for her early poetry.
Howe’s early poem “Boston Harbor” can be thought of as a companion piece to India
Wharf Sculpture. She began writing it during the nine-month construction of the sculpture,
while Howe and von Schlegell were living in an apartment overlooking the construction site.
It was first printed in a Boston Literary journal called Fire Exit, for which Fanny Howe,
30 Howe tells Lynn Keller that she had to make cuts when she transferred The Liberties to The Europe of
Trusts. “That was David’s drawing, too; I loved that. If I could ever get that book done again, I would want it
back. I love that drawing. It’s part of the poem.” Keller, ibid., 17.
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Howe’s sister, was one of the editors and Mary Manning Howe, Howe’s mother, was a
financial backer through her Cambridge theater. The first page appeared as follows: 31
Boston Harbor
scud under bare poles
“He Stretcheth out the north over the empty
place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”
Job 26:7
The four words in the center, “scud under bare poles,” do not form a clear picture. They
might be thought of as a minimalist poem, for like the simplicity of a black painting, very
little traction is given to the reader. On closer inspection, the words form a nautical phrase
that was common in the nineteenth century: “In seaman’s language to scud means to drive
before a gale with no sails, or only just enough to keep the vessel ahead of the sea; ‘scudding
under bare poles’ is being driven by the wind so violently that no sail at all is set. Figuratively
it means to cut and run so precipitately as to leave no trace behind.” 32 In “Boston Harbor,”
the first line thus forewarns the reader to be on the lookout for what has left no trace, for
what was once present but is now absent (even ironically as the phrase itself once had
meaning that is now lost). The same idea was conveyed by India Wharf Sculpture. Von
Schlegell’s sculpture, Howe’s poem, and the forgotten history of the shipyard industry all
converge around the meaning of historical absence.
31 The poem can be found in Fire Exit #4 (1974) as well as the final section of The Western Borders. I want
to emphasize this book, uncollected in Frame Structures, partly because “Boston Harbor” is balanced by another
poem in the book, “Ireland.” Together the two produce a symmetry and tension between Ireland and Boston
that are essential to Howe’s historical and autobiographical poetry. Quotations from “Boston Harbor” will be
cited with page numbers to Fire Exit #4. For brief analysis of “Ireland” see 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, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 1990), 298.
32 Entry for “Scudding under Bare Poles.” Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1810–1897.
1898.
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A scriptural passage (the quotation from Job) underwrites “Boston Harbor” much like
the Reinhardt-St. John connection. But here something else happens. In the essay,
Reinhardt’s back painting is underwritten by scripture, but not historical precedent. In
contrast, Howe’s poem is underwritten not only by scripture but also by a reference to the
nineteenth-century shipping industry. The poem looks out with a stereoscopic view of
scripture and of American history. Moreover, in the poem, Howe has a much different
strategy for evoking historical reference than in Von Schlegell’s sculpture. The sculpture
evokes history through its site-specificity. It was built on the site where the industry once
thrived. A poem does not have this option; instead, history must be evoked through its use
of language. Whereas the sculpture depends on the forgotten site of a once-famous shipyard,
the poem depends on the forgotten names of clipper ships and their captains:
what sail snow vanished monuments
where vanished a Run
ice to the indies. Staghound
swift to the equator – sky sail and studding
in 13 days under
Capt. Dumaresq pronounce it
d’merrick and Romance
of the Sea
Notice how sound signifies absence through a name which is unrecognizable to modern
ears: “Capt. Dumaresq pronounce it / d’merrick.” The passage further structures absence by
listing the names of clipper ships that were built at the Donald McKay shipyard such as the
Staghound, the Romance of the Sea, and the Glory of the Seas. A century ago these were
world-record-breakers but today they are “vanished monuments.” The poem might even
bring to mind a sailing race through the frequency of words that contain s-sounds, which is
the lightest and swiftest letter of the alphabet, and which has a swirling shape like water. It
goes without saying that the most effective way to structure absence in language is to cut
away details, to withhold a complete narrative or representation of events, which is perhaps
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why in “Boston Harbor” the reader is given so few crumbs to follow. In her later poetry,
Howe can sometimes allow even fewer details, but she compensates with a preface or
introductory essay that points to the historical narrative around which the poem has been
constructed. In “Boston Harbor” there is no such introduction. It balances specific events
(such as the reference to “13 days” as the time it took the Staghound to win a world record),
with a countermovement towards divulging little information about those events. The reader
is handed sparse details as if to emphasize the pastness of the past. The Staghound’s race
took place over a stretch of “13 days” that is no longer available to experience.
The absence of the past is essential to this poem, but so too is the position of whoever
witnesses that absence. One passage offers a vivid picture of Howe overlooking the harbor
and her husband working on the “lost dry bones / of the drydock dinosaur”:
the shipyard 6 pm
the western sun at Sink
time tweaks at the Poles
time catches queer at 6 pm
deflective light on the lost
(where from Staghound to Glory of the Seas
an orb of globe in 22 days)
on the lost dry bones
of the drydock dinosaur
Although there is no “I,” there is still a viewpoint that can be described. It reads, “the
shipyard 6pm,” like an entry in a diary. The viewpoint—shall we call it Howe’s?—is aware
that the past is evoked through its absence, the need for “deflective light on the lost.” It is
like Dickinson vowing to tell the truth but “tell it slant.” Howe is struggling to express what
has disappeared from the horizon of Boston Harbor: “lost dry bones / of the drydock
dinosaur.” This brings Olson’s archaeology to mind, for the line “time catches queer at 6
pm” sounds like it could have come straight from his poetry. If I can play with the names a
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it, Howe responds to his Archeologist of Morning (his poetry collection from 1973) with her
paleontologist of evening (“drydock dinosaur” at “6pm”).
“Boston Harbor” is by no means an offspring of Olson’s poetry alone. Howe was also
reading Marianne Moore at the time, and her poems “The Fish” and “A Graveyard” were
evidently influential. Like “Boston Harbor,” “A Graveyard” features a viewpoint from the
shore and the attempt to see beyond that limiting threshold:
Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as
you have to it yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. 33
The signal difference is that Moore wants the reader to think about a symbolic absence and
Howe wants the reader to think about a historical absence. For Moore, the sea symbolizes an
alienating “human nature.” She defines “human nature” in terms of its centrality (“in the
middle of a thing”). She then indicates the thing that cannot be central to human experience,
namely “a well-excavated grave,” or the thought of impending death. Moore’s poem is
essentially about an existential condition, while Howe’s viewpoint is defined by a historical
condition. It depends on what has disappeared from the current historical moment, namely
the ability to recognize the names of New England shipyards. Those names which represent
craftsmanship and industry have disappeared from the horizon of the present. Still, in terms
of poetic form, Howe breaks up words much like Moore. In “The Fish” Moore splits the
word “ac-/cident” in order to avoid deviating from a patterned form:
33 Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, (New York: Penguin, 1982), 49.
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All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes… 34
The fact that Moore could be such an influence tells us that Howe’s introduction to
writing poetry clearly included exposure to avant-garde as well as canonical poets—in fact
her interest in Moore anticipates her later admiration for poets like Eliot and Stevens. This
might help explain why “Boston Harbor” and Hinge Picture are such markedly different
poems, despite the fact that they were written around the same time. Hinge Picture came first
and was written in large part under the auspices of Duchamp. Hinge Picture is by an artist and
what she knows best is art. “Boston Harbor” is written by an artist who is making a
conscious effort to do what poets do. The artist has been exposed to poetry but not through
any standard route. It’s very likely nobody in her correspondence from this period was
recommending Moore, especially not Finlay nor her sister Fanny Howe, who was already
writing poetry and who is known to have recommended Olson in 1968 or 1969. 35 The letters
from Lax to Howe which are quoted in “The End of Art” give the impression of an artist
asking a poet to explain his vertical arrangement of words. She quotes the following
response from Lax:
34 Ibid, 32-33.
35 See her comments to Lynn Keller, “Around that time (1968 or ’69) through my sister Fanny, I became
acquainted with Charles Olson’s writing. What interested me in both Olson and Robert Smithson was their
interest in archaeology and mapping. Space. North American space—how it’s connected to memory, war,
history.” Keller, ibid., 5.
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i like white space &
i like to see a vertical
column centered
sometimes verticality helps in
another way
image follows image
as frame follows frame
on a film
verticality helps the
poet withhold his
image until
(through earlier
images) the
mind is prepared
for it.
(EA, 4)
The fact that Howe wrote “Boston Harbor” before “The End of History” leads to a few
observations about the difference in the historicism of her poetry as compared to her prose.
Both works demonstrate a strong appreciation of how historical language informs the
present. In the essay a scriptural subtext underwrites Reinhardt’s description of his black
paintings, and in “Boston Harbor” a scriptural epigraph (in the passage quoted above) sets
the tone for her evocation of emptiness. But “Boston Harbor” goes a step further because it
evokes American history in ships from the Donald McKay Shipyard. This suggests that her
poetry explores American history before her prose, and it explores not just American history
as such, but also the impact of history on her work, and by extension on herself. Again,
Boston was her home for much of her childhood, so “Boston Harbor” has a personal
connotation that is unmistakable. American history is not mentioned in her prose until the
follow-up piece on Reinhardt when he is aligned with Melville.
Does this mean that Howe’s poetry develops her distinct form of historicism before her
prose? It might be tempting to brush this question aside and say that Howe’s early work,
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oth in poetry and in prose, is all one big soup in which no distinctions can or should be
isolated, certainly not if the hope is to arrive at something like the “growth of a poet’s
mind.” Still, there are indications that the early poems contain a more complex approach to
history than the early prose—and without her being entirely aware or self-conscious of a
change. After all, even in the Reinhardt review the Melville equation is based on her saying
that she “senses” something “American and isolate” in the black paintings. It is not an
objective argument but her hunch or impression, and it is couched in open and provisional
language, “Perhaps the black paintings and the white whale are the same” (my italics).
It may be that more than any other work from the seventies, “Boston Harbor”
anticipates the historicism of Howe’s later writing. I say this because of an unexpected and
more than likely unintentional connection between the poem and F.O. Matthiessen’s
groundbreaking study of nineteenth-century American literature, American Renaissance: Art
and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). It has been seen how the vanishing
memory of Donald McKay’s shipyard afforded Howe with historical material for her poem.
It turns out that Matthiessen chose a daguerreotype of McKay for the frontispiece of his
book for almost exactly opposite reasons: not because McKay was a vanishing memory but
rather because he typifies the “heroic stature” at the center of the study. As Matthiessen
explains,
Rather than add to these portraits [of Hawthorne and Whitman] any of the already
well-known likenesses of my other writers, I have chosen to reproduce the finest
daguerreotype I have ever seen, the portrait by Southworth and Hawes (1854) of
Donald McKay (1818-1880), the master shipbuilder of the clipper era, a farmer’s son
who reached his full fame when, in the same year as Moby-Dick, he built at East
Boston the Flying Cloud. McKay’s portrait makes the most fitting frontispiece, since it
reveals the type of character with which the writers of the age were most concerned,
the common man in this heroic stature, or as Whitman called the new type, “Man in
the Open Air.” 36
36 F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, (Oxford:
Oxford U P, 1941), xxvi.
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In her counter-study, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History
(1993), published nearly two decades after “Boston Harbor,” Howe responds directly to
Matthiessen by trying to understand why “women were banished” (BM, 18) from his study.
He wrote chapters on Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman, but left out
Dickinson and Margaret Fuller, even though he came close to including a chapter on the
latter. Where Matthiessen foists on his audience a canon of “already well-known likenesses,”
Howe keeps in play the question of who remains “banished” from the present. I think the
McKay connection is not intentional on Howe’s part, but rather ironically anticipates her
later investigations of suppressed iconoclastic voices in American history. She writes about
the disappearance of McKay, who symbolizes the virtue of Matthiessen’s American
Renaissance, but that question of disappearance stays with her when she then goes on to
write about others who have disappeared because of the very model that supports an
American Renaissance canon.
2.6) Female Mariner
The last thing I want to discuss in this chapter is the exploratory nature of Howe’s early
poems. This is embodied in a “female mariner” who intermittently appears in her early
poems, and even looms over later work. The poem “Song,” published in Maureen Owen’s
Telephone #11 (1975) but not republished since, first introduces the female mariner—
older than anything world for miles and leaky
I wade in sea terms
neap tide and inaccessible island my female mariner
absurd and many Turnings
backyard evenings down the hall the hills be dizzy
we be all shes and jingles
all night the house knocked sand lit and cozy show
false fires answer frequent
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whimper no far pillar for the world on seeing me
looking I tumble glass
whimper no far sea pillar feeling myself to wax weakly
rain going hurricane)hush
your fame to follow twenty years ago meaning jingle
I don’t do any fun to save the ships 37
This poem revises several previous commitments. In “Boston Harbor” the viewpoint is
from the shore. In this poem the speaker fully enters the water and “wade[s] in sea terms.” A
“neap tide,” for example, means a tide of minimum range occurring at certain phases of the
moon. In Hinge Picture the landscape was marked by “accessible passes.” In this poem the
female mariner veers full tilt towards an “inaccessible island.” The goal which remains
unnamed can only be circled with “absurd and many Turnings.” Perhaps such turning
accounts for the swirling allusions, reversals, and distorted syntax. Several moments intimate
a conflict for the female mariner who seems to be stuck in a “house” or some other
domestic situation. She evidently has insomnia because “all night the house knocked.”
Meanwhile, the sea beckons her away from the house, towards a “far pillar.” This is
supported by a later line, “my female mariner stand in doorways down the hall.” It seems
the mariner is not at sea, or not yet at least. “I don’t do any fun save the ships,” she says. Is
this supposed to be pirate-speak? Rather than “we be pirates,” it reads, “we be all shes and
jingles.” The same poem continues further down,
absurd call so swiftly Said,wings unstiff and veerable swell.
no rest being Gall.Cud and clog in lea of Prone,fame never follows.
drag tired hump to dinner, where spittle fall it casts a scab.
The lines never resolve into complete sentences or straightforward diction. Instead they
“swell” with energy, or pent up desire, breaking rules of spelling, grammar, and spacing, in a
stream of words that surges forward. Some of the phrases can be individually interpreted,
37 Susan Howe, “Song,” Telephone 11 (1975), unpaginated.
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such as “call so swiftly,” “no rest,” and “fame never follows.” They could have come from
almost anywhere, however, so no final interpretation presents itself. In fact, many of the
phrases and the words that seem to interrupt them give the impression of shapes that are
falling out of form. Something is “unstiff” and there is a “veerable swell.” This is poetry that
stands not on solid ground, but rather on the inconstant surface of a sea.
Water is a frequent theme in these early poems. The language alludes to oceans, seas,
rivers, shores, beaches, sand, ships, and coves, and also to swimming and drowning. In the
same issue of Telephone as “Song” is a selection from Howe’s volume The Western Borders
(1976), which includes imagery such as “the illimitable silver sea” and “the golden white-
tailed sea.” The selection ends with what looks like a “found text,” presumably from a
spelunking manual. After describing “a pool 15 deep in some places and about 30 ft long
[that] fills this final passage,” the paragraph concludes, “The water is intensely chill and an
inexperienced improperly equipped caver could panic and strike out for the cave walls which
are slippery and under water slope sharply away from the center.” 38 Water images and
nautical iconography continue to appear in Howe’s later work, especially on her covers.
Hinge Picture has a photograph of a schooner, the Vigilant, on its cover. The Liberties (1980)
has a photograph of a small moterboat on its cover. The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993) has a
sketch of a sailboat by Percy Shelly that was recovered from his drowning. The Birth-mark
(1993) has faint swirling lines on its cover that seem to suggest water. Howe even casts
Dickinson as the female mariner when discussing her affinity for George Eliot: “What did
this female Columbus crossing an uncharted fictive ocean find in George Eliot that made
her the lane to the Indies rather than Harriet Beecher Stowe or Margaret Fuller, her own
country-women, or even Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her fellow poet?” (MED, 19).
38 Susan Howe, Telephone 11 (1975), unpaginated.
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Once again David von Schegell enters the picture, for ships and related nautical
iconography, such as we have seen in “Ninth Wave” and India Wharf Sculpture, are regular
themes in his sculpture. As Von Schlegell once remarked, “All the years of my youth I was
obsessed with the lucid structures of boats and aeroplanes; designing them, building them,
contemplating them, and using them. Theirs was an object/space dichotomy in which the
object attained a purity by its absolute dependence on nature.” 39 His sculptural projects
include Wave at Primary Structures and Voyage of Ulysses (1976), which was commissioned for
the Byrne Green Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia. “The sculpture is dramatic, activating
dead space,” von Schlegell says of Voyage of Ulysses, which combines two forms of flowing
water, one that resembles the bow wave of a ship and the second that resembles a
transparent, curved flow of water over a dam. “I have called it Voyage of Ulysses. I think of it
as a metaphor for the dimly perceived but grand emotions and events from a deep past,
providing resonance to our concept of time; a duality here made of the still, vaguely heroic
object and the flowing water.” 40 It’s worth noting that von Schlegell and Howe regularly
went sailing together, and in 1972 they moved to a home near the ocean in Guilford,
Connecticut. There Howe has kept a series of wood sculptures that he created in 1979-1981
that depict the curvature of hulls with carved and natural lines in the wood. 41
Several of the poems in The Western Borders (1976) contain images of islands, seas, coves,
bays, and harbors. In “LIFT BACK THE HATCH OF THE ARK AND LOOK OUT,”
which again evokes scriptural associations, a flood suddenly brings destruction to the
39 David von Schlegell, “Two Outdoor Pieces,” Arts Magazine (May-June 1973): 30. Howe discusses his
relationship to airplanes (he was a pilot in WWII) in “Sorting Facts,” an essay which I take up in the next
chapter.
20.
40 David von Schlegell, “The Making of a Sculpture,” Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal XLI: 4 (1977): 19-
41 These were exhibited at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1981. A different wood was used for each
sculpture, among them rosewood, cherry, ebony , red oak, Honduran mahogany.
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speaker’s home—and this poem unlike so many by Howe begins with a rather coherent
speaker. What’s curious, then, is that the flood destroys the very images of home that were
previously so confining to the female mariner of “Song”:
When the tremors began
I rushed into the metaphysical yard.
Paper doors bent when opened
the ground swayed like sea.
I couldn’t stand
I saw that walls and houses shook
The twenty foot tower of a church
came tumbling down.
Some hid in caves
Some lashed themselves to tree-trunks
Suspended between two trees
they swung back and forth.
Part of the house began to fly away
I locked the door
and pocketed the key.
“Is so and so there?”
“And so and so?”
Our skiff was a fir log
loaded with barnacles
and other trash.
In the morning
when I looked out
So many droves of Hungry Bay
They obscured the light.
(WB, unpaginated)
In the first half of the poem the “tremors” bring destruction to the solid land, the houses,
the church, and “the metaphysical yard” where the speaker initially seeks refuge. The second
half “in the morning” takes place the day after the catastrophe. The speaker has witnessed in
effect the end of her world but she has somehow survived it. The predicament is reminiscent
of Olson in “The Kingfishers,” which famously begins, “what does not change / is the will
to change / / He woke, fully clothed, in his bed…” (SW, 167). In his poem Olson discards
one metaphysical paradigm after another, and then concludes with his renewed commitment
to exploration: “I hunt among stones” (SW, 173). In Howe’s poem the speaker is again the
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female mariner. She has survived destruction by resourcefully making use of debris left from
the flood. Her “ARK” is a skiff made of a “fir log / loaded with barnacles / and other
trash.” Similarly, Olson places his hope on the “fetid nest” formed of “rejectamenta” from
which the “young are born” (SW, 168). In a strange twist of gender roles, Howe’s poem is
aligned with a mariner and Olson’s poem is aligned with maternity!
This poem also compares with the finale of Hinge Picture (quoted above) where “the
blessed Paul / shut the door which had / been open and bolted it.” In this poem the
female mariner has “locked the door / and pocketed the key.” Earlier Paul possesses agency
by closing the door and bringing the poem to an end, but now the female mariner controls
the key and thus demonstrates her agency. Notice that agency is granted only insofar as she
escapes from the “metaphysical yard,” and one could read this as Howe’s farewell to a
metaphysical world. Richard Rorty explains that a “metaphysician is still attached to
common sense, in that he does not question the platitudes which encapsulate the use of a
given final vocabulary, and in particular the platitude which says there is a single permanent
vocabulary to be found behind the many temporary appearances.” 42 From a metaphysical
point of view, the truth is absolute and unchanging. A metaphysician “believes that there are,
out there in the world, real essences which it is our duty to discover and which are disposed
to assist in their own discovery” (75). In times of uncertainty a metaphysician retreats to
fixed structures and beliefs. Howe probably points to such a retreat when she writes, “Some
hid in caves” and “Some lashed themselves to tree-trunks.” Unlike them Howe sets out for
the sea. She rejects metaphysics not just as a philosophical way of speaking but as a general
outlook on life. It seems that she adopts the position which Rorty opposes to the
metaphysician, the “ironist” who “thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence,” and
42 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 74
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who “worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by
giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the
wrong kind of human being” (75). The female mariner is like the ironist in embracing the
“rootlessness” of her existence and thinking that human beliefs, desires, and conflicts are
contingent and can be changed by redescribing them. Howe is motivated, however, by the
question of who is missing from her horizon: “Is so and so there? / And so and so?” At the
end of the poem she is sailing in “obscured… light.” This paints a picture of drifting or
wandering in darkness, where the main image on her horizon is of the “many droves of
Hungry Bay.” We do not know what “Hungry Bay” refers to, but “Hungry” implies human
needs and vulnerability, which the female mariner now senses all around her. This
corresponds to the ironist whose foremost priority (which is not ironic in the least) is the
elimination of pain in others. It would seem that Howe has found a moral purpose for her
work, a direction in which to point her sails.
To go back to “Song” for a moment, consider for the sake of contrast the only other
poem in the same issue of Telephone to deal directly with history. Ray Di Palma’s untitled
poem features a series of canonical writers with a brief fact about each:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
upon graduating from Bowdoin College
entered a 12 year writing apprenticeship
Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
believed passionately in man’s need to
expatiate his sins through suffering
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
contracted a nervous condition from which he
sought relief first through travel and then
in semiretirement
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Henry James (1843-1916)
once characterized the goal of fiction as
“catching the very note and trick, the strange
irregular rhythm of life” 43
An additional ten writers follow in what might be a required reading list for students of
literature, perhaps with a name like “Literary Genius Since the 19th Century.” By matching
the names of writers with biographical trivia, the poem satirizes a canonical model of
organizing literary history, especially any such model that valorizes the writer over the work.
It’s not a high-minded indictment carried out with theoretical language about the hegemony
of values or canons, which it could have been. Instead, Di Palma casually foregrounds the
chronic shortfall of biographical information against whatever associations are normally
evoked by each writer for those familiar with the work. The entry for James Joyce is
emblematic of the critique that the poem is making as a whole: “when told that Finnegans
Wake would take a / lifetime to read replied that so it should / since the book had required a
lifetime to write.” The idea is that biographical trivia is less important than if we could
devote our time to reading Finnegan’s Wake. But I quote this poem because aside from its
critique of canon organization, the list is surprisingly comprised wholly of male writers. What
is more surprising is that the date of the poem is 1975, a time when the male-only canon was
beginning to come under intense criticism. Whereas the poem gives no indication
whatsoever that gender bears any part of its critique, it’s needless to say that such a one-
sided list would not escape notice by Howe’s female mariner. Again, her question is pitched
at the level of who has been pushed out of the picture. Di Palma’s poem is pitched at the
level of what we know and how we organize it. Howe’s question in the future will be how
what we know obscures what we do not know.
43 Ray Di Palma, untitled poem, Telephone 11, unpaginated.
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Let me close this chapter with a drawing from one of Howe’s working sketchbooks that
nicely recapitulates what I have been saying about her artistic background and her turn to
poetry (see FIGURE 3.3). Howe had been reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence which
was at the time newly published. In the years since, the theory of poets having oedipal
origins has been so ridiculed by actual poets (as well as critics) that it is difficult to imagine
the initial reaction of a young poet when she first encountered its argument. Surprisingly, her
response is not to discredit the notion of influence in its entirety, but rather to take influence
as far more complex and expansive than a linear model can account for. In her cross-limbed
“tree” are the multifarious influences that feed into her own work. At the top is Shakespeare
with a line into Milton, and indeed these two are at the center of Bloom’s theory. Milton
connects to Melville, as does Hawthorne, and from him another line that goes up to “ALL
MEN.” Branching off from Melville is Whitman, though Howe specifies “no connection”
between them. Poe is placed at about the same level as the other nineteenth century
American writers, but his only line of connection leaps across the page to Mallarmé, who is
crammed into a small space with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Just beneath the latter are Pound
and Eliot, and a lateral line connects them to Williams. At the next level down is Olson,
whose name connects to Melville, Pound, and Eliot, but curiously enough, not to Williams.
Another line goes from Olson down to Robert Smithson, who also connects up to
Williams. 44 Above Smithson’s name is “mans art” which is part-underlined. Finally, Howe
locates herself (“me”) in a line going down from Smithson. No other lines come in or out of
her, so accordingly, Smithson mediates her only literary influences. She locates herself very
44 In a 1972 interview with Paul Cummings (the same Cummings who edited Howe’s essay “The End of
Art”), Smithson talks about his relationship with Williams: “I guess the Paterson area is embedded in my
psyche. As a kid I used to go and prowl around all those quarries. And of course, they figured strongly in
Paterson. When I read the poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson where it showed all
the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of a proto-conceptual art, you might say… Williams did have a sense of
that kind of New Jersey landscape.” Robert Smithson, ibid, 285.
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near a blank space pointed to by two lines coming down, one line from Olson and one from
between Eliot and Pound, but she has not (yet) assumed that space for herself. I take this
last part to confirm the fact that her poems in the mid-70s were more influenced by her
exposure to art than to poetry, which I have tried to show in this chapter. Finally, her
marginal note, “all this goes to prove you can always find some one else—more than just
one,” opens inheritance beyond the horizon of positive knowledge about one’s historical
determination. This recognition points forward to the next chapter on the use of
documentary forms in historical poetry. For Howe documents reveal and conceal the many
currents of inheritance.
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128
FIGURE 2.3

CHAPTER 3. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND DOCUMENTS
3.1) A Documentary Life
The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He
does not comment…Each historian will ‘have ideas’—
presumably different from other historians—imperfect
inductions, varying as the fashions, but the luminous details
remain unaltered.
—Ezra Pound (SP, 23)
(1) what I call DOCUMENT simply to emphasize that the
events alone do the work, that the narrator stays OUT,
functions as pressure not as interpreting person, illuminates not
by argument or “creativity” but by master of force (as space is
shaper, confining maintaining inside tensions of objects), the art,
to make his meanings clear by how he juxtaposes, correlates,
and causes to interact whatever events and persons he chooses to
set in motion. In other words his ego or person is NOT of the
story whatsoever. He is, if he makes it, light from outside, the
thing itself doing the casting of what shadows;
—Charles Olson, (CP, 283)
During the twentieth century, avant-garde poets have increasingly turned to documents
for language outside of what originates in the poet. A documentary poem (sometimes called
a citational poem) consists in large part, if not entirely, of texts that are already written when
the poet comes across them. Poets have made documentary poems from a variety of pre-
written sources, such as correspondence, diaries, newspapers, dictionary entries, marginalia,
interest rate data, shipping records, court records, architectural specifications, and even other
poems—and this list is hardly complete. Once the poet has found the document (or
documents), there are multiple ways that he or she can work it into the poem; a few such
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poems are made up entirely of documents, as for example “The Record” and “14 MEN
STAGE HEAD WINTER 1624/5,” in the first volume of The Maximus Poems. In using
documents a poet takes seriously William Carlos Williams’s comment that a poem can be
made out of anything. The sole condition is that a document must be a “found” text and not
one made up by the poet.
Because it participates in a larger tendency towards what Olson calls “getting rid of the
lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (SW, 24), the documentary poem would thus
seem completely at odds with autobiography, assuming of course that a necessary condition
of autobiography is that it be a direct outpouring from the writer and not from someone
else. For this very reason autobiography has largely remained a non-issue in the study of
documentary forms in American poetry. 1 But if a poet assumes that he or she is a creature of
history, then autobiography is no longer confined to narratives of self-representation that
originate with the poet. For Pound, Olson, and Howe, documents provide a window onto
how such narratives were historically formed in the first place. For each poet, the goal is not
a documentation of history as such, but a documentation of inheritance, and for this reason
the documentary poem is a form of autobiography.
This view of documentary poems departs not only from critical definitions of the form,
but also from the positions voiced by the poets themselves, as evident in the epigraphs
above. For Pound, the responsibility of the poet is to “seek out” and “present” a document
without getting in its way, so autobiography would seem precluded at the outset. Pound
believes that the right documents can present the essential facts of history in a condensed
form, or what he calls a “luminous detail.” He explains: “the method of Luminous Detail, a
1 See notes below on Michael Davidson, Ming-Qian Ma, and Ralph Maud. For a historical reading of
Pound’s use of documents, see Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the
Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991).
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method most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of today—that is, the method of
multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and
generalization. The latter are too inexact and the former too cumbersome to be of much use
to the normal man wishing to live mentally active” (SP, 21). On one side is a danger that an
artist will provide too much historical knowledge (or the multitudinous detail), which Pound
says would paralyze “the normal man wishing to live mentally active.” On the other side is
the danger that an artist will romanticize the past with “sentiment and generalization,” which
Pound says would be “too inexact” for practical purposes. A luminous detail is said to
transmit usable knowledge to the present in the most expedient form possible; as Pound
explains, “A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of a period—a kind of
intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort. These facts are
hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the
switchboard governs an electric current.” (SP, 22-23); for our concerns, it is important to see
that Pound warns against any tampering with the luminous detail. He demands complete
non-interference so the luminous detail can shine by itself: “The artist seeks out the
luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment…the luminous details remain
unaltered.” The luminous detail is intended to be utterly non-subjective; the artist is
governed by the imagist rule to “show and not interfere.”
A similar plea is heard in Olson’s “Introduction to Robert Creeley” (1951), from which
the second epigraph is taken. Olson believes that narrative forms have reached a historical
impasse because most narratives merely describe events rather than constitute events in
themselves. He worries that narrative language becomes “sterile” when events are mediated
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y layers of commentary or summary imposed by another party. 2 The more representational
that a narrative becomes, says Olson, the more that a reader is separated from anything
actual or concrete. His solution is to restore an experiential dimension to language through
the use of documents. The reader has a first-hand encounter with documents which are
inside (or part of) the text. Olson calls this “RE-ENACTMENT.” In turn, he distrusts an
overt representation of the writer within the text because of the danger that the writer’s ego
will obstruct the immediacy of the document. Olson thus banishes the narrator from the
text. 3 Although Olson could be faulted for equating a document with a pure event (which
obscures the fact that documents are writing), he formulates an intriguing distinction
between the documents “alone” and the exterior narrator who masters them by “force.”
Even though the narrator, like a puppeteer, is out of the reader’s view, Olson believes that
narrative involvement returns when the poet “juxtaposes, correlates, and causes [documents]
to interact.” Unlike Pound, who locates luminosity in the detail (or fact or document), Olson
locates luminosity in the agency of the narrator, described as a “light from outside.” Olson
shares Pound’s principle of non-interference, but differs from the older poet in recognizing
2 See also “Letter to Elaine Feinstein.” To Feinstein’s question about the “use of the Image,” Olson
responds that images evoked by use of analogy or comparison are but “sterile grammar”: “Thus representation
was never off the dead-spot of description. Nothing was happening as of the poem itself—ding and zing or
something. It was referential to reality. And that was a p. poor crawling actuarial ‘real’—good enough to keep
banks and insurance companies, plus mediocre governments etc.”(CP, 251). Olson distrusts a purely referential
use of language because he believes that this sustains the alienating institutions of modern life (“banks and
insurance companies”).
3 The second way that Olson sees to redeem narrative, which is exemplified by Creeley’s stories, is “(2) the
exact opposite, the NARRATOR IN, the total IN to the above total out, total speculation as against the half
management, half interpretation, the narrator taking on himself the job of making clear by way of his own
person that life is preoccupation with itself, taking up the push of his own single intelligence to make it, to be—
by his conjectures—so powerful inside the story that he makes the story swing on him, his eye the eye of
nature INSIDE (as is the same eye, outside) a lightmaker” (CP, 283). The narrator must summon total
attention so as to grasp events that surround him or her and illuminate the world. Olson holds that both ways
of narrating “drive for the same end…to re-enact experience that a story has what an object or person has:
energy and instant” (CP, 283). Olson wants immediacy between the events and the experience of those events.
The narrator is to avoid letting the actuality of an event be subordinated to its representation. “Events have
outreached narrators, have overmatched them…” (CP, 283).
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that events must be “set in motion.” Olson thus seems more aware that the narrator is
implicated in the presentation of documents. He treats “document” as more verb than noun.
In just a moment I will return to Howe, who speaks not of luminosity but of what voices
have been obscured or shadowed in a patriarchal history. But first I want to emphasize how
Olson and Pound seem to disallow the possibility of autobiography in documentary poems.
For each, the responsibility of the poet is to “seek” and “present” essential facts, and for
each this becomes, in theory and in practice, a basis for making documents the building
blocks of a historical epic. Ideally the documents are to remain free, closed off from the
subjectivity of the poet. In practice this separation is by no means a constant, and numerous
poems by Pound or Olson waver between presentation of the documents as such, and a
view of the poet “behind” the text who acts by selection and arrangement. A good example
is Olson’s poem “The Librarian” when he dreams of his father “selling books and
manuscripts”:
My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,
there should be materials here for Maximus…
(SP, 86)
But in nearly all of the stated positions, the documents are supposed to be “unaltered”
(Pound) and not “interpreted” or “creative” (Olson). Moreover, this expectation has been
handed over directly to their interpreters. When critics measure the efficacy of a
documentary poem, they seldom appeal to other criteria than how objectively the documents
are presented; for example, one critic argues against the efficacy of The Cantos by saying that
the documents are “Pound’s mouthpieces” and that “quotations are used as stage lighting
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for ‘the dance of the intellect among words.’” 4 Again, the prevailing criterion is that the best
documentary poem is the one that is least autobiographical.
Of course there are many advantages to thinking of documentary poems as having
nothing to do with the poet, and one wouldn’t want to discard those advantages too hastily
when trying to redraw the relationship between documents and autobiography. According to
Michael Davidson, a documentary poem facilitates a more socially engaged practice. By
dislodging a document from its original context, a poem can expose “the institutional venues
through which history is written.” 5 Davidson demonstrates the accomplishment of two
poems in particular, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, which incorporates congressional
testimony, and Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, which incorporates court records. The virtue
of each poem is that by surrendering individual perspective, the poem acknowledges and
often actually includes a multiplicity of viewpoints on a given historical event. This can be
seen ideally as a more democratic model of history because a single historian has not
imposed his or her version of events at the expense of other possible perspectives. Davidson
writes: “The example of Testimony suggests… that the poet serves not as witness but as
editor—a witness of witnesses—whose arrangement of legal documents supplies a social
narrative for acts of private observation.” 6 The poet’s self is found only in what Davidson
calls “an extreme example of negative capability.” Autobiography is thus less of an issue with
4 By contrast, Ming-Qian Ma says that in Zukofsky’s poems, “quotations are themselves the dance,
occupying center stage of the poem. Zukofsky’s ontological treatment of quotations is theorized in the poet’s
definition of poetry itself, which is ‘precise information on existence out of which it grows, and information of
its own existence, that is, the movement (and tone) of words’” (136). For Ma, Pound subordinates the
document to his own schemes while Zukofsky releases it to a free movement located inside the text of the
poem. See Ming-Qian Ma, “A ‘no man’s land!’ Postmodern Citationality in Zukofsky’s ‘Poem beginning ‘The,’”
in Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins (Tuscaloosa, Ala: U. Alabama P, 1997),
136.
5 Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, (U California P, 1997), 139.
6 Ibid., 151.
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the documents because the history in question is said to be radically disconnected from the
poet. The relationship between the history and the poet is not arbitrary, however, but
depends rather on affective criteria. As Reznikoff states, “Something happens and it
expresses something that you feel, not necessarily because of those facts, but because of
entirely different facts that give you the same kind of feeling” 7 Davidson adds, “Reznikoff’s
objectification does not escape empathy but provides a series of surfaces upon which
identification can be built.” 8
One question that arises is what exactly Rukeyser or Reznikoff finds compelling about
the historical event that he or she chooses to document. Here we should distinguish between
two kinds of documentary poems: the documentary poem of history versus the documentary
poem of inheritance. Whereas Rukeyser and Reznikoff are practitioners of the former, the
poets at the center of this study are practitioners of the latter. Rukseyer’s interest in the
exploitation of miners or Reznikoff’s interest in the impact of jurisprudence on people from
across the U.S. is not immediately relevant to each poet’s personal background—or at least
that relevance is not as obvious as compared to Olson’s interest in the founding of
Gloucester or Howe’s interest in the history of the Irish Diaspora. None of this is to
discount a formal affinity between the documentary poems created by each poet. 9 But
Rukeyser and Reznikoff do not assume (here at least) to have an inherited self. They
document history that does not directly constitute the self of the poet, so the results are not
a form of autobiography. Pound, Olson, and Howe, on the other contrary, presume to have
7 Ibid. Davidson quotes an interview of Reznikoff by L. S. Dembo, “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet: Four
Interviews,” Contemporary Literature 10.2 (Spring 1969), 106.
8 Ibid, 151.
9 Ralph Maud shows that Olson thought Reznikoff’s documentary practice was important enough to
mention it in a 1950 letter to Creeley. “He is a lawyer,” writes Olson about Reznikoff’s Testimony.” He made his
book up of selections from court records, of situations, or words, or ‘plots’ therein discovered.” See Ralph
Maud, Olson’s Reading: A Biography, 85.
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an inherited self, so when they document that inheritance, the results are in fact a form of
autobiography.
What the documentary poem of history and the documentary poem of inheritance have
in common is an interest in getting outside the subjectivity of the poet. Not surprisingly,
then, a documentary approach is of extraordinary benefit when a poet wants to write about a
personal subject but not to become unduly private or self-indulgent. In a work that focuses
on a personal issue a poet will sometimes want to avoid putting his or her self in the
forefront, and so a documentary form provides an appropriate solution. The two obvious
examples of combining documents and autobiography are Pound’s short book Gaudier-
Brzeska (1916) and Howe’s long essay “Sorting Facts; or Nineteen Ways of Looking at
Marker” (1996). The two works have a surprising amount in common. Each is about an art
or artistic practice: Vorticism for Pound, and non-fiction film, especially that of French
filmmaker Chris Marker, for Howe. Each incorporates documents into the discussion, but
each goes one step further by theorizing about the use of documents for literary and artistic
practice. More to the point, each has a directly autobiographical motivation: for Pound, to
memorialize his friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and for Howe, to memorialize
her late husband, David von Schlegell (coincidentally a sculptor as well). Instead of a
reminiscence based on anecdotes or fond memories, Pound and Howe collect pieces of
textual material that document the person. As she explains, “I was asked to contribute to this
collection of essays because of a book I once wrote about Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
Although this seemed a strange reason to assume I could write about nonfiction film, I was
drawn to the project because of the fact of my husband’s death and my wish to find a way to
document his life and work” (SF, 295). The essay, which includes numerous documents
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elating to her husband as well as to non-fiction film, runs to over fifty pages, making it the
longest single essay she has published.
But it is curious that Pound and Howe wrote these works despite the fact that each is
commonly associated with an avant-garde that devalues personal or subjective writing.
Pound wrote Gaudier-Brzeska when he was involved with Vorticism, and before then
Imagism. By definition the two avant-gardes were set against Symbolism and particularly
what was seen as its excessive concern with individualism. But Pound was a poet who would
just as quickly break the rules as make them. In Gaudier-Brzeska he use Vorticist principles to
craft a highly personal work. The main avant-garde associated with Howe is
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which has mounted a powerful critique of interiority and
personal writing (as discussed in my introduction). In “Sorting Facts,” Howe continues to
investigate language (especially in documents), but she takes a deeply personal approach in
writing about her late husband.
Pound voices trepidation that he might sentimentalize the sculptor—with whom he,
Wyndham Lewis and others founded Vorticism: “I am not particularly anxious to make this
book ‘my book’ about Gaudier-Brzeska” (GB, 18), he says in the opening pages. His main
strategy for distancing his prejudices and his unmistakably strong feelings for Gaudier is to
engage in what he calls “formal and almost dreary documentation” (GB, 19). Pound is being
rhetorical here because the documentation is ubiquitous. He asks for the reader’s
understanding because he wants to “leave as clear a record as possible of Gaudier’s art and
thought” (GB, 20). It’s interesting to note that Pound is already emphasizing that his work
does not originate with himself: “I do not believe in any important art criticism, any
important criticism of any particular art, which does not come originally from a master of art”
(GB, 20, my emphasis). It might seem that Pound is setting himself up to be the “master,”
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ut in fact he is talking about Gaudier. The book is on sculpture so Pound looks to the
sculptor first. The so-called “dreary documentation” begins with pages of quotations from
Gaudier’s writings, then proceeds to what others say about him, and only later does Pound
discuss art from his personal perspective. When a short way into the second chapter Pound
lapses into commentary, he quickly sounds an apologetic note: “I am afraid that is a very
rough and clumsy statement of something he would have put much more clearly” (GB, 26).
So there is a biding distrust of whatever he might say that Gaudier has said and that might
thus be quoted.
When Pound turns to memories of Gaudier, his own as well as others, he treats that
memory as necessary but fallible. After a string of his memories, Pound writes, “That is the
way memory serves us, details return ill assorted, pell mell, in confusion” (GB, 40).
Nevertheless, he does not abandon memory, for it proves a resource for his portrait of “the
man as I knew him”:
To give the man as I knew him, there is perhaps no better method, or no method
wherein I can be more faithful than to give the facts of that acquaintance, in their
order, as nearly as I can remember them.
In reading over what I have written I find it full of conceit, or at least full of
pronouns in the first person, and yet what do we, any of us, know of our friends and
acquaintances save that on such and such a day we saw them, and that they did or
said this, that or the other, to which words and acts we give witness.
(GB, 44)
Pound strategically tries to keep his personal views from overtaking his subject. He worries
that his tribute to Gaudier is “full of conceit” because of the number of first person
pronouns. He appeals to the “facts of that acquaintance” while realizing that even such facts
cannot be wholly trusted because they stem from his personal experience. This middle
section of Gaudier-Brzeska is where Pound’s voice is most overt, but it does not take long
before he hits a kind of wall when his “memory of the events from then on is rather
confused” (GB, 51). Pound has in effect run out of language. It’s not that he cannot keep
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writing about Gaudier, but rather that his personal vantage has nothing to add to the
portrait. In the end he swings all the way back to documents, and the entire last section of
the book is a sequence of photographs featuring Gaudier’s sketches and sculptures. The
documents release Pound from the onus of his subjective framework, while still allowing
him to write about something personal. It’s worth noting that when Pound praises the
photographer of the sculptures (as he did earlier in the book), he also underscores the limits
of whatever he (Pound) can personally voice about Gaudier: “And Mr. Benington’s camera
has the better of me, for it gives the subject as if ready to move and to speak, whereas I can
give but the diminished memories of past speech and action” (GB, 38).
The possibility of using a documentary form for deeply personal ends is seen again in
Howe’s essay. In the first section she quickly jots down a series of details about her late
husband’s life. We learn “facts” like that he sailed ships as a boy, flew a bomber over
Germany from 1943-45, studied painting with his father after the war, and met Howe in
1965. “These are only some facts” (SF, 296), she writes. Then in the same long paragraph
that began with his birth, she ends by describing his stroke in 1992 and the three days that he
spent in the hospital before dying:
Those last days in the hospital were a horror. He was fully conscious, but words
failed. He couldn’t speak or write. He tried to communicate by gestures. We couldn’t
interpret them. He kept making the gesture of pointing. In physical space we
couldn’t see what he saw. He couldn’t guide a pencil or form a coherent signal…
Without words what are facts? His eyes seemed to know. His hand squeezed mine.
What did he mean? In my writing, I have often explored ideas of what constitutes an
official version of events as opposed to a former version in imminent danger of
being lost.
(SF, 296)
The biographical summary in the first half of the paragraph makes the greater part of his life
seem like a body of facts. But the stroke reveals that picture of life to be woefully
incomplete. In the hospital bed her husband is left to a world of facts that cannot be put into
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words. Suddenly Howe is faced with something that is refractory to the world of words. To
be without language, or without the ability to communicate with others, is to her “horror.”
She is certain that he is “fully conscious” and that he still has affection (his “hand squeezed
mine”), but she sees his gestures without understanding. Her next question, “What did he
mean?,” recalls that her poems are built around facts that are lost in the “official version of
events.” She continues: “Sorting word-facts I only know an apparition. Scribble grammar has
no neighbor. In the name of reason I need to record something because I am a survivor in
this ocean” (SF, 297). Howe, who still lives in the world of speech and meaning (and
documents), is the survivor whose responsibility it is to “record something” of what cannot
enter her world.
Pound is aware that his memory would never present Gaudier as effectively as could a
documentary approach. Similarly, Howe is aware that her language would never effectively
present her late husband, and so documents provide an initial solution to the problem. As
she says, “A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere
looking back” (SF, 332). It is her next statement which gives pause: “Looking back, Orpheus
was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot’s wife” (SF, 332). The allusion suddenly
puts in question the power of documents to recapture the past. Rather than bring Eurydice
back from the underworld, Orpheus loses her when he turns to look back. Howe has just
lost her husband, and like Orpheus, she can document him but not bring him back. For
Howe, a document is a mixed blessing. It can point to a past but it can never overcome the
loss of presence. Her work against “an official version of events as opposed to a former
version in imminent danger of being lost” is never a completed project. She cannot name
what has been lost, but only sort the available “word-facts” to record it. As we will see
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elow, Howe identifies her inheritance with the “apparition” beneath the official version of
events. Her autobiography is thus the impossible documentation of this apparition.
3.2) Susan Howe’s Working Sketchbooks
I dream of the remotest century in the eye and ear the
answer lies under the tires of traffic far away in the distance
promised americas where local glimpses of truth stand in a row
signature a riddle image of me. Fringes in the right
place. Myself a film of articulated thickness
—Howe, lines in Sketchbook
Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling,
interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text
—Howe on Dickinson (MED, 28)
I’ve said that Howe documents her inheritance, so the poems should be thought of as
autobiography, but it remains to see how this process unfolds in an act of writing. One
difficulty is that the original documents from which she creates her poems are seldom
apparent in her publications. Anyone can see the presence of archaic words or get a sense
that she is quoting from other writers. Her exact sources are difficult to ascertain, however,
because like Dickinson, she uses a variety of compositional strategies to pull “text from
text.” The resulting work, the published poem, skillfully reworks its sources, but it does not
actually name them, or at least not all of them, as we shall quickly see. To appreciate the full
extent to which Howe implements other texts and rearranges (or disarranges) the language
cannot be done without consideration of her “working sketchbooks.” 10 Since the mid-
seventies when Howe turned her energy from painting to poetry, the sketchbooks have been
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at the heart of her creative process. The sketchbooks, which are in fact small 3” x 5” artist
sketchbooks, combine quotations from her reading with page after page of poems. She
collects the quotations in the first several pages of each sketchbook. She always includes the
name of the writer or the text. She then devotes the remainder of each sketchbook almost
entirely to poems. The division between quotations and poems is part of a ritualistic pattern
that remains unchanged over the years.
Here for example are several pages from two different sketchbooks that are dated nearly
fifteen years apart, but that exhibit the same method of quotation collecting. The first set are
from a sketchbook dated November 6, 1982-May 9, 1983, a period when Howe was busy
with writing Defenestration of Prague (see FIGURES 3.1 and 3.2). The second set are from a
sketchbook dated November 6, 1996-January 1997, a period when she was busy at work on
Pierce-Arrow (see FIGURES 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5). The sketchbook quotations can be thought of
like the “extracts” on whales that come before Ishmael’s narrative in Moby-Dick. The extracts
establish an etymology of the word whale, followed by around eighty quotations from an
enormous range of sources: writers from the Old Testament to the Enlightenment,
contemporaries of Melville, and accounts of sea voyages from the 18th and 19th centuries.
While the extracts suggest an exhaustive account of whales, the whale at the center of the
story ultimately escapes capture. I make this comparison not only because Howe’s range of
sources is equally as impressive as Melville’s, but more importantly, because her extracts
point always to a center of inheritance that escapes capture. Her poems are a search for what
the documents hide or obscure, and it’s beneath those documents that she locates her
inheritance.
10 Many of her “working sketchbooks,” as they are called, and all of them to which I refer, are collected in
the Susan Howe Papers at the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Collection, University of California, San
Diego. My bibliographic citations are to individual sketchbooks based on Howe’ s dating system.
142

143
FIGURE 3.1

144
FIGURE 3.2

145
FIGURE 3.3

146
FIGURE 3.4

147
FIGURE 3.5

It will help us understand Howe’s process of documenting inheritance if we have some
description of the sketchbooks and how they are created. My discussion in this section is
thus, in large part, a kind of show and tell. Of foremost importance for our attention is the
relationship between the extracts and the poems. Although extracts and poems are in
separate sections of a given sketchbook, the two are added simultaneously in a process that
unfolds over several months. Her reading and writing are thus a joint activity. Of course the
balance between reading and writing cannot be foreseen at the outset of a given sketchbook.
The blank pages that have been saved for quotations occasionally fill up before the book is
full of poems, and then quotations spill over onto pages near the end or inside the back
cover, or anywhere in between. The opposite can happen too. The poems occasionally fill up
the book before the front pages have been filled with quotations. When this happens, which
is rare, Howe just moves on to the next sketchbook. All of this makes it extremely difficult
to attribute a specific sequence to the quotations and the poems. Consider that a quotation
found on the first page of a book may have been added at the same time as a poem found
on the very last page. So my observations must proceed with a fair amount of speculation,
and I am often given over to guesswork about why certain quotations are in the vicinity of
certain poems.
Over the years the range and the focus of the extracts have undergone several changes.
In the 1970s there are frequent extracts from Freud, Lacan, and Harold Bloom, but by the
mid-1980s the theoretical extracts tend to be from Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze, Irigaray,
and Levinas. Another significant early source for theoretical extracts is Heidegger, especially
his volume Poetry, Language, Thought. It is interesting to note that by the mid-80s the
Romanian poet Paul Celan is quoted far more often, and one might even speculate that his
poetry supplants Heidegger’s philosophy, because the latter virtually disappears. The earliest
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sketchbooks also reveal Howe’s long-time interest in Nietzsche, especially his early works
The Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. (In the early sketchbooks there
is more from Nietzsche than Dickinson, which makes the following statement from My
Emily Dickinson seem like a personal realization: “‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—,’
written in a time of civil war, by a woman with little formal education in philosophy,
carefully delineates and declines all aspects of the ‘Will to Power’ nearly twenty years before
Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphysical rebellion” (MED, 35). I think Howe began to realize that
other writers came to the same conclusions prior to Nietzsche: “Emily Brontë and Emily
Dickinson, two of the self-emancipated ‘little women’ Nietzsche was so fond of scorning,
often anticipate him in their writing” (MED, 62).) Around 1980 there are many passages by
Wittgenstein and a bit later from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. It seems her
reading of each can be traced to her correspondence with Charles Bernstein, who studied
with Cavell. 11 In fact it is not unusual to find a work quoted in a sketchbook at around the
exact same time it is recommended by a correspondent; however much we might picture
Howe as isolated and reading by herself in libraries, the range of her interests is driven by a
sense of reading as a shared activity, where she recommends works to others, and other
recommend works to her.
As the sketchbooks proceed there is an increasing presence of the American writers that
constitute Howe’s inheritance—from voices in Puritan and colonial times through the late
19th century. Passages come from Emerson and Thoreau and then Oliver Wendell Holmes,
William James, John Dewey, and of course Charles Sanders Peirce. It might surprise some
that so many extracts come from the heart of the English canon: Shakespeare, Spenser,
11 See for example his exceptional essay, “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,”
in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 2001), 165-183.
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Milton, Swift, Pope and a host of Romantics. Her interest in The Fairie Queene, for example, is
reflected in a spate of Spenser quotations from the early 1980s. One can never accuse Howe
of ignoring the canon in her search for the excluded and forgotten voices of her inheritance.
It is also common to find writers that Howe has referred to or written about in various prose
works. As might be expected, Dickinson and Stevens provide many quotations, and there is
an impressive allotment from Stein and Woolf. Several quotations come from Ashbery, and
perhaps through him (as well as other New York School poets), the English poet F.T.
Prince. This brief inventory hardly exhausts the sources. There are numerous artists, such as
Duchamp, Reinhardt, and (less frequently) Jasper Johns. Seldom are quotations taken from
musicians, but one by Thelonius Monk is especially memorable: “The only cats worth
anything are the cats that take chances. Sometimes I play things I never heard myself.” 12
Other quotations are taken from personal life. These are found interspersed among the
literary, theoretical, and historical quotations, and they are labeled with a name or title just
like the rest. One example is a letter written by her father to her mother while he was
stationed in Europe during WWII. Having just learned about his younger daughter, Fanny’s,
outstanding score on an IQ test, he writes back,
Sukey [Susan Howe] is probably destined to be something of a dope by comparison,
but I don’t believe that you will lie awake in fearfulness that her father will therefore
lose all feeling for her.
Such quotations are side-by-side with the literary and historical sources. In one book we see
Flaubert on the temptation of St. Anthony, followed Thomas de Quincey on opium,
followed by Howe’s son: “Mark today. ‘Mummy what is the opposite of opposite?’” 13 The
12 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, Nov. Dec, 1992 [no end date], Box 18, MSS 0201 M.2001.001.
13 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook July 30-October 27, 1974, Box 12.
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same kind of personal quote is found in another sketchbook: “Mark said, ‘When we die is
there really heaven? I hope there is so we can see each other again.’” 14
I have suggested that everything in a sketchbook is either a quotation or a poem, but in
fact there are some entries which are not so easily categorized. Some resemble entries in a
diary, such as several that record and interpret unusual dreams. Some are the ephemeral
notes of daily life: a grocery list, a reminder to pick up the dry cleaning, contact information,
or a set of directions. At a few points Howe records her dreams: “Whistling ghost
communicator choose another sound. / I do believe that I had communications twice /
from some magic force in dreams. One in my dream of Icarus last year one in my dream /
of flying this summer. These were unlike other dreams they are messages.” 15 At other points
there are reading lists and card catalogue numbers that indicate the sketchbooks have
accompanied her on many trips to the library.
What this leads one to conclude is that her present life, which we would call the stuff of
traditional autobiography, is tightly interwoven with her documentation of inheritance. Her
present and her past come together in the physical pages of the sketchbooks so that her
search for inheritance is embedded in her daily life rather than separate or autonomous. Not
everything that goes into a sketchbook happens while sitting in a library or at a desk. This is
supported by the nontrivial fact that a variety of writing utensils is used in the sketchbooks,
such as pencil, every color of felt and ball-point pen, and magic marker (even a neon-pink
marker). There does not seem to be any special rule that governs the time or condition for
writing; she writes with whatever utensil is available and whenever she has the opportunity.
This is not to say that Howe did not have countless obstacles or responsibilities that kept her
14 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, April-July 10, 1974, Box 12.
15 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 30-October 27, 1974, Box12.
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from writing over the years—as she certainly did—but only to say that a sketchbook is
constantly in her possession. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that obstacles and
responsibilities were so numerous that she had to steal elusive moments for writing
whenever she could, thus making it a matter of necessity to have a sketchbook always on
hand. And like keys or wallets, whatever is constantly on one’s person is sometimes lost or
misplaced. An early sketchbook has a short note written on the first page: “… After the best
lost book.” She adds at the top, “If this book is lost PLEASE return to Susan Howe.” 16 It
then gives her home address.
The sketchbooks raise a number of questions about Howe’s poems. In what way do the
sketchbooks relate to the published poems? In what way do the sketchbooks fit into her
compositional process? In what way are the sketchbooks creations that should be examined
in themselves—as Howe treats Dickinson’s fascicles? By invoking the sketchbooks it might
be supposed that I am going to talk about drafts of poems or Howe’s compositional
techniques. There is indeed a temptation to use them as a kind of backdoor on Howe’s
dense often hermetic poetry. My impulse is to work through these possibilities by treating
the sketchbooks as works in themselves but also as steps in a more comprehensive process
of writing. While a large part of my discussion is devoted to compositional techniques and
variants of published poems, I want to downplay the idea that the sketchbooks are reducible
to preparation for the published poems. To treat the sketchbooks as mere drafts would be
misguided mainly because Howe has so often celebrated the handwritten page of other
writers in contrast to published editions. It is difficult to imagine that the same rule would
not apply to herself. Of course treating the sketchbooks as works in themselves has the
16 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, April 26-July 15, 1974, Box 12.
152

esult (or peril as some might see it) of expanding the number of Howe’s works from around
twenty or so books of published poems to more than two hundred. 17
Let me add that another good reason for treating the sketchbooks as works in
themselves is that they are not reducible to research for poems. Howe has a large body of
spiral notebooks (also in the archive) which contain far more in the way of research notes.
They also contain revisions of poems, and longer, more elaborate diary-like entries than
found in the sketchbooks. Some spiral notebooks even contain drafts of correspondence
and essays. If my intentions were to seek the least systemic and most fragmentary stage of
Howe’s compositional process, then the spiral notebooks would probably be the place to
look.
But the key difference is that the sketchbooks are deliberately ritualistic, where the spiral
notebooks are not. The ritual, if I can call it that, has several features worth noting. Each
sketchbook is built around a tension between quotations and poems. Howe also neatly
writes her name, “Susan Howe” or “Susan von Schlegell,” on the first page, along with her
home address and telephone number. In certain sketchbooks the information is added with a
personalized rubber stamp, such as one would use on mailing envelopes. A stamp of
“Ireland’s Eye,” which can be seen at the very end of The Liberties (ET, 218), decorates the
first page of each sketchbook for a number of years. Another aspect of this ritual is her exact
dating of each sketchbook. On the first page Howe writes the day, month, and year on
which she begins, and later she adds the date on which she ends. Usually not more than a
few months have transpired. The sketchbooks are also consecutively dated. The last date of
one is often the first date of the next. It is from these dates that we can gather some clues
17 In dealing with the sketchbooks there are occasional errors in spelling and transcription, but in all cases I
have respected Howe’s rendering of them. It’s needless to add that Howe’s sketchbooks have never had
proofreaders or copyeditors.
153

about her compositional process, as for example which works took longest to write. Often
midway through a sketchbook Howe registers the completion of a poem; for example, a
note reading, “End of Secret History” and dated “March 3” is found in the sketchbook
dated November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978; a note reading, “End of Pythagorean Silence” is
found in the sketchbook dated May 20-October 2, 1981; a note reading, “Completely
finished Defenestration,” is found in the sketchbook dated November 6, 1982-May 9, 1983.
In contrast to such definite endings, the beginning of each poem is a far less determinable
point. This strikes me as the opposite of Olson, who uses open parenthesis to suggest an
opening or projecting outward. For Howe, poems might be imagined as having closed
parenthesis at the end of each. This supports reading Howe’s poems at the level of individual
lyrics rather than epics or long poems—as has been the ambition for so many modernists.
She is focused intently on each poem itself rather than on how each poem fits in the vast
architecture of a long poem. Another way to look at her poems, then, are as serial poems.
It is obvious that reading is an integral part of Howe’s sketchbooks. In an early
sketchbook dated April-July 10, 1974, a period that coincides with her first intense effort at
writing poems, we find an extraordinary list for summer reading. Written in short-hand
across a single page are references to Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Erich Newmann’s Amor
and Psyche, and resolutions to “read Harry Crosby stuff @ Beinich / find New England
Judged Quakers / Book on Caves / An Hutchinson / Jane Bowles book / Yale / Poe /
How to Write Gertrude Stein / The Making of Americans / What one Master / Pieces…” 18
The same page has at the bottom, “Must Get: Duchamp Salt Cellar / Agnes Martin /
Weatherly – Mau Mall [Maumau] Cantos.” Under the heading, “This Summer,” Howe puts,
“ancient Irish histories / Guermantes Way / Finnegans Wake / William James – Varieties of
18 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook April-July 10, 1974, Box 12.
154

Rel. Ex. / Praise to the End – Roethke,” and the Roethke title is circled. There is also a work
ethic to the list: “WORK EVERYDAY FROM 8-3.” 19 Although it is impossible to say
which of these works were read (though in many cases I have found passages from them in
this and other sketchbooks), it is clear that for Howe, writing and reading are joint activities.
The sketchbooks are the place where the two are held together.
In the sketchbook dated July 30-October 27, 1974, there are two quotations that shed
light on Howe’s interest in the reading habits of other writers. Two passages by Balzac and
Schopenhauer are included not because Howe actually read them but because Melville
“underscored” or “scored” passages by each in his books. I think her attention to Melville’s
reading holds an important to clue to what she wants from the sketchbooks. It’s not what
Melville says in response to Balzac and Schopenhaur that is so pertinent as the fact that his
response in itself captures Howe’s attention. Melville is one of several writers she quotes to
demonstrate the attention given by one writer to another. In this and other sketchbooks I
am amazed at how few extracts present a theory or an idea abstractly; far more weight is
given to extracts which feature one writer responding to or commenting on another. In this
sketchbook, as in many later ones, Howe is fascinated by the act of writers locating
themselves in relationship to other writers. This is a major component of the historical
vision presented in the sketchbooks: Howe’s reads a writer reading other writers. This
creates a chain at the end of which Howe can locate her own efforts. To position herself as a
writer means trying to fill a role—whatever that role ends up being—based on the precedent
of other writers who have done the same.
This does not wholly explain the criteria for selection of quotations, but it does establish
that Howe cherishes those elusive moments when a writer locate himself or herself in
19 Ibid.
155

elation to the past. She also regularly sets her own experience against a quotation. A case in
point is a passage by Kafka: “The main thing when a sword cuts into one’s soul, is to keep a
calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By
means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable.” Underneath it Howe writes: “This is
how I should have been in argument over Shakespeare with R— when I knew I was a fool
and he was blood thirsty for the intellectual kill.” 20 Howe puts herself at the receiving end of
Kafka’s statement. It seems that many of her extracts are implicitly bracketed in the
subjunctive case and that she is the potential subject. A passage by Yeats reads: “How much
of the best I have done and still do is but the attempt to explain myself to her? If she
understood, I should lack a reason for writing, and one can never have too many reasons for
doing what is so laborious.” Howe makes this personal: “In my case change her to him.” 21
The question is how the past can speak through her in the present.
She also grapples with at least one theory of how writers read one another. On the same
page as Melville reading Balzac and Schopenhaur is a passage by Harold Bloom. It is one of
many from his theory and criticism found in her 1974 and 1975 sketchbooks: “The strong
poet peers in the mirror of his fallen precursor and beholds neither the precursor nor
himself but a gnostic double, the dark otherness or antithesis that both he and the precursor
longed to be, yet feared to become.” Howe highlights this quotation with multiple vertical
lines, possibly because the whole idea of poetic lineage was looming as she turned from
painting to poetry. It should not be presumed, however, that the presence of the quotation
implies Howe’s agreement with the position it represents. Instead, certain quotes, such as
three more by Bloom in another sketchbook, establish boundaries against which to locate
20 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, April 26-July 15, 1974, Box 12.
21 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook , November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978, Box 13.
156

her own efforts. In the following, Howe literally inserts a feminine pronoun above each
masculine pronoun used by Bloom:
(her)
A poem is a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority.
Then beneath it reads another passage:
Id. 22
(woman) (she)
For Nietzsche a man is an artist to the extent that he is free of individual will
and has become subject medium through which the true subject’s own
redemption is an illusion.
(for what is the true subject but Repression)
Art’s true subject is art’s great antagonist, the terrible chorus concealed in the
Howe looks to the Bloom in order to explore assumptions about the nature of poetry and
history, but she sees no reason to agree with his patriarchal assumptions.
Another rebuffed quotation is from “Drayton”: “Them who for the greatness of mind
come near to gods. For to be born of a celestial incubus is nothing else but to have a great
and mighty spirit. Far above the early weakness of men.” Underneath it she responds wryly:
“This is a pathetic way of talking about what is probably a twist of fate.” 23 The remark might
seem trivial but it leads her to unleashes a much longer reflection on her relationship to the
past. This time her thoughts are cast into lines, the bottom half of which reads,
…How much
do I see or is seen and therefore
made by me. How much built
on the ghosts—the glosses of others
and being a woman—have I the
right or not right but the
same feelings as the great
men I ape. When someone like
Graves so glibly says women
should do their own thing—
different from men, noone comes
22 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, September-December, 1974, Box 12.
23 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 30-October 27, 1974, Box 12
157

from nothing we all build on
past examples and if for me
the examples have been male
how can I then be totally “female” 24
This is prompted, in part, by her of reading Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and Harold
Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. Howe has an anxiety about how possible it is for a female
writer to inherit male exemplars, “the great / men I ape.” She also confronts the fact that
putting Graves and Bloom together forecloses any space for a tradition of female writing.
Graves “so glibly says women / should do their own thing,” but Bloom only allows for a
world in which “the examples have been male.” On the next pages she asks how Blooms’s
oedipal theories might apply to a tradition of female writers: “Maybe as one kills the father as
Bloom would have it, a woman must kill the mother, because women in certain ways must
kill their mother. But there is only one in Poetry, Dickinson—and she was unique – one
cannot imitate or spring from her.” 25 What soon becomes clear is that Howe reads Bloom’s
theory of influence as it applies, or better yet, as it fails to apply to her development as a
poet. Notice that although Bloom limits his theory to a patriarchal tradition, Howe’s
response is not limited to the obvious response that he excludes women. Her main objection
is rather to the linearity of his model. “I suppose my work last year would not have been
done without Djiua Barnes – Nightwood… Or Virginia Woolf Orlando – But far far more
important, Melville + Poe + Mallarmé. However it took them all AND Ashbery. that is the
thing about Bloom, he doesn’t understand that it is never just one but many.” 26 She then
decides to completely drop his theory of out-doing previous writers:
24 Ibid.
25 This same sketchbook is briefly cited by Fiona Green in “‘Plainly on the Other Side’: Susan Howe's
Recovery.” Contemporary Literature 42.1 (Spring 2001): 78-101. I hope to show that Howe’s reading of Bloom
cannot be reduced to a family struggle (in the traditional sense of autobiography) but encompasses also Howe’s
meditations on her own poetry in relation to history.
26 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 30-October 27, 1974, Box 12
158

The central problem in life is to accept that there have been much greater writers
than myself. To accept that is to accept that the skin or your skull has limits. This
is what we utterly recoil from. This is the wakefulness from which there is no
rest
What makes this. What gift… Who or what decides. What combination of
circumstances. 27
The response to Bloom coincides with the genealogical “tree” reproduced at the end of my
last chapter. In it, we recall, Howe maps out the many, sprawling predecessors that she can
count.
As Howe gains a greater appreciation of her multiple inheritances, she begins to envision
a course for the poems she might write: “Maybe a book laid out as Hinge Picture was.”
Howe ponders what form the poems should take in response to her reading: “make quick
stories out of Graves, White Goddess.” Her drive to write historical poems is made evident
when she voices a question that points forward to Eikon Basilikae, her book fifteen years
later: “Find information on beheading of Charles Ist + regicides…Who actually cut off his
head what was his name? What happened to him—masks?” 28 On the next page she commits
herself to writing poetry based on historical investigation,
retrieve somebody from the past
back of dust jackets
amble up + poke + pry
caretaker couples
mountains + meadows
The ideas only go so far before Howe returns to the construction of gender in the historical
record. For to “retrieve” from the past depends on there being a record, and many times the
records have only been the provenance of men. Howe knows that she must look in
unexpected places such as “the back of dust jackets.” But even when the records can be
located, Howe is skeptical that they will actually represent the voice of women. She
27 Ibid.
28 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 30-October 27, 1974, Box 12.
159

continues: “There [is] a very great danger in requiring a woman to write about her ‘life.’” The
virtue of Dickinson is that she found a way to steel her writing against this pressure: “It is
just why Emily Dickinson is so very great because she isolated herself and wrestled with the
covering cherub. Had she been told what her voice was like she wouldn’t have been so
great.” Dickinson and others who populate the sketchbooks are approached because they
have voices that speak from below the surface. Again, for Howe, the documents not only
disclose but also hide and obscure her inheritance.
Having presented some of the general characteristics in Howe’s selection of quotations, I
now want to address how the physical form of the sketchbooks has effected her writing. A
poem is most often found on the right hand page. It can be written in response to one or
more of the quotations at the beginning of the sketchbook, though the extent to which it is a
response is often obscure untraceable with any absolute certainty. Because most of the
poems are not found contiguous to the quotations, it becomes even more problematic to say
which quotation or quotations were addressed. In rare instances, such as the following
(FIGURE 3.6), a quotation and a poem are side-by-side, and it is easier to see the
connection. 29 Alongside quotations from Nietzsche, including “We operate with things that
do not exist” and the “intellect is the means of deception,” the poem catalogues intellectual
activities, as in “conceiving thinking imagining / assuming inventing,” and then proceeds to
deconstruct such activities, as in “invention falsification.” Howe makes a Nietzschean
gesture by reversing the typical hierarchy of the intellect: “wisdom of illusion / essence of
action veiled in illusion.” Not only does the poem make is seem that her intellect can be
inherited, but so too can the deconstruction of her intellect be inherited. As usual, she relates
the quotation to herself: “I will veil myself / and gallop through this poem.”
29 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, October 9, 1980-January 17, 1981, Box 13.
160

161
FIGURE 3.6

Howe’s poems are also influenced by the physical size of the sketchbook page. The
majority of the sketchbooks are 4”x6” artist’s sketchbooks with black, hard covers. During a
brief period of early experimentation she employs several larger 5”x8” sketchbooks, but
eventually she comes to prefer the smaller size. A few early sketchbooks also have red
covers, but the black is consistent after 1980. To see how the size of the page has influenced
the look of the poems, consider the first poems to feature criss-crossing and inverted lines.
When Howe was writer-in-resident at the Lake George Arts Project—an experience
remembered in the preface to Thorow (1987)—she used up her last sketchbook and was
forced to use a larger 5”x8” size, since apparently the smaller size was not available. She
began the sketchbook as usual, “March 22, 1987—,” but left off a date of completion. She
left off writing in the book after only a few poems, and the pages reserved for quotations are
left completely blank. What happened can be gathered from a subsequent 4”x6” sketchbook
which is dated April 10, 1987-June 5, 1987 and has “Lake George” for the address. A few
pages into the new sketchbook, Howe writes, “Starting this little book because David [von
Schlegell] sent it even if I am well enough into a bigger one—I like this size…” 30 This might
seem a trivial incident, but what’s curious is to go back and observe the last poem that she
wrote in the larger-sized sketchbook before giving it up. Here, for the first time in her
compositions, we see her criss-cross lines (see FIGURE 3.7). Thorow is the first book in
which Howe rejects horizontal lineation, and what appears to have made this possible is the
materiality of the page. Such a formal innovation that would have been less self-evident on
the smaller page of the standard sketchbook. The example also illustrates that Howe is open
to letting contingency influence the very form of her poems.
30 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, April 10 - June 5, 1982, Box 14.
162

163
FIGURE 3.7

Because they contain far more poems than are ever published, the sketchbooks can be
thought of as containers for variants of Howe’s poems. From this point of view the
sketchbooks are the closest that Howe’s compositional method gets to Dickinson’s bound
fascicles. In Dickinson’s case, the original pages with her poems are sewn together, but
printed editions take apart the pages and reorder the poems according to the judgement of
the editor. What we see in an edition of Dickinson is not, however, how she originally set
the poems; sometimes the edition does not even include the variants of a poem. In Howe’s
case, we find many variants of her published poems in the sketchbooks. For example, a
single page in the sketchbook dated Feb 8, 1982-June 1, 1982, reads:
The beginning of my Beginning
ever since I can remember
The beginning of my Beginning
ever since I remember. 31
Then in a variant on the very next page Howe revises the same thread,
My beginning from Beginning
The Beginning from Beginning
Nature rounding knowledge
full volumes
confederacies of volumes
The first variant completely disappears in the published poem. The second variant has only
three lines (the first and the last two) that appear in the published poem, and even then she
changes the capitalization of “Beginning” to “beginning” which de-emphasizes the idealized
“Beginning” that is implied by a capitalized noun. This passage is convenient because it
reinforces the whole issue of poetic revision. Line selection is a process that has no
“beginning” as such. I read the third line as a challenge to the “knowledge” that we might
31 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 8– June 1, 1982, Box 13.
164

have of beginnings. As I read it, Howe designates “nature” in a physical space (“rounding”)
outside of knowledge where such beginnings might be provisionally located. The outside is
imagined as an unread or outlawed text: “full confederacies / of volumes.” When the lines
finally appear in the published poem, they are divided by other lines that have seemingly
wandered in from elsewhere. The following is the ninth poem in “Speeches at the Barriers”
in Defenestration of Prague:
Passion
and intellectual articulation
Truth and glory
as forms of beauty
Proteus
formlessness
Possibility of discovering
anything
anything
foreshadowed words of all
wandering
Full volumes
confederacies of volumes
near and far a fugue of fear
crisp aphorisms die out
the Seventy Interpreters
—old men who sail off
Measurable things
My beginning from beginning
pleasure of eden (eastward)
Translation
Death
an opinion or imagination
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Long lives the Patriarchs
walkers on hills
language
Stride of the sun in golden
Inaccessible proof
Day falling and decaying
number of times and all things
(ET, 116)
Although the variant has an allusion to memory (“ever since I remember”) that is now
omitted, a plausible reading of the poem is to expand on how a personal beginning is
remembered. Perhaps Howe avoids a direct allusion to memory because she is interested in
the failure of memory or any system of “Measurable things” to contain its own origin. She is
more concerned with an origin defined by its “inaccessible proof.” The poem does not
attenuated “beginnings” through some formulaic theme (such as the impossibility of isolated
beginning), but opens up the protean (“Proteus”) loose strands of any originary moment.
Notice too that “eden” resonates with a beginning, but also with expulsion. Howe even
gestures to a fall: “falling and decaying / / number of times and all things”). And although
the introduction of Eden suggests that a pure beginning can never be retrieved, it also
suggests hope on some future possible horizon. In my view such a poem might point to the
space beneath a given extract or quotation. Whereas we might normally associate the extract
or quotation with an origin, with a source for subsequent readings or even with an ur-text
from which all variants might spring, Howe displays an evident interest in what such texts
hide or obscure, a “form of beauty” that is known only through the “possibility of
discovering,” but not, we see, the actual discovery. Hers is a quest that is at odds with the
“Seventy Interpreters,” though she might explore those seventy interpretations in carrying
out her quest. Her repetition of “anything / anything” emphasizes the openness of her
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quest. In the next section, I look in more detail at how one specific quest is oriented towards
her inheritance, and how what she finds leads her to revise her self-understanding.
3.3) “I Can Re / Trace / My Steps”: Finding Stella and Cordelia
I am suspicious of a canon in the first place because to enter this canon a
violation has usually been done to your work, no matter what your
gender may be. And besides, the more you go into something, the more
you see that the canon is only the surface, only the ghost’s helmet. Not the
face underneath the helmet.
—Howe (BM, 171-2)
What is a drawing? How does one do it? It’s the action for forcing one’s
way through an invisible iron wall which seems to be located somewhere
between what one feels and what one can do. How does one get through
this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and
penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience, as I see it.
—Van Gogh, quoted in Howe’s working sketchbook
dated July 10, 1979-January 1, 1980. Beneath it she writes:
“perfect description of my agony over Stella-part of The
Liberties.” 32
In what follows I want to talk about the sketchbooks leading up to and including The
Liberties (1983), Howe’s most widely discussed volume. My purpose in this chapter is to
examine the documents that not only disclose her inheritance, and thus her autobiography,
but that also withhold and obscure it. In The Liberties Howe comes to recognize that her
autobiography is an inheritance that is always lost to documentation. Listed below are
thirteen consecutive sketchbooks covering the four years of writing that gave birth to two of
Howe’s most celebrated works, The Liberties and Pythagorean Silence. The dates from the end of
each sketchbook to the beginning of the next attest to nearly continuous writing. The
32 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 10, 1979-January 1, 1980, Box 13.
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longest break is twenty days during the summer of 1979. Most are far shorter. Five of the
sketchbooks begin on the same day as the previous one ends. Three begin only a day after
the previous one ends.
August 18, 1977 - November 12, 1977
November 17, 1977 - May 1, 1978
May 2, 1978 - September 22, 1978
September 23, 1978 - February 11, 1979
February 11, 1979 - June 30, 1979
July 10, 1979 - January 1, 1980
January 7, 1980 - May 21, 1980
May 21, 1980 - July 30, 1980
July 30, 1980 - October 9, 1980
October 9, 1980 - January 17, 1981
January 17, 1981 - May 19, 1981
May 20, 1981 - October 2, 1981
The period covered by each sketchbook ranges from just under 2 months (May 21, 1980-July
30, 1980) to almost seven months (November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978). The duration of the
latter might be explained by commitments to her radio show, “Poetry,” on WBAI in New
York. For the most part, however, the writing is virtually nonstop. It was “the best fever of
work I have ever had,” she writes in the sketchbook dated July 30, 1980-October 9, 1980.
It was a period of intense reading as well. The quotations in each sketchbook make for
an encyclopedic tour of American and European writers. For August 18, 1977-November
12, 1977 the front pages alone have quotations from F. T. Prince, Yeats (two), H.D.(two),
Amy Lowell (on H.D.), William Carlos Williams (three), Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff,
Franz Kafka, John Quincy Adams, and Simone Weil. November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978 has
John Cage, Kafka, Lao Tzu, Emerson, Paul Valéry, Samuel Johnson, J. R..R. Tolkein, Yeats
(two), Walter Benjamin (three), Jacques Lacan, Pascal, and a Greek epigram on Plato. May 2,
1978-September 22, 1978 has Henry Dickens (brother of the novelist), Lucretius, de Maistre
(on Pascal), Ibsen, Dickens, Melville, St. Augustine, Wallace Stevens (two), Blake (three),
Eleanor Jayola, Dickinson (two), Freud, Joyce, Phyllis Greenacre (a feminist theorist),
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Donald Hall (two on Marianne Moore), Pound, and Oscar Wilde. September 23, 1978-
February 11, 1979 has Shakespeare (three), Frank Darron, Virginia Woolf (four), Keats,
Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein (on Duchamp), Jasper Johns (also on Duchamp), G. Bennie
(quote from Adrienne Rich footnote), Swinburne (on Marlowe), Swift, Melville, A.C. Bradley
(on King Lear), Swift’s epitaph, a history of Joan of Arc, a biography of Woolf, Burke,
Pseudo Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena. February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979 has Milton (four),
Dickinson, Blake, Simone Weil, Martin Luther, Freud, Lacan, Shakespeare (two), Joyce,
Revelations, Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. (two), Heidegger, Nietzsche, a dictionary of British
folklore, Lady M. W. Montagu (two), Spenser, Richard Foreman (two), and Ibsen. July 10,
1979-January 1, 1980 has George Kubler, Vasari, Samuel Johnson, Mallarmé, Wittgenstein
(two), biography of Lytton Strachey, Ibsen, Van Gogh, Artaud (on Van Gogh), S. Weil, and
Lady Wilde (Ancient Legends of Ireland). January 7, 1980-May 21, 1980 has Brown (apparently a
mathematician), Wittgenstein, Heidegger (two), Marlowe, Tennyson (two), E. Gosse
(Encyclopedia), Nietzsche, Kierkegaard (four), Pascal, Robert Duncan, Milton, A.
Strindberg, Nash, T.S. Eliot, and William Empson. May 21, 1980-July 30, 1980 has Buchner
(two from Danton’s Death), Revelations, Rilke, Coleridge, Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, and Phil
Weld (two, with the note that he “was on the transatlantic race, 65 years old. Oldest man on
it”). July 30, 1980-October 9, 1980 has Oliver W. Holmes, Frank Kermode (two, on
Cordelia), Shakespeare (three), Webster, A. Dürer, Goethe, Keats, Montaigne, Newton, and
Santayana. October 9, 1980-January 17, 1981 finds Yeats, Shakespeare (six), St. Paul, Shelly,
Molly Mahood (Shakespeare’s Wordplay), Emerson (three), Ortega y Gasset, Melville,
Heimskringla, Sir C. Wren, Lucretius, Viterbo (on Dionysius), Montaigne, Stevens, and
Proust. January 17, 1981-May 19, 1981 has Nietzsche, Eckhert, T. Taylor (footnote to
Plotinus), S. Spender, Shakespeare (three), Ruskin, Emerson, Blake (two), Isaiah, Pascal,
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Shelly (four), Coleridge, Raine, Tennyson, S. Johnson, Virgil, Keats, von Clauswitz, and The
Book of Wisdom. May 20, 1981-October 2, 1981 has Nietzsche, Emerson, Jeremy Taylor,
Plotinus, Heraclitus, Heidegger (two), Yeats, Keats, Spenser (two), Mary Manning Howe, The
Book of Revelations, and Shakespeare.
I list the sources at such length in order to foreground the ironic fact that nowhere in the
sketchbooks is there an extract from either of the two heroines of The Liberties. For readers
of Howe’s work, however, surely one of the most interesting questions involves the recovery
of Esther “Stella” Johnson and Cordelia. A virtue of examining the extracts is that we can
see the approximate moment when each of the heroines emerges from behind the works
that Howe was reading. Stella was of course the love of Jonathan Swift, but the nature of
their relationship remains a mystery because the majority of her papers were destroyed.
Cordelia is best known as the youngest daughter in King Lear, but as we shall see, Howe
brings together several precedents other than Shakespeare in creating her vision of Cordelia.
The extracts tell us just how difficult it was for Stella and Cordelia to enter the picture. Other
writers whose voices can be heard in The Liberties are much easier to locate; for example,
Rachel Tzvia Back says, “In the search for the voice and image of Stella, Howe cannot help
but wander through the literary and literal landscape first claimed by four male Irish
compatriots, perhaps the greatest Irish writers—Swift, Yeats, Joyce, and later, Beckett.” 33
Each of these writers is found in the sketchbooks. Missing, however, are any quotations
from Stella, and the only material associated with Cordelia is taken from what others have
said about her, not from what she has ever said about herself—and as we shall see in a
moment, the Cordelia of The Liberties hearkens back to a historical figure and not, as so
many have assumed, to a fictional character. Olson says of inspecting particulars: “each bit
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can be brought together and / gone over until as though it were the secrets of a /
universum.” 34 But for Howe, who devotes equal attention to the “bits” (or quotations), what
she discovers is a “universum” defined not by revelation of presence, but rather of absence.
Because Stella remains an irrevocable blank in the historical record, we should revise Olson’s
idea to say that certain bits cannot be gone over because they have been written over. In the
effort to identify her inheritance, Howe illustrates that documents not only disclose the past,
but also withhold or obscure it. This is the case particularly with Stella, whose absence from
the available documents epitomizes Howe’s inheritance. As she says in her most famous
statement, “I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are
anonymous, slighted—inarticulate” (ET, 14). Stella epitomizes the “dark side of history” that
Howe inherits.
The paradox is in finding a way to acknowledge the “dark side of history.” Any
statement risks neutralizing or obscuring the darkness. Any knowledge would have to be
based on the presence of documents which simply do not exist. One strategy in the
sketchbook dated November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978 is to collect documents (or quotations)
that refer to secrets—language that carries its own darkness. A secret is a special kind of
language that can only be known by not being spoken. A secret has to possess a barrier
against communication. If a secret were made public, then it would no longer be a secret. It’s
not a coincidence that Howe has just completed her fourth book, Secret History of the Dividing
Line (1978). Clearly she is still interested in the dynamics of secrets. One quotation is by
33 See Back’s brilliant reading of the literary devices that Howe borrows from Swift, Yeats, Joyce and
Beckett for The Liberties. Rachel Tzvia Back, Led By Language, 76.
34 Olson was speaking specifically of manuscripts, or we might call them documents. But I think the point
still holds. He believes such attention to particulars will disclose their presence; Howe believes that attention to
particulars (especially those particular building blocks assumed to form the great literature of the Western
Canon) discloses their absence.
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Walter Benjamin: “In Kafka the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by
basing itself on them the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly.” 35 Of the
eight other quotations on the same page, this is the only one that has a box drawn around it.
She also quotes Pascal: “Fine deeds are most admirable when kept secret. When I see some
of them in history, they please me greatly; but of course they are not completely secret
because they have become known, and, although everything possible was done to keep them
secret, the detail by which they came to light spoils everything, for the finest thing about
them was the attempt to keep them secret.” In the margin Howe writes: “but just like
Kafka.” 36 Further quotations allude to the unknown or the unfathomable, which like a secret
is a limit of language. 37 Other quotations allude to historical secrets. A passage by Tolkein
reads: “they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, only for a moment, we
stand outside our own time, outside Time itself maybe.”
Stella and Cordelia are like secrets in Howe’s reading. In the months before starting on
The Liberties Howe is reading all around the two heroines, but neither has leapt to her
attention. They remain outside her horizon, or in an “Other Time,” as Tolkein says.
Ironically, in the sketchbook dated September 23, 1978-February 11, 1979, there are two
extracts that should by all rights point to the two heroines. In the first case, Howe copies
down an English translation of Swift’s epitaph. His own composition was originally in Latin:
“The body of Jonathan Swift, Dr. of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral Church, is buried here,
where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can
35 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook , November 17, 1977-May 1, 1978, Box 13.
36 Ibid.
37 A second Benjamin extract on the same page, and taken from the same essay, reads: “To Kafka, the
world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realties was important for him, and we may be sure
that, like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him down to the animals.” Beside
this Howe refers to a recent poem, “Like my ‘thorn, thistle.” Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook , November
17, 1977-May 1, 1978, Box 13.
172

one who strove his utmost to champion liberty.” 38 The irony is that Howe says nothing
about the fact that the epitaph hangs over Stella’s adjacent grave too—a point which is
strongly emphasized in The Liberties. (We should note this is not the Yeats translation that
Howe eventually uses for her poem (ET, 156-157).) In the second case, she quotes A. C.
Bradley on King Lear, but surprisingly there is no reference to Cordelia:
They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a scene or particular
place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately, of a particular place which
is also a world. This world is dim to us, partly from its immensity, and partly
because it is filled with gloom; and in the gloom shapes approach and recede,
whose half-seen faces and motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most
painful pity –
– This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look
for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was
chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean.
A. C. Bradley on Lear 39
Beneath the passage (which is taken from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy) Howe writes, “Just
what I see when I conceive Chanting or Secret History and now…” Her thinking is
retrospective, to her recent works Chanting at the Crystal Sea and Secret History of the Dividing
Line, but the subject of her next work is still in question. It’s hard not to hear Cordelia just
beneath the surface, even in Bradley’s allusion to “the daughters of Ocean.” But as it stands,
Howe gives no indication that she is about to write a long poem about Cordelia. Howe is
clearly in the search mode, but the goal is undetermined.
The same sketchbook shows that The Liberties might have turned out with different
heroines than Cordelia and Stella. Howe was casting a wide net across literary history in
search of others who had been lost or obscured beside their male counterparts:
38 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, September 23, 1978-February 11, 1979, Box 12.
39 Ibid. See Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. 2nd ed.
(London: Macmillan, 1905), 261.
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Dr. Johnson shouted people down
Swift was caustic, Coleridge had no humor
great talkers of the past talked superbly
laughter to the left and right – 40
Howe is familiar enough with the personage of each writer to offer such cutting
characterizations. She knows that Johnson “shouted,” that Swift was “caustic,” and that
Coleridge had “no humor,” but she is also drawn to the works by each. If Howe’s lines are
taken as critical, then the object of her critique is not that the writers failed as writers, but
that being “great talkers” led them to run roughshod over those around them. Accordingly,
Howe’s work is driven by a need to be both writer and listener: to write the past but also to
listen to what the past can never divulge (or its secret). Availing herself of a writer like
Johnson, Swift, or Coleridge is only the first step in discovering how the past informs the
present. She must also avail herself of the unnamed others, like Stella, who were around the
“great talkers” but who went unheard and thus unrecorded in the historical record. The
allusion to Coleridge can be thought of as a placeholder. Nearly a decade later Coleridge’s
daughter is featured in The Birth-Mark (BM, 31-36).
Finally, midway through the sketchbook and far from the quotations that occupy the
opening pages, the first reference to Stella suddenly materializes. It comes in a series of
research notes scrawled opposite a poem. Howe writes “STELLA” and beneath it lists a few
preliminary resources, in particular David Higgins, a scholar writing on Stella, and Swift’s
Journal to Stella. The latter is of course pivotal to The Liberties. She cites additional works by
Swift: “Jonathan Swift / Volume IV A Proposal for Correcting the ENGLISH TONGUE
Polite conversation, etc. / Basil Blackwell. Oxford / 1973 – // CA Modest Defense of
40 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, September 23, 1978-February 11, 1979, Box 12.
174

Punning / A Discourse to Prove the Antiquity of the English Tongue / Miscellaneous and
Autobiographical Pieces Fragments and Marginalia / edited by Herbert P / Basil Blackwell
Oxford, 1962.” The notes are obviously intended for research purposes. What is so
interesting is that Stella has leapt forth almost at once, but there are only slight indications of
her role in The Liberties. The same page also points to research for My Emily Dickinson; Howe
cites the “Master Letters,” a “Portrait” of Dickinson (presumably in a biography), and Jay
Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960). “See if Leyda is still in print,” writes
Howe, circling his name. I take the notes to mean that Howe was in the middle of
researching My Emily Dickinson at the same time that Stella came to her attention. (I have
more to say about Dickinson in the next chapter). The remainder of the sketchbook has no
other allusion to Stella until near the very end, when it reads: “Say, Stella, feel you no content
/ Reflecting on a life well spent?” The same lines appear in The Liberties (ET, 158), and as
Rachel Tzvia Back observes, the source is a poem by Swift: “Stella’s Birthday March 13,
1726.” 41
Stella essentially disappears from the sketchbooks until half a year later, so I will return
to her in a moment. In the meantime, Cordelia, the second heroine, comes to the fore in a
rather unexpected way. In the next sketchbook, dated February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, we
find a reference to Cordelia that is surprising because the source is not King Lear but one of
Shakespeare’s sources, The Faerie Queen:
41 Back, ibid., 69.
So to his crowne she him restor'd againe,
In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,
And after wild, it should to her remaine:
Who peaceably the same long time did weld:
And all mens harts in dew obedience held:
Till that her sisters children, woxen strong
Through proud ambition, against her rebeld,
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And ouercommen kept in prison long,
Till wearie of that wretched life, her selfe she hong. 42
I quote this passage because it challenges the widespread assumption that the “Cordelia” of
The Liberties is based solely on “William Shakespeare’s Cordelia.” 43 In Spenser’s version
Cordelia restores the crown to “Leyr,” and after his death she rules “peaceably” for many
years. She also meets a violent end, however, when her nephews rebel and she is forced to
commit suicide. On the basis of this extract, Howe seems to have approached Cordelia from
Shakespeare and Spenser. On top of this, as Rachel Tzvia Back has recently shown, one line
from The Liberties, “children of Lir / lear” (ET, 176) introduces an “early source for the King
Lear story—the Gaelic legend of Lir, the ocean god, whose three sons and one daughter
were turned into swans by their jealous stepmother.” 44 And in a poem in the same
sketchbook Howe writes, “Leir Leer – lives and reigns / over the dark islands – .” 45 The
reference to “Leir” establishes that Howe was also thinking of an earlier version of “King
Lear” that Shakespeare had based his play on. 46 So all four sources must be considered as part
of Howe’s vision of Cordelia.
In being documented multiple times over, Cordelia exceeds being strictly defined by her
characterization in Shakespeare’s play. This complicates the idea of an original or authentic
Cordelia. Howe quotes Blake in the same sketchbook assaying, “Nothing can be more
42 The passage is from The Faerie Queen Book II, Canto X, quoted in Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook,
February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
43 For example see Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan / New England UP, 2000), 179.
44 Back, Ibid, 82.
45 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
46 Shakespeare “knew, and may have even acted in, a bland dramatic version, The True Chronicle History of
King Leir,” published anonymously in 1605 but staged at least as early as 1594,” writes Alfred Harbage. See his
introduction to King Lear in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Penguin,
1969), 1060.
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contemptible than to suppose public records to be true” 47 An extract from Nietzsche reads:
“Originality. What is Originality? To see something that as yet bears no name, cannot yet be
named, although it lies immediately before the eyes. Men being the way they are, the name
first makes a thing really visible to them. The people endowed with originality have chiefly
been name givers.” 48 Names are traditionally given by gods, kings, or poets—those who have
the power to bring into being what has previously had no part in the world. Howe’s poems
tend to work in the opposite direction. By instilling doubt in our knowledge of Cordelia,
Howe un-names the historical and literary figure. Another extract (by Freud) describes the
danger in assuming that a biography has “named” its subject. “Whoever undertakes to write
a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery, and even to hiding his own
lack of understanding, since biographical material is not to be had, and if it were it could not
be used. Truth is not accessible; mankind does not deserve it, and wasn’t Prince Hamlet right
when he asked who would escape a whipping if he had his deserts?” This passage is
highlighted and beneath it Howe writes “Great!” 49
This sketchbook contains work on “The Book of Cordelia,” one of the two middle
sections of The Liberties. Although such a title seems to promise the reader a full or adequate
representation of Cordelia, like a biography, anyone familiar with The Liberties knows that
transparent representation is undone at almost every turn. Howe does a delicate balancing
act in which Cordelia appears and disappears from page to page. As one couplet that was
omitted from the published poem reads, “still being identified they constantly /vanish.” 50
Rather than identify Cordelia, Howe dismantles the “effable” subject:
47 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
177

effable Cordelia Aurora
knees of night
on your back
hail of epic windcry
clairvoyance
adorable
step
by
step
returns to life
rises child again
catastrophe hurled
down. This dead one.
shadow to feed the empty 51
I noted at the beginning of this chapter that Pound’s “luminous detail” locates an inherent
light in the document or fact, and that Olson’s “light from outside” locates a light in the
narrator who sets in motion the documents in a poem. By contrast, Howe begins with an
“Aurora” of light across the top of the poem, “effable Cordelia Aurora,” but then moves
toward a “shadow to feed the empty” at the bottom. It is in this shadow, like a niche of
silence, that Cordelia is to be sought beneath whatever documents might seem to present
her. Cordelia is at the outset in a state of violent constraint; her light is blocked by a
personified “night” with a “knee” forced down on her “back.” It is almost as if Howe can
sense Cordelia, beneath this scene, in an “epic windcry” that has never previously entered
her world.
The “windcry” calls to mind the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose writings begin
to appear in Howe’s sketchbooks around the same time. In a letter written shortly after
composing this passage, Howe tells Lyn Hejinian that she has a passage by Wittgenstein
pasted on the wall above her desk:
51 Ibid.
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But here is the problem: a cry, (1) which cannot be called a description, which is
more primitive than any description, for all that, serves as a description of the inner
life. (2) A cry is not a description. But there are transitions. And the words ‘I am
afraid’ may approximate more, or less, to being a cry. They may come quite close to
this and also be far removed from it. 52
Howe might be said to treat Cordelia the way that Wittgenstein treats “the inner life.” If we
add the fact that Howe assumes the source of her self is her inheritance, which is defined by
voices such as Cordelia’s, then writing about Cordelia becomes in effect writing about
herself. The problem is that Cordelia is only sensed in an “epic windcry.” She can be sensed
but ultimately remains ineffable (rather than “effable”). In this context the appeal to
“clairvoyance” is reminiscent of another claim by Wittgenstein (not quoted, however, in the
sketchbook): “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves
manifest. They are what is mystical.” 53 Perhaps “clairvoyance” can communicate with the
mystical. Finally, the “transitions” of Wittgenstein are congruent to the “step by step”
process in “returns to life.” The line “feed the empty” is appropriate for Howe (or any
reader) who hungers for a “description” of Cordelia, but who has nothing to feed on but a
“shadow.”
With the exception of the phrase “step by step,” none of the lines just quoted are found
in The Liberties. This is consistent, however, with the predicament of poetic language that is
aimed at recovering an irrecoverable history. If Cordelia announces herself only as a
“windcry,” then spoken or written words can never respond on the same level. The words of
52 Susan Howe to Lyn Hejinian, December 13, 1979. Lyn Hejinian Papers, Archive for New Poetry,
Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, MSS 74, Box 4, Folder 18. Howe
adds the parenthetical numbers to the quote which can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 189.
53 This is one of Wittgenstein’s final propositions (6.522) in his Tractatus. See Ludwig Wittgeinstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 89.
179

the poem can never be identical to the cry itself, for the cry is not a matter of language that
can be excavated from the historical record. The cry is a limit for representational language.
Whatever language Howe finds to capture the cry is thus provisional, and some of the paths
taken to capture that cry must eventually be discarded if she finds a more suitable alternative.
For example, the sketchbook has another variant of the “steps” poem:
I can retrace
my steps
linden
coming to pieces when the sun
is weak… 54
Here the path is ambiguous. Aside from an inexplicable allusion to the linden, a European
species of tree, the only clear image is of disintegration (“coming apart”) in growing darkness
(“the sun / is weak”). It turns out the path is through a play by Yeats called The Hour-Glass:
A Morality. In it a character named “young man” says, “Let go his cloak, it is coming to pieces.
What do you want pennies for, with that great bag at your waist?” Then a character named
“Fool,” replies, “I want to buy bacon in the shops, and nuts in the market, and strong drink
for the time when the sun is weak…” The fool certainly resonates with King Lear and with the
title of the Cordelia section in The Liberties, “W H I T E F O O L S C A P E / The Book of
Cordelia.” But no sign of Yeats’s play resurfaces in the published poem. The actual path
vanishes and only the “steps” remain. The steps recur in several variants as if to indicate the
transitions between representational language and its limit (i.e. the cry).
It is in fact the steps that constitute the speaker of the poem rather than any of the actual
sources. Remember that there are no direct sources from Cordelia (or Stella), only from
others like Shakespeare or Spenser writing about them. (Everything we have about Cordelia
or Stella is a secondary source.) The “I” is constituted by the past—according to the
54 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
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autobiography of an inherited self—but the past is defined by its absence. The “I” can only
be made from the steps (or transitions) that are enabled by this absence. Here is the key
passage as it appears in “The Book of Cordelia”:
I can re
trac
my steps
Iwho
crawl
between thwarts
Do not come down the ladder
ifor I
haveaten
it a
way
(ET, 177)
This is no doubt a crucial passage because there are two additional variants of it before “The
Book of Cordelia” comes to an end. And here the sketchbook is invaluable because it
contains even more variants but with significant differences:
I can re
trace
my steps
I, who might that be?
Who crawls between thwarts
Do not come down the ladder
for I haf taken it
away
whistling would in the air ha
come way
running
mouths in a glass
We crawl and cry. I will preach to thee,
Mark 55
The “ladder” promises potential relocation to an alternate plane. It certainly resonates with
Wittgenstein’s famous ladder in Tractatus. As Wittgenstein writes, “My propositions are
55 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
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elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he
has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must, so to speak, throw away the
ladder, after he has climbed up on it.” 56 But the real source is Samuel Beckett. In Watt (1953)
we see the following passage: “Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away. This I am
happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing
where it always was, back again.” 57 In The Unnamable we see this passage: “I. Who might that
be? The galley-man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules, who drops his sweep under cover of
night and crawls between thwarts, towards the rising sun, unseen by the guard, praying for
storm.” 58 There are of course changes. The passage that should be flagged is, “I, who might
that be?” It is elided in the poem, but here it points to the self-questioning that motivates a
retracing of her steps. Notice that in The Liberties the ladder is “eaten” and hence
internalized, rather than “taken away” as in the Beckett. That the lines are autobiographical is
confirmed by the direct reference to Howe’s father and son, “Mark.” She addresses him with
a term of respect, “thee,” but the roles are reversed. The child preaches to the father, not the
other way around. Self-formation is undone, like the “reverse metamorphosis” in The
Unnamable, or the retracable steps of the poem. Undoubtedly she will preach to her father
about Stella and Cordelia. Self-formation thus begins again through documenting her
inheritance.
Howe actually does retrace her steps. Soon after writing the lines based on Beckett she
traveled back to Ireland and revisited St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The visit is recorded in the next
56 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, (London:
Routledge, 1961), 151.
57 The italics are mine. See Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 44. See also Marjorie
Perloff’s reading of Watt as a Wittgensteinian novel, especially her suggestion that Beckett was referring to the
ladder in Tractatus: “Witt—Watt: The Language of Resistance/ The Resistance of Language” in Wittgenstein’s
Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996), 133.
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sketchbook, which unlike others, has a special subsection set off from the rest: “Ireland July
10th 1979-July 24th 1979.” In the following Howe is back at the grave where she had
previously copied Swift’s epitaph (two sketchbooks prior). This time, however, her attention
is on the graves of both Swift and Stella. The scene is laid out like the surface of a document:
The presence of this place
those two there, under the floor—
Her truth, honesty, saintly-grace
His passion, rage, savagery, wit
To the end, convention interrupted—
on the floor of the church the letters
their letters—
the child in my dream leading me to St. Patrick’s 59
“[U]nder the floor” suggests buried and irrecoverable knowledge, and it’s not a coincidence
that the same line appears twice in “Fragments of a Liquidation,” the prose preface to The
Liberties: “[Stella] was buried at midnight under the floor on the south side of the nave of St.
Patrick’s Cathedral…” (ET, 155) and “[Swift] was buried, by torchlight and in the same place
that Stella had been interred, under the cathedral floor” (ET, 156). The “letters” in line six refer
to the actual names on the graves, but then in line seven Howe associates the letters with
their lost correspondence: “None of Stella’s letters have been saved” (ET, 151), as she makes
a point of later emphasizing. Stella and Swift had an unorthodox relationship, or
“convention interrupted,” that was literally effaced when her papers were destroyed. The line
about Swift’s “savagery” is perhaps the most telling indication that Howe was so deeply
immersed by this point in the story of Stella, for it suggests a familiarity with the Yeats
translation of Swift’s epitaph. The original Latin reads: “Ubi saeva Indignatio” (ET, 156).
The translation copied into an earlier sketchbook (cited above) reads: “fierce indignation.”
58 The italics are mine. See Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Beckett
and Patrick Bowls (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 336.
59 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 10, 1979-January 1, 1980, Box 13.
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But the Yeats translation which later appears in “Fragments of a Liquidation” reads: “Savage
indignation there” (ET, 156).
Stella and Cordelia help Howe to realize that a shadow exists beneath historical
representation—or beneath the documents. What this view wins Howe in terms of self-
understanding is not apparent until the final section of The Liberties, when she turns from
Stella and Cordelia to herself. In the sketchbook that corresponds to this final section, Howe
dismantles her proper name and more generally the inherited language that constitutes her
self:
Entire I’m a person’s name, behead me
I represent noisome insects, beheaded once
more and I’m seen in the northern regions 60
If names are one of the primary ways that we document ourselves, and if all documents are
inherently incomplete, then names too must be incomplete. For Howe, being released from
the name clears the space for “noisome insects,” perhaps indicative of nature or a natural
state, as opposed to human artifice. But even such a natural state can be “beheaded / once
more,” and what remains (“seen in northern regions”) is a traveler, a groundless being, an
émigré. Being without a name does not mean a state of nonexistence, but rather an open
state in which existence is not fixed by a closed set of terms, or as Lyn Hejinian says
elsewhere, a “rejection to closure.”
When Howe was writing The Liberties she clearly had an idea that her name would enter
the composition. In the preceding sketchbook are several quotations that refer to the nature
of proper names, including her own. A passage from Milton’s On the Reformation reads:
“Their ceremonies and their courts’ are two leeches… that still suck and suck the Kingdom.”
60 Ibid.
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Beneath it Howe writes: “Why I like the name Sukey…” 61 This is of course her nickname
(as disclosed in “Frame Structures” (FS, 21)). Howe also cites the appellative with which
Milton cartooned his antagonists: “Smectymnous – composed from initials of the authors
Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Mathew Newromen, and William
Spurstow.” 62 Finally, a quote from the ninth chapter of Ulysses anticipates one of Howe’s
favorite ways of incorporating autobiographical material into her poems: “He has hidden his
own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.” 63 Howe has likewise hidden her name (and
certain family names) in her writing, from her conspicuous initials in the title of Secret History
of the Dividing Line (1978) to the more obscure allusion to an “S”-shaped arch (the “ogee”) in
Bed Hangings II (2003): “Need wheat for an ogee epigram” (TM, 90). Howe conceives of
herself as a product of language, but the language is not total or absolute (as seen through
Stella and Cordelia), she is not pegged in place, and this leaves an unmarked space for play.
In The Liberties her strategy is less a matter of encoding than of decoding her name—
taking apart the spelling and giving full reign to the existence of each individual letter. The
sketchbook starts off similar to what we have in the published poem: “I am composed of
nine letters” (ET, 208). She numbers each letter of her name so that “S” is first, “U” is
second, and so forth. She then plays on each letter: “My first is a snake / My second is a
lamb or a tree / My third is the same as the first…” 64 Some of her experiments in the
sketchbook are not included in the published poem. In one case she connects her name to
61 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, February 11, 1979-June 30, 1979, Box 12.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Susan Howe, Working Sketchbook, July 10, 1979-Jan 1, 1980, Box 13.
185

her body: “anus / my 4th 5th and 3rd are a part of my body.” 65 In another case, also not in
the poem, she intimates that her name has a buried history: “My 6 7 8 9 is an ancient burial
mound.” 66 We could think of persuasive ways to frame this numerological name: flirting with
procedural poetry, returning to the language games in Watt, or imitating Dickinson, who was
a great aficionado of riddles. 67 Because she plays with alphabetical letters, I am inclined to
read the passage as engaging and extending the principles of L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E, the
avant-garde magazine where some of her own work had appeared by this time. The title of
the magazine bulldozes the word “language” in order to foreground its project, the
investigation of language, and its group name, the Language Poets. The equal sign is an
appeal to community, which was (and is) important for the poets involved. The title also
demonstrates the materiality of language, that it can be dissected, reshaped, and transformed
in ways that are irreducible to language as a medium for communication. In The Liberties,
Howe bulldozes the letters of her name and puts them back together in ways that recall the
project of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. But this point should be qualified. I think at the same
time that Howe affirms the project of Language Poetry, she instigates her work from a more
idiosyncratic and personal standpoint. She starts with the linguistic determination of herself
in the rock-bottom denominator of her personal name. This is not to say that in having a
more autobiographical approach to language that Howe avoids participating with others.
Certainly one must recognize her rich and beneficial exchange with fellow poets such as
Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Palmer, and many, many others.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 On the “mathematicized speech” in Watt, see Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A
Critical and Historical Study, (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 168-171. See Anthony Hecht, “The
Riddles of Emily Dickinson,” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 149-162.
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But I think the community in which Howe might be located is attenuated by her engagement
with past figures as much as, if not more than, with her contemporaries. I’ve tried to show,
for example, that Stella and Cordelia teach Howe to interrogate documents for what they
hide or obscure. This lesson wins Howe a personal liberation from the language (such as her
proper name) that would otherwise hold her captive.
Howe is always caught between a responsibility to language and a recognition that
language is an unfinished business. The passage that I quoted in my introduction comes right
after her mathematicized name and attests to her debt:
Across the Atlantic, I
inherit myself
semblance
of irish susans
dispersed
and narrowed to
home
(ET, 213)
It has not been my intention to refute the strict separation between the document and the
poet. I have sought to illustrate, rather, that if a poet presumes to have an inherited self, then
documenting his or her inheritance becomes another form of autobiography. The separation
is preserved because the documents still do not originate with the poet. Instead, the
documents originate with the history in which the poet originates. We can apply this
paradoxical formulation to the passage above. Howe claims to originate with her namesake,
an Irish grandmother, but finds a way to document her Irish inheritance by documenting
Stella. And like Stella, the inheritance is not fully realized but exists as a “semblance,” which
is to say a film or a veil rather than the penetration to certainty. Howe conceives of her
inheritance as “dispersed / and narrowed” because the moment of recognition is never
immediate. The inheritance floats in and out of view, dark at some points, bright at others.
Yet as Howe emphasizes, the inheritance, elusive as it may be, is what founds her “home.”
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The inheritance is what houses her being and makes her at home in the world. In my view
the latter transforms her work into autobiography. The question that remains for the next
chapter is why Howe organizes her inheritance around historical figures, such as Stella and
Cordelia, or Emily Dickinson, particularly when progressive historical methods have long
since discarded subject-based models. Howe is not alone of course; for Olson, the historical
figures include Melville, John Smith and the numerous archetypes for Maximus; and for
Pound, the figures include Andreas Divas, Sigismundo Malatesta and certain “Founding
Fathers” of the U.S. Where this chapter is about how poets document inheritance, the next
chapter is about how poets organize inheritance around specific historical figures.
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CHAPTER 4. HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
4.1) “I Would Be…As…” : Avant-Garde Historical Figures
Here was a man. Here is a man after my own heart. Is it merely in a
book? So am I then, merely in a book. You see? Here at least I find the
thing I love. I mean here is the thing, accurately, my own world, the
world in which I myself breathe and walk and live—against that which
you present.
—William Carlos Williams on Samuel de Champlain
(1567-1635) (IAG, 69)
I assume Hope Atherton’s excursion for an emblem foreshadowing a
Poet’s abolished limitations in our demythologized fantasy of Manifest
Destiny.
—Susan Howe (S, 4)
In the last chapter we examined the use of documents in avant-garde historical poetry.
Charles Olson trusted the evidence of documents because he followed Herodotus’s
definition of history as the Greek verb “‘istorin” or “‘finding out for oneself,’ instead of
depending on hearsay” (SV, 20). When he embarked on the Maximus Poems, he made the
Greek historian central,
I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking
for oneself for the evidence of
what is said…
(M, 105)
and thus placed highest what Hegel placed lowest: the “primitive” history exemplified by
Herodotus wherein the “author’s spirit, and that of the actions he narrates, is one and the
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same.” 1 According to Hegel, the primitive historian “describes scenes in which he himself
has been an actor, or at any rate an interested spectator” 2 To Olson, the disinterested
spectator is impossible on the grounds that subject and object are a false dichotomy. 3
Whereas Hegel proposes that we improve on the primitive historian by becoming a more
reflective and philosophical historian, for Olson, Herodotus legitimates the hands-on
research that governs his poems. Olson is the historian of traipsing around an ancestral site,
gathering stories from modern-day descendants, pillaging town archives, and so forth. If you
are like Herodotus or Olson after him, then you think history should be written not by
adding on top of what the best and brightest commentators have already said, but from a
perspective that is located down at the level of the facts, where you are simply another fact
on the horizon. It’s imaginable that Herodotus would not have seen any difference between
history and autobiography. In the Greek, ‘Istorin is a verb meaning that you and the events
around you are caught up in the same process.
There is, however, a more fundamental part to this, which takes us further towards
appreciating the complexities of Olson’s Maximus Poems and his poetics in general. Not only
1 In The Philosophy of History Hegel describes three levels of historical writing: primitive, reflective, and
philosophical. He says that primitive history, the kind practiced by Herodotus (and Thucydides), never achieves
a grand perspective on the past because the primitive historian only writes about events that are the same as his
or her experience: “The influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which have moulded the
events that constitute the matter of his story. The author’s spirit, and that of the actions he narrates, is one and
the same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at any rate an interested spectator.”
Reflective history is an intermediate step on the way to philosophical history, Hegel’s most advanced level: “the
Philosophy of History means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it.” When Olson writes, the “distinction
here is between language as the act of an instant and language as the act of thought about the instant,” he uses
the same Hegelian model but privileges the opposite term: not thought but action. See G.W.F. Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 2-4.
2 Ibid.
3 Olson holds that the practice of “projective verse” can bring about a new “stance towards reality”
wherein everything is essentially an object, even (or especially) the person: “Objectism [as he called it] is the
getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar
presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with
certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call
objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, particularly at that moment
that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use”(CP, 247).
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does he want to be “looking / for oneself for the evidence of / what is said,” but he takes
Herodotus as his precedent and guide. That he can say in the first place, “I would be… as
Herodotus,” is based on the assumption that history is the sum of human actions. “History
is what he does” (SV, 26), Olson says in The Special View of History (1956); “History is
precisely cut to the term man” (SV, 28). Notice that rather than define “history” as such or
“man” as such, he proposes a corresponding symmetry between them. “One could put it
this way, history is the continuum which man is, and if a man does not live in the thought
that he is a history, he is not capable of himself” (SV, 28). The problem then becomes,
insofar as we want to know ourselves, we must learn history as the totality of the possibilities
of what we can do. On the face of it Olson’s position is conservative—nothing changes,
nothing new under the sun—as if history repeats itself because we have no other grounds
for change. Olson is convinced, however, that history has an undisclosed range of radical
possibilities. The problem is simply that we are so caught up in our contemporary world that
we have forgotten them; in this respect Olson is not appealing to a regressive stance so
much as a progressive stance that is founded on historical recovery.
Herodotus is not alone among the many figures that Olson seeks in order to learn what
he is “capable” of, nor is Olson alone in undertaking this kind of quest. What I want to
explore in this chapter is how avant-garde poets locate historic figures who reveal what they
are “capable” of and who, being a part of their inheritance, can be assumed or followed in
the present. Such figures can be thought of as bridges between the past and present of
history and autobiography, though as we will see, the paths between past and present require
complex representational strategies. For the poets, the governing assumption is that the
world they inhabit is inherited, so they feel it incumbent upon them to locate historical
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figures who have already negotiated this inheritance, even if the terms of that negotiation
have yet to be disclosed.
Avant-garde historical writing holds a mosaic of such figures. My Emily Dickinson
(discussed in a full section later in this chapter) finds Howe expressing her subjectivity
before the poet of the title. In “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” (1987) Howe
discovers that the “wanderings” of a seventeenth century minister in the Connecticut River
Valley foreshadow her situation as a poet in the twentieth century. She literally puts herself at
the receiving end of his inheritance: “I assume Hope Atherton’s excursion.” According to
Pound the “study of literature is hero-worship” (SP, 5). He locates his aesthetic forebears in
The Spirit of Romance (1913), finding an select handful of pre-Renaissance Provençal
troubadours whose historical innovations provide a template for his modern assault on
tradition. In a similar vein, Williams organizes the chapters of In the American Grain around an
array of figures that form an alternative genealogy of America: Columbus, Cortez and
Montezuma, and De Soto, in the first chapters, and Sam Houston, Poe, and Lincoln toward
the end. “Here is a man after my own heart,” he says of Samuel de Champlain, “Is it merely
in a book? So am I then, merely in a book.”
Williams, infamous for his spirited attacks on the bookish, pedantic character of T.S.
Eliot 4 and other modernist poets (his friend Pound included), acknowledges here, however
tongue in cheek, that he too is “merely a book” and that the study of history thus provides
essential self-understanding. “We are blind asses,” he says, “with our whole history unread
before us and helpless if we read it. Nothing noticed. Nothing taught in the academies.
You’d think that THAT would force us into some immediacy. NEVER” (IAG, 179). The
4 See in Williams’s Autobiography the well-known twenty-fifth chapter, “The Waste Land,” where he says
“the blast of Eliot’s genius… gave the poem back to the academics.” The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
(New York: New Directions, 1967), 146.
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few potshots taken at the “academies” in In the American Grain (1925) expand to a full-
fledged assault in The Embodiment of Knowledge, the pedagogical guide written for his sons in
1927 (and posthumously published). In it he distinguishes two opposing forms of
knowledge: the “fetish” knowledge of scholarship and the “embodiment” of knowledge that
he seeks. Scholarship is guilty of turning knowledge into a “fetish,” says Williams, meaning
that history is reduced to vain or irrelevant knowledge of past events:
Scholars, academicians—They are truly lost in the pursuit of knowledge. To bring
them back to their own true purpose, of a clarity, would be at the same time to
humanize them, since knowledge is always human, only its fetish is otherwise.
(EK, 38)
Williams is clear about the fact that “Knowledge is something separate from man as a
creature” (EK, 62), but even so, knowledge can be embodied when someone, like
Shakespeare for example, puts knowledge to use. This is a tool-based theory of knowledge
where the tools are available if and only if somebody recognizes them and applies them to
the world—preferably some application on the order of changing his or her life. The
alternative is a mental paralysis towards knowledge: “The embodiment of knowledge can
have no meaning but the escape of man from its domination as a fetish of knowledge itself
by realizing its function and its place as subordinate to himself—oddly metaphysical as it
may sound” (EK, 63). 5
For Williams, Shakespeare is an instructive figure, exemplifying the “embodiment” of
knowledge in contrast to its “fetish.” That Shakespeare was excluded from In the American
Grain does not keep Williams from thinking he is an “inevitable prophet of the world as it is
coming to be today” (EK, 14) and thus part of that project for a corrective American
5 Incidentally, Williams is here indirectly criticizing Henry Adams, as he is through much of the book, for
feeling paralyzed by the knowledge of the “Dynamo.” See the first chapter where I argued that, although
Adams and Williams devise different models of history, Williams’s critique of scholarship coincides with
Adams’s claim about the “failure” of his “education.”
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inheritance. Calling Shakespeare his “grandfather” (on account of sharing the same first
name), Williams devotes six full sections to the bard. The virtue of Shakespeare, says
Williams, is that he is “divorced from knowledge as explanation, and at work on knowledge
as colored stones” (EK, 110). The “colored stones” are hard and weighty, a metaphor for
how Shakespeare substantiates knowledge. Shakespeare appears to anticipate modernist
collage through “a juxtaposition of and interaction between pieces…and not a qualitative,
quantitative chemistry” (EK, 110). The colored stones are activated by their adjacency to one
another, not by some interpretation or explanation that we might impose on them.
Elsewhere Williams clarifies that he is talking about how Shakespeare’s characters work
together in a play. What’s more important, Williams insists that however much Shakespeare
anticipates the present, he is in fact grounded in history: “Shakespeare came as an ebullient
naturalism of his time. He was thrown out, so to speak, fully grown by his mother (England),
a nation breaking through its bounds, whose London was a teapot of languages, whose
odors filled the scene. Shakespeare in absorbing all this gratis, almost through his skin, was
braced, intoxicated, fed and released all in one” (EK, 138-139).
Williams thinks that Shakespeare embodied knowledge because he had contact with the
social and historical changes around him. For Williams, contact is dependent on what he
calls “wit, alert sensibilities” (EK, 139) and “‘naturalistic’ observation” (EK, 139). This
practice goes deeper than a set of lessons or instructions, which is perhaps why he never
published The Embodiment of Knowledge in his lifetime. It’s not even clear that the embodiment
of knowledge can be expressed as something recognizable as knowledge. Rather—and this is
I think William’s principle claim—embodiment is not an act of freedom from one’s personal
circumstances, but rather an act of freedom that goes into those circumstances through a
more careful attentiveness. To go back to an earlier quote: “The embodiment of knowledge
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can have no meaning but the escape of man from its domination as a fetish of knowledge
itself by realizing its function and its place as subordinate to himself—oddly metaphysical as
it may sound” (EK, 63).
This does sound metaphysical, as does the title The Embodiment of Knowledge, more so than
the Williams of white chickens and pilfered plums is ever wont to do. But his point is
important because it discloses the “oddly metaphysical” reason that one would want to study
such historical figures as a Shakespeare or a de Champlain, or even for that matter a
Herodotus or a Dickinson. As he explains, “It is not scholarship, not degrees, not snobbism
of knowledge, not knowledge of the classics at all[,] but a liberation of man himself” (EK, 139,
my italics). The idea must be entertained that Williams would lose all interest in Shakespeare
if he ceased to see him as a liberating figure. To the avant-garde poet (not just to Williams
but to Howe, Olson, Pound, and a handful others), the reason one studies history in the first
place is to discover the possibilities of liberation in the present. The trick is to make a
successful transition from fathoming that possibility to actually realizing it. It’s no doubt an
optimistic view of history. If a Shakespeare or a Dickinson can achieve a modicum of
liberation, then so too might liberation be possible in the present, in 1927 or in 1985 or
perhaps even for someone like me reading poems about them in 2003. The problem for the
rest of this chapter is to interrogate the cross-historical junction between the potential
liberation of a Shakespeare or a Dickinson and the auto of autobiography in the present.
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4.2) “The Archaeology We Are” 6 : Olson’s Archetypal Inheritance
Don’t read this as a letter : read it as though I were
—as in fact etc – Paleolithic !
—Olson, Pleistocene Man (1965)
Melville grasped the archaeological man and by doing it entered
the mythological present
—Olson (CP, 119)
Of the poetry that focuses on historical figures, Olson’s is most inclined to abstract
specific figures into archetypal paradigms. From incarnations such as Big Mans, Pacific Man,
and O’Ryan in early work, to Cro-Magnon Man and Pleistocene Man later, and in Maximus
though much of his epic, Olson shapes inheritance around images of man that educated him
in,
what we do not know of ourselves
of who they are who lie
coiled or unflown
in the marrow of the bone
(CP, 173)
The archetype is born from a historical inquiry into what he can become in the present. So
close do the ancient figures “lie / coiled or unflown / in the marrow of the bone,” that we
must distance our usual self-image in order to hear what “they” have to say. Our usual self-
image is estrangement or alienation, as Olson says after Heraclitus: “Man is estranged from
that with which he is most familiar.” Olson conceives that an archetype, excavated from the
historical record, has the power to blast through our estrangement and return us to what is
“most familiar.” By the time that “Bigmans” appears in “Sing, Mister, Sing” (1945), “La
6 See “The Chiasma, or Lectures in the New Sciences of Man,” published in Olson: The Journal of the Charles
Olson Archives 10 (1978): 21. Henceforward abbreviated (Ch).
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Préface” (1946), “Bigmans” (1950) and “Bigmans II” (1950), and “Pacific Man” appears in
the conclusion of Call Me Ishmael (first published in 1947), the archetypal paradigm is central
to his investigation of how the past inhabits the present. “He who saw everything,” says
Olson in “Bigmans II,” “of him learn, o my land, learn / of him who sought out to know
what lands are for, & people…” (CP, 149).
We should pause over the fact that Olson had such a large ensemble of archetypes and,
in The Maximus Poems, that he had so many precedents that qualified as Maximus. In his
magnificent A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, George Butterick reports that
Olson once “enumerated the various archetypal figures” which include, in addition to James
Merry of Gloucester, Orion, Hercules (“who appears in Maximus both as the Phoenician
prototype of Odysseus and as the ‘Glory of Hera’ (which the name signifies), an aspect of
Enyalion,” and Gilgamesh, Samson, Odysseus, and Theseus. Butterick adds additional
figures who appear throughout the epic: William Stevens, the androgynous John Smith,
Enyalion, the Perfect Child, Odysseus, Hercules, Melkaart, James Merry, Manes/Minos and,
as Butterick notes, “even a ‘whelping mother.’” 7 The sheer number, I am persuaded, should
be taken as a sign of Olson’s utter inability to reign in his inheritance. The inheritance is
always in excess of its container, that is, its archetypal figure. A given archetype begins in the
historical record. It is researched, elaborated, and enshrined—sometimes in prose, like the
“Pacific Man” of Call Me Ishmael, or sometimes in verse, like the “Bigmans” of his early
poems or the Maximus figure of his epic. 8 But ultimately (inevitably) the archetype is
7 George Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, (Berkeley: U California P, 1980), xxix.
8 Olson does not always frame his inheritance in sharply delineated or well-formed archetypes, for example
when he is inhabited by a more general “dead,” as in the poem “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” or when he
devises a “New Sciences of Man” in his Chiasma lectures (1953), or when he refers to himself through
individual mythological figures, as in an early evocation of Gilgamesh in “Tomorrow” (1941), “I am
Gilgamesh, / an Ur world is in me / to inhabit” (CP, 9).
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discarded, a new one is sought, and the quest begins all over. An archetype is never a
conclusive statement. It is always punctuated with an implicit question mark. The Chiasma, or
Lectures in the New Sciences of Man (1953), for example, contains a comprehensive research
program that Olson undertakes in order to “inhabit man in his story backward & forward as
close to exactly as any of us actually inhabit ourselves” (Ch, 21). He believes it is possible to
know our “vertical force” because “the archaeology we are, creates the mythology of which
we are the inheritors” (Ch, 21). This creates a rift between an inheritance that grounds his
creativity and his creativity which substantiates this inheritance. As research advances,
inheritance outreaches any single archetypal paradigm. We end up with predecessors in
excess of a closed conceptual system. Consider for example the inheritance that we get from
“Cro-Magnon.” Olson first enumerates “those animals and those plants” that dwell in us,
then he proceeds to a series of “industries” and “arts” (Ch, 27) that inform our world. 9 The
demands made on the Cro-Magnon inheritance increase until Olson exclaims, “I have lost
the thread in the maze—I am not, any longer, persistent. So let me do what a man out of
breath does (or ought to do): STOP” (Ch, 27). How ironic that Olson is so famous for
identifying poetry with breath. The inheritance eats up all his energy, it metastasizes his
poetics and leaves him breathless. This is surely a key reason that projective verse is so crude
9 Chiasma was to be an “institute of the sciences of man” featuring the newest research in archaeology,
“culture-morphology,” geographical sciences, bio-sciences, psychology, mythology, anthropology, and art, plus
even the “still tremendous tools” of physics, mathematics, and geometry. See Olson’s ambition in “1st Draft of
Possibilities” for the “Institute.” These lectures took place in March of 1953, just a month before his prolific
writing from April to June, when he composed The Maximus Poems from “Letter 5” to “Letter 22.” See also the
essay “Culture,” discussed in more detail below, in which Olson writes, “I get more and more certain that if
location in time and space is exactly determined, one gets, by such relevances, those priorities of succession &
importance which can now be called LAWS. We have this gain, that several of the newer sciences—
archaeology, anthropology, mythology, bio-chemistry, and the several geographic sciences, an example of
which is meteorology—arm us more than our predecessors were armed, to measure the back of man in order
to see the front” (CORC9, 145).
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and ungainly—sprawled every which way on a double-sized page. He has set himself an
impossible task. It runs him out of breath.
Taking account of this protracted rethinking of archetypes (the recasting and
reconfiguring of them throughout his career) helps us to clarify the much debated nature of
the relationship between the archetypes and Olson. Consider, for example, that few
commentators go so far as to posit that Olson and Maximus are one and the same. An
indication that Olson did not want to be identified with his hero is sometimes taken from the
late, retrospective “Maximus of Gloucester,” which reads:
…It is not I,
even if the life appeared
biographical. The only interesting thing
is if one can be
an image
of man, “The nobleness, and the arete.”
(M, 473)
Sherman Paul suggests that Olson and “the life” depicted in the poem are separate when he
says of this passage (and the final Maximus volume as a whole) that Maximus “disappears”
and Olson “comes forward.” 10 Paul is clearly right to notice the increased presence of
personal details in the final volume, unlike earlier volumes where mythological and historical
details dominate. And when Olson says, “It is not I,” we are inclined to see them, Charles
Olson and Maximus, as somehow discrete beings. But I think another reading can better
account for the relationship. The second half of the passage indicates that the two are not
discrete, but rather should be thought of as two ends of an ongoing transformation, or a
becoming. The start of the transformation is the “biographical” Olson and the end is the
“image / of man, ‘The nobleness, and the arete,’” which is to say the Maximus archetype.
10 Paul observes that Olson signs his name in some later poems so that we know they are his poems, not
Maximus’s. Paul also says of passage above, “Yet, unquestionably, this is the most biographical volume, and is
especially moving because it is” (218).
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Even this view needs be qualified, because in Olson’s world, the “I” cannot be assumed at
the outset but must be discovered through a kind of self-forming quest. The “life” which he
alludes to must be founded on “an image of man” such as Maximus, the archetype
representing the pinnacle of what he might possibly become. To be “noble” is to have a
voice in history, yet in Olson’s view, the voice is precisely what modernity has denied. His
world is dominated by forces like trade, metaphysics, and discourse, which he believes are
responsible for self-alienation. Only in certain circumstances can voice be resurrected, like
the community of poets at Black Mountain for example, or the right conditions should he
retrieve them in Gloucester. A Maximus archetype concentrates his search by supposing that
patterns exist over time. An archetype is a theory of historical determination which translates
the past onto the present. Olson is not Maximus, and that is why Maximus is his
autobiography. His life is not a presupposition but a fulfillment of an archetypal pattern that
he has discovered. Recall that it took just under three months for Olson to write from
“Letter 5” through “Letter 22” of The Maximus Poems. Soon after that plunge down the trail
of the Maximus archetype, he wrote to a correspondent, “only this spring have I acquired
consciousness.” 11 Or as Creeley says (to quote it again), autobiography is “a life tracking itself.” 12
In what follows I want to retrieve some of the conceptual steps that went into the
producing and discarding of the archetypal paradigms. Because Olson’s archetypes were
always works in progress, I will concentrate on the period that saw the birth of his first
volume of Maximus. The period comes on the heels of his residency in the Yucatan
Peninsula (chronicled in correspondence with Creeley, who edited Olson’s letters as The
11 See “Charles Olson and Ronald Mason: A Correspondence,” Ed. Torsten Kehler and Ralph Maud, PN
Review (149): 57. This particular letter is dated June 22, 1953, though this particular quote comes from the
second of the three days that it took Olson to writer the entire letter.
12 See Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1990), esp. 79-89.
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Mayan Letters), and the essays “Projective Verse” (1950) and “Human Universe” (1951); the
period culminates with The Special View of History (1956), which I briefly discussed in the
previous section. 13 The main reason that I want to examine the period is because it lets us
observe Olson at work, in the laboratory of his historical investigation, in one of the most
tangled thickets of speculation and theorizing in his entire career, as he revises the previous
archetypal paradigm of Call Me Ishmael and prepares for the emergence of Maximus. We
recall that in the “conclusion” of Call Me Ishmael he argues that the nineteenth century marks
an “end of individual responsible only to himself” (CMI, 119). Moby-Dick records the change.
It is a turning point after which we have the potential to become what he calls “Pacific
Man.” Note that this does not postulate the end of the individual. For Olson, the virtue of
Moby-Dick is that it reverses the individualist legacy of the Homeric hero, who is defined by
“search, the individual responsible to himself” (CMI, 118). A society based on the Homeric hero is a
society comprised of individual egos committed to personal needs and desires at the expense
of others. Olson says that Dante’s hero, whom he locates between Homer and the
contemporary world, does not alter the essential structure of this society. Ulysses sets his
eyes on an “unpeopled world behind the sun” (CMI, 118, quoting the Inferno), so like
Odysseus, he is preoccupied primarily with the unknown. A hero in an “unpeopled” world is
a tyrant who sets himself above everyone else: “[Ulysses] bends the crew to his purpose,
forces them West” (CMI, 118). In Olson’s view, this situation remains essentially unchanged
until nineteenth-century exploration of the Pacific heralds the end of the unknown. It’s now
space that matters, not historical time (i.e. chances are we will not discover a new continent
13 For a detailed analysis of this period in Olson’s writing see Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Life in a Human
Universe: Charles Olson’s (Post)Modernism in Context (An Anthropoetics)” Sagetrieb 13:3 (1994): 117-52. See
also Steve McCaffery, “Charles Olson’s Art of Language: The Mayan Substratum of Projective Verse,” in Prior
to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2001), 45-58.
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in the next century). “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America” (CMI,
11), he says in the most famous passage from Call Me Ishmael. For Olson, the end of
“westwardness” is a cause for celebration. He conceives that if the West were still
“boundless,” then society would lack any criteria for egalitarian or democratic values. It thus
becomes an ethical priority to grasp the disappearance of the unknown, for only then can
human orientation reject personal interests and embrace the social values of a shared world,
such as global friendship, cooperation, and community. In 1947, Olson proposes Pacific
Man as this exemplar of what we might become. He does not see himself as imposing a
moral imperative on his reader when he talks about Pacific Man; rather, his view is that the
modern American is constitutionally altered when born into a world where the unknown is
no longer a temptation. It means egotistical behavior has no more excuses: “The Atlantic
crossed, the new land America known, the dream’s death lay around the horn, where West
returned to East. The Pacific is the end of the UNKNOWN which Homer’s and Dante’s
Ulysses opened men’s eyes to. END of the individual responsible only to himself” (CMI,
119).
This formulation would not last. By 1952 Olson says to Creeley, “‘I take space to be…’ /
christ, how innocent!” (CORC9, 183). What prompted him to renounce a spatial
configuration of man as too simplistic? Several new insights dovetailed with the recognition
that he had overlooked an essential dimension of spatiality: mobility or what he calls
“animation” and “kinetic life.” 14 It was not enough to catalogue the historical situation
before and after Melville. It was not enough to say the end of the unknown means we can
now grasp the “laws” of man (to borrow another of Olson’s keywords). It is also necessary
14 This phrase is in a letter to his friend and fellow Melville scholar, Merton Sealts, on March 7, 1952, the
same month as the letter to Creeley. See Charles Olson, Selected Letters, ed. Ralph Maud (Berkeley: U California
P, 2000), 161. Henceforward abbreviated SL.
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to find how those facts or laws determine and influence individual activity. It is necessary to
see in “facts an animation the equal of Melville’s animation” (CP, 117).
This last statement comes from “The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville,” an
omnibus review of recent Melville scholarship for the New Republic in 1952 (and written
approximately the same time he wrote “‘I take space to be…’ / christ, how innocent!” to
Creeley). In the review Olson promises to his reader “whatever insights five additional years
of work of my own might bring to correct or add to the measure of Melville I offered in Call
Me Ishmael” (CP, 114). Although he never explicitly spells out these corrections or additions
(such candor is reserved for his letters to Creeley), we can observe a gradual shift in his
emphasis in the review, along with a handful of other pieces written around the same time.
Whereas previously Melville’s achievement was measured by his global perspective, now he
is measured by his
ability to go inside a thing, and from its motion and his to show and to know, not its
essence alone (this was the gift of ideality…) but its dimension, that part of a thing
which ideality—by its Ideal, its World Forms or its Perfections—tended to diminish;
that quality of any particular thing or event which comes in any one of our
consciousnesses; how it comes in on us as a force peculiar to itself and to ourself in
any of those instants which do hit us & of which our lives are made up of…
(CP, 117)
Melville is said to grasp exactly how facts stir or move us. He sees things in their dynamic
relationship with perception and physical contact. The problem is how we bump, touch, or
caress the world around us. More than a view of fixed facts, Olson wants a theory of
adjacency or nearness. His previous formulation of space as such failed to adequately
calculate the movement and intersection of bodies and things. (Not coincidentally, Olson
wrote a poem at this exact time called, “The Thing was Moving” [CP,263].) Olson even
revisits his previous description of Homer: “If I put this first—if I put Melville in the
context of Homer—I do it because, until any of us takes this given physicality and moves
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from its essence into its kinetic, as seriously as we are all too apt to take the other end—the
goal, we’ll not be busy about the civilization breeding as surely now as that other one was
between Homer and 500 B.C. And we’ll not know what Melville started a hundred years
ago.” (CP, 117, my italics).
At this point Pacific Man was sunk. Olson realized that space was only one component
of the inheritance that Melville bequeathed to the twentieth century, so he could not found
his archetype on space alone. In the 1952 essays “History” and “Culture” (written during the
same period that he wrote the omnibus review), he realized that he would need to dig deeper
into Melville’s lifetime if he wanted to grasp the animating forces of the present. Call Me
Ishmael was limited because it minimized nineteenth century contextual analysis of Melville.
In “History” Olson sought to overcome this negligence: “I have found myself finding the
year 1830 a fix, a powerful time over & over this year—Jackson coming in here, Hegel
dying, there. I shall seek to take it apart as a sphere. And I shall be frank with you—my real
interest is in three men who were boys at the time, Melville, Lincoln, and Whitman… I am
giving 1830 a dimension & effect proper to itself in all the other ways an event of magnitude
must be measured—and that the usual methods of discourse, don’t, somehow manage
to measure, eh?” (CORC9, 103, Olson’s bold typeface). As he writes in a letter to Merton
Sealts, “I am more able to talk to you about this that I have been trying, by my own
methodologies…to see that what was the full body of the causation which, around the very
same years, tossed up such like psyches as Melville’s, Whitman’s, and Lincoln’s… what was
there in those decades, say 1830-1850—what happened?” (SL, 153). By digging in one place,
or one year, the “fix” of 1830, Olson tries to conceive a sphere-like picture of the world, or
what he calls the “full body of the causation.” His conclusion is to measure history in terms
of trade. He was immersed in a series of economic histories, in particular Brooks Adams’s
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The New Empire, and he was rereading Ezra Pound’s polemics against usury. 15 Indeed
“History” probably represents Olson’s most Poundian essay because it theorizes history as
the product of economic forces. Movement in space meant the complexities of trade as a
basic dimension of life. This was a lesson he had missed in Call Me Ishmael: the “minuteness
and absoluteness of trade as daily fact of any one of us is such a familiar, peculiarly lost sight
in the present mountainous economies” (CORC9, 102-103).
The perspective on 1830 affords him a new perspective on his present life. He extends a
historical equation forward to himself but also back to ancient times: “Go back to Brooks
Adams to see all that we have been as a compulsion, as a consequence of the series of
motions of the centers of trade power from the Mesopotamian Valley to the Eastern
Mediterranean (c. 1500 BC) to Europe (1. A.D.) to America (when?) and back to Asia—the
story, 4500 BC to 1945 AD” (CORC9, 113). Notice the circular path of Olson’s inquiry:
from Mesopotamia forward to America but then from America back to Asia. Even as Olson
insists on a spatial model, he must keep adjusting his formulations for blindspots that escape
his awareness. An idea takes shape in this essay that will eventually lead him to conceive of
reality as a process—even if he never employs that specific word here. 16 Instead he struggles
to describe a state in which the present is as responsible for the past as the past is for the
present. “An event, historically, leans in on two directions (historically). It is backward as
much as forward—and backward does not necessarily mean well-prepared. Causation, like
projection, depends for its value, its use, on the value, the seriousness, of the man, the men
15 Brooks Adams provides Olson with an antecedent to Pound’s generation. Olson says “go to [Brooks]
Adams, only, because one needs not to go to the generation just after him…” meaning Pound’s generation, for
it is “nothing but that peculiar American brand of humanism called POPULISM” (CORC9, 113). The irony is
that Adams was recommended years earlier by Pound during Olson’s visits to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the
Criminally Insane.
16 Olson is moving towards the idea that reality is a process that must be realized at each instant. As he
says later in Proprioception: “…what America is the inheritor of: a secularization which not only loses nothing of
the divine but by seeing process in reality…” (CP, 190).
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of any of us: all events are only our own actions” (CORC9, 109).
For Olson, people can only make of themselves what choices they discover in historical
precedent. This is why archetypes are, for Olson, the essential form of his inheritance. The
archetype is the limit of what he can become (and hence writing about archetypes is
autobiographical for Olson). On this view it becomes imperative that an archetype is not
closed off from any new history that becomes available. According to Olson, for example,
Pound thinks that we “back up” to “Malatesta’s court” in 14th century Italy, so he is closed
off to an inheritance that has a longer view of world history. Olson asks, “how valid is even
that backwall [of Malatesta’s court], that fix, or any fix which stays inside the two culture
houses of the Western world, the Greek-Renaissance, the Indeo-Christian-Roman house?”
(CORC9, 110) By contrast, Olson wants to get outside of the “two culture houses,” which he
feels is now possible because the twentieth century witnesses the availability of heretofore
lost knowledge that fundamentally changes our relationship to world history. He enjoys the
availability of what Jed Rasula calls the “compost library.” 17 He is energized by the prospect
of a history that has never been contemplated—
There is an astonishing fact, a dimension of history in the sense, even, in which
the 19th Century, with its scope used it. There is a thing now available, a new found
fact, which is as profound in its effects upon the geography… of events as were
Columbus & Copernicus on the geography of land, seas, & outer space. (Or—to
restore history a previous discovery which did not have an immediate Renaissance…
17 For more on the historical context of Olson’s argument, especially as it relates to the stores of historical
knowledge that opened up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Jed Rasula’s “The Compost Library.”
To see what resources Olson had available to him in simple terms of the books he had, see Maude’s biography
Olson’s Reading. In addition to listing the numerous books Olson read and owned, Maude details the schemes
through which Olson obtained many of his books, often at great difficulty. He was continually writing
publishers for review copies, which he sometimes received. But he had another way of obtaining books too.
Olson commandeered libraries on two times that are worth mentioning. The first is the famous story of when
Olson dropped his lunch with a fellow Melville scholar and went off to obtain ninety-five books in Melville’s
library. The second time is when he was departing Black Mountain College and he “gutted” the library, as he
put it in a letter to Bolderhoff. Maud lists nearly a hundred books and magazines later found in Olson’s
Gloucester home which bore the imprint “Property of Black Mountain College.” Included was Brooks Adams,
The New Empire, the importance of which is discussed above. Written on its flyleaf is: “Olson—by arrogation.”
Ralph Maud, Olson’s Reading: A Biography, 134.
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For the first time—right now—man can see his whole story in the round. And its
effects upon all dimensions—all previous attempts to use the space-time axis as
grounds for a new humanism—are not yet calculated. I refer to this: that “history”
was literally impossible before the 20th Century simply because no one knew up until
now the exact backwall against which human events do back up—
(CORC9, 110)
Olson takes it upon himself to write a history that in some way draws all groups together and
explains why differences exist in the world. He thinks the best solution is to go farther back
than the historical record has previously allowed. He identifies his own “backwall” as a
“town of 300 persons named Jarmo on the upper Euphrates, founded 4950 BC” (CORC9,
110). The “backwall” is not so much outside as at the starting point or origin of Western
inheritance. As Creeley understood him, “This is yr set: how to have this christly world in
ONE piece, —or nothing, or nothing, damn actually, as all worth it” (CORC9, 150). Olson’s
thinking coincides here with what his fellow poet Robert Duncan called a “symposium of
the whole.” 18
Olson is a radical poet for whom the radical takes eons to occur. When it does occur, we
don’t even notice for another hundred years. Melville might have noticed, but he himself was
ignored until generations later; “Melville stayed unknown,” says Olson, “until exactly the
date of WWI.” 19 In Olson’s view the divisions that we traditionally think are fundamental in
the course of history, such as between the East and the West, began to disappear in the
nineteenth century. Olson worries that most people should they even take notice will prove
unable to cope with the change. He worries that our decisions will be based on fallacious
18 For a contemporary poet whose work strives for an analogous message, see Michael Palmer’s “Seven
Poems Within a Matrix of War,” written during the first Gulf War: “We never say the word desert / nor does
sand pass through the fingers // of this hand we forget / is ours.” At Passages (New York: New Directions,
1995), 18.
19 See “Charles Olson and Ronald Mason: A Correspondence,” ed. Torsten Kehler and Ralph Maud, PN
Review (149): 54. This particular letter is dated June 22, 1953, though this particular quote comes from the
second of the three days that it took Olson to writer the entire letter.
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assumptions about one culture being eternally at odds with another—like the conviction that
world cultures are incompatible or lack any common ground on which to communicate their
differences. He give special credence to 1945 as the year when the West could no longer
deny the “sphere” of its westward history. 1945 awakens us to a world-historical sphere
because the U.S. drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “It remains
obscured—so far as I know still totally obscured to the people—that the bomb was not used
to end one war but was used to begin another” (CORC9, 109).
Olson is deeply pessimistic about the bloodshed and genocide of the twentieth century.
He hopes they will prove a wake-up call for the world. He writes in “The Prelude” (1946):
“‘My name is NO RACE’ / address Buchenwald new Altamira cave” (CP, 46). Hope is
invested in the idea that exposure to an older past, such as “Altamira cave,” will lead
different cultures to communicate with one another, to see what they have in common, and
to put a halt to racial or ethnic genocide. Ralph Maud explains, “because Western
Civilization has brought us to ruin, to achieve some kind of solution one must go back
before the Greek philosophers, and out into still living primitive societies.” 20 Olson hopes
that his own country will be able to break away from received history and achieve a more
total view of inheritance than other Western cultures, which in his view are more rooted and
therefore constrained by tradition. His view is evident in his comments to (and about)
Europeans, as for example Rainer M. Gerhardt, a German poet who knew Creeley when he
was abroad and who published several of Olson’s early poems. Olson writes: “I don’t know
whether I said it, but I meant, to Gerhardt, go out the back door of your inheritance. I did
say, plant Odysseus’ oar, don’t worry about Homer’s poetics” (CPr, 339). The comments are
20 Ralph Maud, What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” (London: Associated
University Presses, 1998), 24.
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found in his review of a book by a European historian, Ernst Robert Curtius, who Olson
faults for focusing on “those greatnesses” of history that merely benefit the “cultivation of
the European tradition” (CPr, 339). Olson has a completely antithetical view of historical
study. He wants a history governed by nominalism, a history of particulars—like baling wire
and Colt revolvers which have physically determined people’s lives. “The Great Frontier is
not over. What is, is Metropolis, despite the appearances. And management” (CPr, 341).
People tend to lose themselves in the Metropolis because their choices are reduced to
marketplace and spectacle.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Olson believes the same history is shared by everyone
on the planet, just that it comes into view only by going back far enough in time. The
difficulty is that contemporary language and cultural practices alienate us from a shared
history. In “The Death of Europe,” a “funeral poem for Rainer M. Gerhardt” after the
poet’s suicide at twenty-eight, 21 Olson explains, “it has to do with how far back are /
Americans / as well as, / Germans” (CP, 308). Far from condemning Gerhardt, Olson
mourns the inheritance that pushes such a fate on him. The poem reads,
What breaks my heart
is that your grandfather
did not do better, that our grandmothers
(I think we agreed)
did not tell us
the proper tales
so that we are as raw
as our inventions, have not the teeth
to bite off Grandfather’s
paws
(CP, 312-313).
21 See Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: Norton, 1991), 181-182.
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In believing that we are “at once our grandmothers (history) and ourselves (what we say)”
(CPr, 341), Olson issues a challenge against our received inheritance, our pre-established
“images”:
The images
have to be
contradicted
The metamorphoses
are to be
undone
(CP, 314)
He binds a need for new kinds of writing with discoveries of new archaic history. As he
writes elsewhere,
We live in an age in which inherited literatures [are] being hit from two sides,
from contemporary writers who are laying bases of new discourse at the same
time that such scholars as the above are making available pre-Homeric and pre-
Mosaic texts which are themselves eye-openers. It is a tremendous moment.
(CP, 346)
Olson’s views might be put in more plain terms by saying that an innovative writer who
renounces “inherited literatures” is potentially the most open-minded to the “bases of new
discourse” that ancient historians are opening up (“eye-openers”). Hence the importance,
say, of a William Carlos Williams or an Ezra Pound. However much Olson might differ
from the their ultimate conclusions, he thinks they are absolutely right in their attack on
received history. Such an attack is what clears the space for receiving a more ancient or
originary inheritance. Notice for example that Olson quietly invokes Williams’s notion that
“a poem is made of words,” in a review of a book called Homer and the Bible. Olson starts by
saying that our preconceptions (the education that we initially have or inherit) prevent
greater sensitivity to the new and unpredictable—as if most knowledge has a built-in firewall
against heterogeneity. In Olson’s view such knowledge, backed up by outmoded interpretive
methodologies, makes new discoveries and translations of ancient texts entirely unreadable.
In return, he sounds just like Williams (or any number of other modernists) when he says,
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“What we need is more of the text, always more of the, text, no end to the work that can be
done. More light on every word, every device of syntax, each difference of morphology in
structure and in form, until it’s laid clear. When the attention is steady and intense, stays that
way, there is nothing but gain, on all sides.” (CP, 347-348). He wants to postpone searching
for patterns or making abstract claims about the relationship between various artifacts. He
wants attention to the text itself, an attention so radical that even simple acts of comparison
are inherently dangerous: “There is a rule: the very likenesses and differences which make
comparison possible in the first instance (when a thing is being drawn out from the general
to the uncovering of its own specific) must, the moment the thing is seen for itself, serve the
details of the thing forever after and never return to the general; or the life of the thing,
which lives by its difference (it is difference which is the freshness by which anything stays
open, its own literal and particularness) will be lost again into the general, from which, by all
the labor, it has been drawn.” (CP, 347). In a rather surprising implication, Olson seems to
be saying that the better a person can read twentieth-century avant-garde poetry, the better
that he or she can read ancient history. This could be any appeal to textuality as against
generalization, but for Olson it most strongly hearkens back to Williams, including the
bodily imagery: “this business of taking the edge off new discovery when the stuff hasn’t
even been taken into the bloodstream of the present…” (CP, 348).
The bravura associated with Olson’s archetypes has been harmful to his reputation
among some readers and poets, especially among later generations. Daniel Kane writes:
Perhaps one of the reasons that O’Hara and other poets associated with the New
York School held Olson and company in suspicion was Olson’s attachment to
mythic and powerful icons. There was Olson’s towering ‘Maximus’ figure, as well as
lines found throughout the shorter poems that lend gravitas to the texts…New York
School poets and their ‘descendants’ (including Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, and Joe
Brainard) resisted incorporating familiar figures of the Western literary tradition into
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their poetry. The use of mythic, Homeric allusion was too reminiscent of ‘academic’
poetry… Koch and O’Hara especially saw humor, lightheartedness, and feyness as a
way of interrogating or destabilizing the sense of import attached to myth and, by
extension, poetry too reliant on the authority of canonical Western texts. 22
Characterizing Olson’s archetypes as “familiar figures of the Western literary tradition” is
problematic in my view because Olson was primarily interested in figures who were
unknown or forgotten in the Western literary tradition, or what Ben Friedlander
distinguishes as “received” versus “discovered” traditions. 23 But more to the point, we notice
that the objection is to Olson’s “mythic and powerful icons,” and not necessarily to the idea
of icons themselves. Clearly it was not the idea of archetypes as such that was incompatible
with these other New American Poets; think of O’Hara on his idol James Dean, “now I am
this dead man’s voice…” 24 Even a generation later the idea of archetypes resurfaces in the
best readings of Language Poetry; Marjorie Perloff refers to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life as “the
archetypal life of a young American girl.” 25 Where archetypes seem to have disappeared, they
have probably been replaced by the more common designation of “self” (which I use
throughout this study). A “self” indicates the formation of a person’s identity or ego by
22 Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: U California P,
2003), 25. Kane makes clear, however, that Olson was not entirely persona non grata among the New York
School. His essay “Projective Verse” was influential in “propagating the poem as a spoken and even social
event” (26), and the public occasion of poetry readings were central to the New York School aesthetic.
23 See Charles Bernstein’s allusion to a letter in which Friedlander makes the distinction in “Optimism and
Critical Excess,” A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1992), 175.
24 Frank O’Hara, “For James Dean,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: U California Press,
1995), p. 230. See also the chapter “The James Dean Poems,” in Joe LeSueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by
Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), esp. 65. “Whatever possessed Frank to write these
poems in memory of James Dean? I suppose the answer is obvious: he was crazy about the kid, liked his looks,
moody personality, overwrought style of acting—plus of course the pathos he elicited.”
25 Marjorie Perloff, “L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E poetry in the eighties,” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the
Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern UP, 1996), 225. Perloff also echoes the Black Mountain
emphasis on “fields” when she says My Life creates a “language field that could be anybody’s autobiography”
(225).
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exterior forces, such as by culture, language, or ideology. This is roughly what Olson means
by the archetypes that inhabit him. 26
So the problem that many readers have with Olson is that his archetypes are
mythologized heroes and in almost every case overbearingly patriarchal. We might conclude
by bearing in mind that Olson opens the door on the future dismantling of his own
formulations. I’ll try to make this case by considering a statement Robert Creeley makes
about Olson’s Special View of History (1956), a lectures series delivered near the end of his
tenure at Black Mountain. In it Olson sought to rethink the nineteenth century conception
of the “Great Man.” Creeley recalls that around the time of the lectures,
[Olson] was using the newspaper as a center, working on the 19th century concept of
the Great Man. If you could locate what did qualify a “Great Man” in a particular
social environment, you then had effectively the whole vocabulary for acts and
perceptions. He then would use things like newspapers, simply reading the
headlines…I can’t tell you the day-to-day activity of his history course, but his
question was, Now the 19th century had a concept of history based upon the fact of
the Great Man. You find the Great Man and then you trace, write their lives, and
then you have the viable and active aspects of history that are involved. So what is
the 20th century’s concept of history, and by that token what constitutes the Great
Man in the contemporary imagination? He said if you could locate that we’d have a
fairly accurate sense of what is the measure of man’s acts. How does the great man
get that way? 27
At this point Olson has gone well beyond the “fix” of 1830 which assumed that Melville’s
“animation” could be compared to a closed set of contemporary figures like Lincoln or
Whitman. This period sees Olson arriving at the view of the individual as meaningful only
26 In earlier writings, such as Mayan Letters Olson refers to the “ego,” but when his attention turns to Jung,
he also begins referring to the “self”: “The self (that which a man might achieve) Jung has put once and for all
in his dictum, “The self is at once center and circumference.” It is what I mean by the ACTUAL brought into
existence, this double co-incidence at any serial point (or incident moment act experience’): the actual, as a
principle of happening – thus, say, the center of the unit the 20th of a second is at once (and here is why stance
or context has to be) the circumference…. In other words, what I am insisting is that a new humanism has to
work away from the old horizontal that, what happens in time (old history, biography, thus personal
exaggeration) and what is included (facts, etc. in other words quality, materialism) matters so much. It does, but
only in context and by stance that any one of us is poised instantly as end (issue, circumference, deed,
whatever you choose to call what happens ‘after’)” (SV, 36-37).
27 Quoted by Ann Charters in her introduction to Charles Olson’s The Special View of History, 5-6.
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when measured against his or her specific context. And a few years after this, he makes a
similar claim, though much more emphatically: “The men of the Revolution, all heroes, are
all False identities, Time of their Age Servants…”(CP, 351, from 1962). By the time of
Proprioception (1962), he wants “a total placement of man and things among all possibilities of
creation, rather than that one alone, of modern history and politics, and science and
literature, or arma, the Indo-European chariot, and virum, the old epic” (CP, 197). This
proposition has two ways of being interpreted. Either expands Maximus to such a degree
that we might as well equate the archetype with the totality of world history (cultural history
but also geophysical prehistory), or we must say Maximus falls apart, that the archetype is a
container burst open with too vast an inheritance. Which in fact happens is debatable. This
sets the stage for a poet who thinks that we are formed as much by what that totality is as by
what it obscures or leaves out. Olson was always aware that he could not grasp the entirety
of the estrangements that made up his inheritance. Susan Howe’s historical poems might be
said to begin by locating herself in those estrangements.
4.3) “In the Grace of Scholarship” 28 : My Emily Dickinson and Howe’s Scholarly Prose
For years I have wanted to find words to thank Emily
Dickinson for the inspiration of her poetic daring.
—Howe (MED, 35)
When Howe selects a representative figure, she does so as one might choose a god or a
savior before whom to declare subjectivity. Her use of “my” in the title My Emily Dickinson is
an expression of subjectivity that hearkens back to an earlier model of saying “my savior” or
28 Howe writes: “In the grace of scholarship. I am indebted to everyone” (BM, 39).
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“my king” before a sovereign entity or being. Today we say subjectivity denotes the
construction of a human self by the world it inhabits, so that subjectivity dwindles to
become an effect of language, culture, or ideology. Seen in this way, Howe’s writing does not
correspond to the fragmentary subject of postmodernism, but instead discloses a new kind
of subject guided by a strange and mysterious Dickinson who has not yet been assimilated (if
she ever will be) by the recuperative efforts of literary criticism. Retrieving the earlier model,
Howe locates her subjectivity before Emily Dickinson, and My Emily Dickinson is about the
spiritual quest to find the right Dickinson before whom to situate herself as subject. “Not to
set forth my Self,” she writes, “but to lose and find it in diligent search. Obedience and
submission to one will, was the journey of return to the sacred source human frailty had
lost” (MED, 46). My goal in this section is to study the path by which Dickinson becomes
this “sacred source” for Howe.
This reading of her relationship to Dickinson admittedly differs from most other
accounts, or anyhow it introduces a theological “tinge” nowhere else in sight. The closest
another critic comes to this is Marjorie Perloff saying, “Howe’s aim is not so much to
‘explain’ Dickinson’s meanings as to relive them. Hers is a tale of possession…” 29 Perloff
means Howe is inhabited by Dickinson, like a ghost that speaks through the voice of a
medium. For Eric Murphy Selinger, on the contrary, history does not have its way with us,
but the other way around; we look to the past for self-development, and in Howe’s case,
“When she conjures her predecessor… she reaps the voice of the Poet ‘Susan Howe’ as the
reward.” 30 John Taggart provides yet another characterization of Howe’s relationship to
29 Marjorie Perloff, “Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics and the Avant-Garde,” Poetic License: Essays
on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 1990), 41.
30 Eric Murphy Selinger identifies a “confident” voice in My Emily Dickinson that seeks to build itself up by
assimilating Dickinson. “Despite its commitment to hesitancy,” he argues, “this voice seems doomed to
confidence.” “Confidence” is his word for a rational self that believes in its own freedom to decide what it
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Dickinson when he views My Emily Dickinson as driven less by possession than a
metaphorical hunting expedition: “The poet is a hunter conspicuously and aggressively active
in the hunting process of composition; the poetry is what’s hunted down and transformed
by that process in a wilderness of language.” (264). His position is that the resultant poem is
dead, like an animal soon to be stuffed and hung on the wall. In saying the poem is “hunted
down,” he highlights the “power” of a poet’s compositional efforts, which releases a poem
to its own particularity in the “wilderness of language.” Howe’s power is to “set free” what
has been captured: for one example, a Dickinson poem that editors have reset in
conventional poetic form. When Howe reads Dickinson, the “final mystery of the poet’s
motivation is respected and the exertion of the poetry’s power is given free play. It is a
picture of Emily Dickinson, and it is a picture of the poet in the act of composition…”
(264). Plainly absent is any “picture” of Susan How except insofar as we might imagine her
being some kind of secret operative who infiltrates enemy territory and rescues the poem
that’s held hostage. Never in full sight, she is represented to us only in “the act of
composition.”
But none of these interpretations happen upon the older model of subjectivity that
governs Howe’s reading of Dickinson. They agree about Dickinson’s importance for Howe;
like Anne Charter’s Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity, a book-length study of Howe’s affinity
wants to own or do on a given occasion: what might elsewhere be called an individualist self. Such a self would
perhaps be resistant to “possession” by ghosts. In contrast to Perloff’s position, he believes the my of the title
pits Howe’s Dickinson against others’ Dickinsons (other critics for example) and therefore reveals her
assumption that Dickinson can be “owned.” To back up his case he cites her statement that her voice “belongs
to no one else.” It’s worth noting that her next sentence undermines this reading: “What I put into words is no
longer my possession” (MED, 13). Later she also says of the possessive pronoun “my” in relation to
Dickinson’s “My Life had Stood a Loaded Gun”: “The emblematical gun escapes its emblem from word one.
When MY is identified and carried away, MY becomes anonymous and refuses to budge. Progress seems to be
forward but where forward is—uncertain. The first two lines suggest suspended motion, the second two,
moving suspension. These first four lines join two souls as they split asunder. Say one thing and mean another.
Strange absence of this presence MY is following, or Absence carrying. The only constant is motion and
identification of nothing. Symbol is concealment and revelation” (MED, 77). Eric Murphy Selinger, “My Susan
Howe,” Parnassus 20:1 (1995): 363.
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with Dickinson will surely be in the making one day. 31 However, here I want to elaborate a
different version of their relationship than a story of affinity, influence, assimilation or
ghostly inhabitation. On the contrary, this is a story of discipleship to Dickinson, most
salient in her expression of subjectivity before Dickinson, but also in the unabashedly
religious fervor with which she writes about the earlier poet. Not surprisingly, the avoidance
of spiritual issues is conspicuous in any number of commentaries on Howe’s poems. I see
this avoidance happening in two ways. In the first, Howe’s research into religious issues is
foregrounded, while the religious form of her research method is neglected. For example,
Howe’s research into antinomians is accurately contextualized in terms of “linking avant-
gardism to a lineage rarely identified at all in American letters: that of women’s spiritual and
political dissent.” 32 It remains a question, however, what mode of analysis drives this
“linking.” The need to “to craft a distinctly feminist avant-garde usable past” (114), must
also take into account Howe’s subjectivity. The second avoidance of spiritual issues occurs
when Howe’s analytic methods are secularized. David Landrey, in describing a “spider self”
that Howe shares with Dickinson, explains that Dickinson abandoned “the self as some
limited ‘identity’” and projected “the self into ‘an idea of grace as part of an infinite mystery
in us but beyond us.’” 33 Landrey never expounds this “idea of grace” which he has quoted from
an interview with Howe. Instead, he establishes a secular horizon by emphasizing “the
31 There are innumerable examples of critics reading Howe in terms of Dickinson, but none that happen
upon Howe’s declaration of subjectivity. Rachel Tzvia Back, following Paul Naylor, singles out the following
passage—“‘In prose and poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off
communication with the reader, writes Howe of Emily Dickinson (MED, 11), describing writing strategies that
apply equally to Howe herself.” Led By Language, 5. See also 121-122.
32 Elisabeth A. Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2003), 107.
33 Landrey italicizes this statement made by Howe in an interview. Landrey adopts the “spider self” from
Tony Tanner’s Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987) to account for a self-conception in which self and
environment are not separate fields but possess multiple interconnections. David Landrey, “The Spider Self of
Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe,” Talisman 4 (Spring, 1990), 108.
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terrible double vision” that Howe values in Dickinson. Even when he remarks on Howe’s
“sublime analysis” (108) that surrenders to mystery, he characterizes the mystery according
to an existential rather than divine model. As he writes, “The poet’s Spider self must cast its
skein into the void” (109). 34
One obstacle to an appreciation of Howe’s relationship with Dickinson is that most
scholarly accounts start with her first published volume of criticism, My Emily Dickinson
(1985). In fact, her interest in Dickinson begins at least a decade earlier, if not before then.
In 1974 she read Richard Sewall’s The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974) to her aunt Helen Howe,
who had suddenly become ill. As Howe says in an interview with Janet Ruth Falon,
During the last month of her life the Sewall biography of Emily Dickinson was
published. I think it’s still the best biography of the poet. It was badly needed at the
time. If it seems overcautious now, caution was needed. Such a myth had been built
up. Aunt Helen was very excited by it and she had a copy when I visited her. I used
to read it to her each visit. We only got to the third chapter, the one about Edward
Dickinson. She kept asking me to mark passages with her pen, so that she could read
them later. We both knew well there wasn’t going to be a later, but our awful New
England reticence stopped us from saying the word “death.” Here was my aunt
dying in her apartment in New York, high up, some of the windows looked out over
Central Park, and she was telling me about herself, and the cost of a Bostonian
34 A similar avoidance informs Devin Johnston’s suggestion that Howe’s “poems seek to isolate a sublime
moment of conflict, the energy and pathos generated by an act of repression.” Discussion of the sublime
traditionally wavers between aesthetic and divine experience—both of which Johnston earlier recognized in
discussing Robert Duncan and the occult—but his discussion of Howe steers clear of any sense of the divine:
she composes “in the service of a sublime aesthetic” (148). At one point he raises the interesting prospect that
Howe’s “attention to wilderness” shares with historian Richard Slotkin “the convergence of a religious sense of
wilderness and its historical experience” (147), and he even adds that she aligns her work with a Puritan
tradition of experiencing religious power. But instead of elaborating, he veers off into a secular interpretation.
A case in point: he renders the Reverend Hope Atherton into a “figure for transgression” whose only
transcendental significance is in his “wanderings [that] transcend the terms of any one discursive mode” (149).
Johnston has it that Howe treats Atherton as an allegory for the present: “As a figure for the artist in America,
Atherton’s wilderness would seem to be one of both materialism and abstraction—in a protomodernist
fashion. He has stepped outside of cultural perimeters and returned with an understanding that separates him
from his contemporaries. For Howe, the American artist is liberated from cultural constraints through a violent
encounter with otherness” (150). So the artist (and not just Howe but any artist) should examine Atherton’s
exile, how he behaved when he was removed from a society designed to keep him from “otherness.” But in
allegorizing Atherton, the danger is that we deafen our ears to his own “otherness,” not as an allegory but as a
historical person. See Devin Johnston, Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, (Middletown, Conn:
Wesleyan UP, 2002), 147.
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upbringing, through the medium of Sewall’s Dickinson biography. In my mind it
became a tremendously important thing. 35
It’s worth briefly speculating about what this book meant to them, for it offers a few clues
about the personal dimensions that made Dickinson appealing. Although up to this point
Howe had led a very different life than Dickinson, certain features overlap, and a few
passages of the biography could stand for either Dickinson or Howe. For example, life for
the Dickinson family centered around Amherst College in much the same way that life for
the Howe family centered around Harvard: “Not only was [Dickinson’s] grandfather a
founder and member of the first Board of Trustees, but her father and then her brother were
treasurers of the college for a span of sixty years, beginning when she was five. Its affairs and
its people were daily in her consciousness. In her adult life, she could in turn be interested,
inspired, repelled, or bored by the college and its people; but she was well aware of the
distinction it brought to the town. It gave her something to match her spirit with, and
sharpen her wits on, throughout her life.” 36 The same was true for Howe’s aunt, who spent
much of her life under the shadow of Harvard, especially through her father, Mark Anthony
DeWolfe Howe (1864-1960). Helen Howe even commemorates him in a sweeping family
history, The Gentle Americans 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (1965). In it we learn that he was
on the “Board of Harvard Overseers” and was a candidate for university president. 37
Considering that Mark DeWolfe Howe (Helen Howe’s brother and Susan Howe’s father)
was a professor at the law school and that the family lived in Cambridge for many years, it is
35 For details of this time see Howe’s interview with Janet Ruth Falon, “Speaking with Susan Howe,” The
Difficulties 3:2 (1989): 34.
36 Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 33.
37 See Helen Howe, The Gentle Americans, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 400.
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probably safe to say that for Susan Howe, as for Dickinson, the “affairs” and “people” of
the nearby college “were daily in her consciousness.”
But unlike the men in her family, there no indication during her formative years that
Susan Howe would ever have a university position, much less that she would ever write a
groundbreaking study of Dickinson. Even her aunt’s book, The Gentle Americans, in a curious
passage on the “future” of the family, unintentionally slights her prospects at an early age.
Susan Howe is named only as Mark deWolfe Howe’s “first daughter.” She is described as
“beautiful in a cloud of Alice in Wonderland hair, black stockings, and a black turtleneck
sweater, [and] bride to a blue-jeaned abstract painter.” 38 The book glosses over the fact that
Howe, like her first husband (Harvey Quaytman), was also a student at the Boston School of
Fine Arts. Howe is reduced to her physical beauty, and her artistic ambition is completely
effaced. In an ironic detail that should not be overlooked, the same paragraph identifies her
sister by name, perhaps because of an earlier Fanny in the family: “A new golden-haired,
blue-eyed Fanny—her Irish heritage granting her release from the prison of the New
England temperament that held an earlier Fanny captive—brings her poetry to show her
grandfather. The future is here.” 39
For Howe, such biographical coincidences are not trivial; as she says in My Emily
Dickinson, “Complex correspondences exist and kindred definitions” (MED, 55). Howe
38 Ibid., 432. There are two other references to Susan Howe in The Gentle Americans: “It was early in 1935,
back in Boston and practicing law in Arthur Hill’s firm, that Mark introduced his bride Mary Manning into the
family. She brought, as playwright and novelist, not only the wit but the warmth of heart indigenous to her
native Dublin. Mark and Molly’s three daughters were to become Father’s only grandchildren living near
enough to be part of his life as little children” (359). Only one passage mentions Howe by name: “We used to
laugh at Father, even as a very old man, when Mark and his wife and their three small daughters came in to
open their presents on Christmas Day. He would begin, as soon as they appeared, ‘What time are we planning
to open presents?’ Then, when the moment finally came, he became the master of ceremonies, feeling every
package, turning it over, and reading the cards, ‘Here is one—Susan with love from Aunt Helen,’ and if Susan
wasn’t very sharp it was altogether likely that Grandpa’s fingers might begin twitching at the knot of ribbon
before hers” (361).
39 Ibid., 431.
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could see a corresponding inheritance between her family and the Dickinson family. One
reason to read Dickinson, then, is to appreciate her unlikely productivity while removed
from the public spotlight. If Dickinson used poems to refuse a life of quiet desperation (to
think like Thoreau for a moment), then so too might Howe find the right kind of poems to
refuse a quiet life in contemporary (and still desperate) times. Howe writes: “As poetry
changes itself it changes the poet’s life” (MED, 11). So art does not imitate life but rather life
imitates art. Dickinson’s poems help Howe to see a way that poems can negotiate the family
constraints that she inherited. As she writes in My Emily Dickinson, “For years I have wanted
to find words to thank Emily Dickinson for the inspiration of her poetic daring” (MED, 35).
Soon after her aunt’s death, Howe began looking in earnest for a way to thank
Dickinson. In 1976 Howe sent a long letter to Sewall commending his biography and
proposing her own project on Dickinson:
I have read and re-read your marvelous biography The Life of Emily Dickinson.
There had been a shocking lack of information about her and your sensitive
awareness of her strength as opposed to her other side which has been so
overstressed was sorely needed.
I am a poet and write art criticism. I happened on an idea that I would like to pursue
in some way –about the “Master” letters. It is an idea first based on instinct – but
having pursued the hunch I am surprised at how sound it seems to be. In the
Chapter dealing with the “Master” letters you speak abut much research having been
done on the explication but you don’t say specifically who by. If someone has already
pursued this line – I would appreciate it if you could let me know. 40
She tells Sewall that she was “reading the letters for a radio program I produce in New
York,” 41 and at “the same time, I have been reading a biography of Charles Dickens – so the
two were in my mind.” She then quotes a long passage from David Copperfield where
Steerforth says to David, “Daisy… for though that’s not the name your Godfathers and
40 Howe to Richard Sewell, March 11, 1976. Susan Howe Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville
Collection, University of California, San Diego. M-1991.011 Box 2, File 6.
41 Ibid. “Susan Howe with Poetry” was her radio show on WBAI, New York City.
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Godmothers gave you, it’s the name I like best to call you by—and I wish, I wish, I wish you
could give it to me!….” 42 Then Howe says, “I instantly associated [Dickinson’s] use of the
name ‘Daisy’ in the master letters with Steerforth’s calling David Daisy. I started looking
back over David Copperfield and over and over again was struck by remarkable
associations.” As the letter proceeds she lists a few other “echoes” and “correspondences”
between David Copperfield and the “Master” letters: “This is so similar to Dickinson’s style as
to be striking.” With the evidence laid out, Howe then ventures “purely onto the realm of
Guess.” She speculates that the letters were meant for Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Dickinson’s
sister-in-law:
If I could find out whether the two might have read the book at the same time it
would be pretty exciting. I would guess that Emily loved Sue Gilbert in just the way
that David loved Steerforth. She was fascinated by her charm, her wit, her power,
and her cruelty. More than that a bit of Little Emilys love for Steerforth was in there
too. I don’t think the letters were ever meant to be sent, but were a way of working
out in prose, both style and passion at once. I think that this “Daisy” like the other
“Daisy” felt she had seen too late the ruin Steerforth-Sue might bring on the family.
And she loved her too as David loved Steerforth. All the images of the sea, sailors,
the redeemed, redemption can all be tied in there. Also “The Corporation” is straight
out of Dickens.
Howe knows that she lacks the academic qualifications for writing scholarship. In the
letter she sounds a humble and even self-deprecating note: “All of this could be completely
wrong…” By the time of My Emily Dickinson, only a few of her initial conjectures remain,
and one is literally reversed. Whereas in her letter to Sewall she speculates that the “Master”
letters were meant for Susan Gilbert Dickinson, she later says, “There is no evidence that
[the “Master”] letters, written when she was at the height of her creative drive, were ever
actually sent to anyone. Discussion invariably centers around the possible identity of the
recipient” (MED, 25). In retrospect her criticism of other scholars for being fixated on the
42 Ibid. Howe says that she found the passage from David Copperfield in “Charles Dickens His Tragedy and
Triumph vol 2 page 697.”
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“possible identity” of the recipient is ironic because it was precisely the sort of discussion
she had initiated with Sewall. In My Emily Dickinson Howe went much further: “More
attention should be paid to the structure of the letters…” (MED, 25). She maintains her
earlier assertion that David Copperfield gave Dickinson “direct use of ideas, wording, and
imagery,” and to it she adds “certain echoes” (MED, 26) from Aurora Leigh. Howe
concludes, “Far from being the hysterical jargon of a frustrated and rejected woman to some
anonymous ‘Master’-Lover, these three letters were probably self-conscious exercises in
prose by one writer playing with, listening to, and learning from others” (MED, 27).
We should note that Howe’s letter to Sewall deflects any attention from her poems. As
far as he would have been able to tell, she wanted to write some piece of scholarship on
Dickinson. The fact that she was a poet, although not kept secret, is never elaborated. In any
other situation, a poet who is first starting out might ask an editor, a teacher, or another poet
for advice about writing practices. In Howe’s case, she appeals to a Dickinson specialist with
questions about her own poems on the sly. Howe sounds like an academic, for example,
when she writes: “I do believe that Emily Dickinson was deeply influenced by Dickens
style.” It is as if she wants to explicate or analyze one text in terms of another: “His names
which sum up and classify a character type are so like her way of using metaphor.” But what
we discover is that Howe’s poems from around the date of this letter employ exactly the
same type of character names. In her second full book of poems, Chanting at the Crystal Sea
(1975), which was dedicated to her aunt and which was written between the time she read
the biography and initiated her correspondence with Sewall, 43 Howe resorts to a series of
43 Her aunt died on February 5, 1975. The daguerreotype and the note on the cover are from her aunt’s
book: “Four Josiah Quinceys (1772-1919) / Three Mayors of Boston / Two Hosts of Lafayette / One Harvard
President” (cf. Frame Structures, 57). Howe’s sardonic epigraph is a quote from “Gestures to the Dead” by the
poet John Wheelwright, “All male Quincys are now dead, excepting one” (FS, 58).
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character names: “Beleagured Captain Stork / with his cane/ / on some quixotic skirmish /
Deserters arrived from Fort Necessity…” (FS, 59). The identity of Captain Stork is a
mystery. Our knowledge is limited to the fact that he has a bird’s name, but of course we can
speculate that he lives in a house by the sea and that his legs are extraordinarily skinny. Nor
is Captain Stork an isolated example. Additional names that appear in her poems from 1975-
1977 hearken to the Dickens-Dickinson character types: Captain Stork, Captain Snow, and
Captain Barefoot are present in Chanting; Sir Noble and Forebear in the poem “Sally” (1977).
In such cases the inheritance in question is not the person who is specified and might be
located in a historical record but rather the technique of character types that has been passed
down from Dickinson.
While Howe’s most perceptive readers, including Marjorie Perloff and John Taggart,
uncover affinities between My Emily Dickinson (1985) and Defenestration of Prague (1983), the
book of poems written during approximately the same years that she was completing her
study, 44 we can find compelling traces of Dickinson much earlier. Chanting at the Crystal Sea is
composed of twenty-eight short poems (only twenty-three are reproduced in Frame Structures)
which are numbered like the poems in Dickinson collections. Howe’s poems echo the
compact and versatile lyric associated with Dickinson and even borrow direct imagery and
language.
I built a house
that faced the east
I never ventured west
for fear of murder
44 “Part Two: Childe Emily to the Dark Tower Came,” an early section of My Emily Dickinson, was
published in the Code of Signals in 1983, the same year Defenestration of Prague was published. See Code of Signals:
Recent Writings in Poetics ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), 196-218, Taggart (another
contributor to Code of Signals) elsewhere likens the “lists” found in Defenestration and My Emily Dickinson (266).
Perloff likens the “collage” methods found in both works (40).
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Eternity dawned
Solitary watcher
of what rose
and set
I saw only
a Golgotha
of corpses.
(FS, 65)
Compare this side-by-side with lines from the following Dickinson poem,
Behind Me – dips Eternity –
Before Me – Immortality –
Myself – the Term between –
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin – 45
The space of “between,” denoted here as the space between East and West, has long been
inhabited by Dickinson. In Howe’s poem, she stakes a claim to the same space. Dickinson
and Howe position themselves in a point of apparent solitude from whence they can observe
the structural relationships that define their worlds. As with Dickinson, Howe’s lyrics
dismantle and even re-invent basic relationships between internal and external, self and
others, life and death. What Howe later says of Dickinson’s poems holds true for her own:
“Each word is deceptively simple, deceptively easy to define” (ME, 35).
Notice in the following anti-Cartesian meditation the combination of Dickinson’s “mob
within the heart” and: “The Court is far away – / No Umpire have I –.” 46 Howe’s poem in
Chanting reads,
45 Emily Dickinson, “Behind Me – dips Eternity –,” no. 743, 1863, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W.
Franklin (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Harvard P, 1999), 332.
46 Dickinson, “The mob within the heart,” #1763, undated, 628. “The Court is far away –,” #250,(1961),
112.
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If I am Mob
and Umpire—
Who smudged
that holocaust
of negative hands?
(FS, 67)
The first two lines are about the contradictory sense of being both single and multiple. The
“Mob” and “Umpire” that jointly constitute the “I” are also tied by the parallel sounds of
“mo” and “um.” Like so many poems in which Dickinson becomes simultaneously
omnipotent and conflicted, Howe presents an “I” defined by a tension between a mob of
multifarious, unruly inner voices, and the competing disciplinary voice of an umpire. Many
poems might stop there, but in the next three lines (separated from the first half of the poem
by Dickinson’s signature dash), Howe inserts a new concern about the relationship between
self and others. The only glimpse of the others is the impossible logic of “negative hands.” It
seems like a revision of Keat’s “negative capability,” but in such a way that physical touching
(“hands”) becomes a more urgent form of contact than imagination. Note how the sonic
energy of “Who” is amplified by “ho” in “holocaust.” The effect is to foreground a
relationship between the speaker and “holocaust”—perhaps even insinuating some kind of
participation and complicity. “Who” is the active agent we want to identify. “Smudged” is
the act of obscuring a past event. “Holocaust” is the past event that eludes a clear
representation. Although “that holocaust / of negative hands” has no clear referent, the
allusions to “smudge” and “negative” suggest a photograph. Of course “holocaust” has
powerful overtones of the Holocaust—which was already anticipated in the above poem by
the “Golgotha of corpses.” The allusion is reinforced by the fact that information about the
Holocaust often entered the United States through photographs of corpses. Suddenly the
question of self and others ceases to be academic. Howe can be seen probing the level at
which a poem can address the horrors of the twentieth century. As it turns out, the allusion
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anticipates the statement in My Emily Dickinson that Dickinson obliquely evokes the Civil
War though the metaphor of a “gun”:
“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” was written during the Civil War. Emily
Dickinson, who is so often accused of avoiding political issues in her work,
certainly did not avoid them here.
(MED, 74)
Neither does Howe “avoid” political issues in Chanting, where she looks to Dickinson for a
poetic inheritance. When Howe writes to Sewall, her intentions are not to make Dickinson
into another object of study. Dickinson is going to teach her the vicissitudes of poetry.
In 1976 the problem remained that nobody else read Dickinson the same way. When
Howe comes upon Sewall’s biography, she thinks she has found a fellow believer. To quote
her letter to him one more time: “There had been a shocking lack of information about her
and your sensitive awareness of her strength as opposed to her other side which has been so
overstressed was sorely needed.” What could Howe do to overcome the “lack,” to meet the
“sore” need? It is not immediately clear that she could manage a full-length study on her
own, reasons for which are made apparent in My Emily Dickinson, as we will see momentarily.
She could, however, pursue other prose projects more in line with her writing experience,
and as it so happened, prepare for the scholarly study that she would eventually embark on.
While behind the scenes Howe continued corresponding with Sewall, researching her study,
and quietly learning from Dickinson, 47 she also began to review avant-garde poetry. This too
was part of her education and would influence the book she would write about Dickinson.
Howe had already reviewed art exhibitions and published, “The End of Art,” (the essay
discussed in my second chapter). Toward the end of the seventies she participated in
47 One should note, in order to appreciate the depth of her interest, that Howe tells Sewall about an
episode of her radio show in which she read Dickinson’s “Master Letters” over the air.
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L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the avant-garde journal and namesake of Language Poets, which
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein edited from 1978-1981. According to the editors, the
journal emerged in the following context:
Face-to-face communities of aesthetically radicalized poets sprang up in the San
Francisco bay area, New York, and Washington, where new reading series, presses,
and magazines set the stage for intense discussions of new poetic possibilities as
well as critical and historical thinking about poetry by the poets themselves (rather
than by scholars or critics). Animated discussion of poetics went on in letters, in
conversation, and in pubic talks, but there was no print forum for these ongoing
exchanges…. 48
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E answered the need for this forum. Although Howe had been
living in Guilford, Connecticut since 1972, she still enjoyed many close friendships in New
York and went there regularly for readings and other events. Reviewing poetry quickly
extended her correspondence to communities in more widespread locations. She reviewed
Rae Armantrout on the West coast, P. Inman in Washington, D.C., and Maureen Owen in
N.Y.—each of the locations mentioned by Andrews and Bernstein. I mention this fact in
particular because so many recent studies of her work have treated her relationship to
Language Poetry with a cringe of embarrassment. 49 This is problematic in my view. Unlike
the art exhibition reviews, which located her in and around the high stakes art world of New
York, the poetry reviews established lines of long distance communication through which
ideas could be exchanged and new friendships formed. Such lines went both ways; Tina
Darragh, who would soon marry Inman, reviewed five of Howe’s books in
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E No. 4 (1982); and Armantrout reviewed Pythagorean Silence in
Poetics Journal No. 2 (1982), another publication associated with Language Poetry. By
48 Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, statement on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, (September 1997) in A
Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, ed. Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips (New
York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998), 235
49 Rachel Tzvia Back devotes only one paragraph to Language Poets. She cites Howe’s “criteria that, in her
mind, sets her apart from Language poets.” Back, ibid., 14.
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participating in these and other small press magazines, Howe joined an energetic community
that was not limited to any single geographic location and that attracted a wide range of
participants in the collective exploration of language. Her correspondents emerged in places,
from Inman and Darragh in D.C. (where she also gave readings) to Lyn Hejinian on the
West Coast, who not only was one of the editors of Poetics Journal, but whose Tuumba Press
also published Howe’s The Western Borders (1976). 50 It was in this context, particularly amid
poets who encouraged her language-oriented scholarship, that Howe’s writing flourished.
None of this means of course that she was prepared to write a work of scholarship.
Much less should we imagine that fellow Language Poets, who were resolutely anti-academic
at the time, would encourage a work of standardized scholarship. What we should see,
however, is that Language Poets provided another kind of encouragement in their appeal to
“critical and historical thinking about poetry by the poets themselves (rather than by scholars
or critics)” (to quote Andrews and Bernstein again). Such an appeal could fill the vacuum
that Howe saw in the antipathy towards scholarship on women writers. Early in My Emily
Dickinson we get a sense of this antipathy when she sets down a self-reflective statement on
the nature of her study:
Wallace Stevens said that “Poetry is a scholar’s art.” It is for some. It was for
Dickinson. For nineteenth century women of her class, the word scholar signified
power. The word suggested clubs. Scholar was “other.” Scholar was male. In the
Victorian New England middle and upper class world of expansive intellectual
gesturing, men gesticulated and lectured, while women sat in parlors or lectors
halls listening
(MED, 15)
A woman who sought the power of scholarship in the nineteenth century challenged a
structure of social values that was organized against her. For Howe, this predicament applies
50 On Howe’s correspondence with Hejinian see Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy
of Language Writing, (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 2000), 178-190.
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not only to nineteenth century women but also to herself: “To balance on a precipice of
falling into foolishness was often the danger of opening your mouth to speak if you were an
intellectually ambitious person with a female education” (MED, 18), she says, ostensibly
about Dickinson, but certainly about her own intellectual ambitions as well. In the twentieth
century constraints against female education have not suddenly evaporated, but only taken
new forms. In going ahead with her study despite the lack of academic training or advanced
degrees for support, a danger exists that whatever she says about Dickinson will fall into this
“foolishness.” Howe looks also for support in earlier writers who faced corresponding
obstacles: “Women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were the rare
exception, and they had suffered agonies of insecurity about daring to speak more than
‘Lady’s Greek, without the accents’” (MED, 15).
The qualification that she lacks for writing scholarship, the kind specialized in by English
professors, she offsets with an alternative company of poets who exemplify the idea that
“poetry is a scholar’s art.” 51 On the back cover of My Emily Dickinson are two blurbs that
concretize her participation in this company. Michael Palmer likens her “seminal” and
“feminist” study to William Carlos William’s In the American Grain. Don Byrd establishes an
even greater list: “My Emily Dickinson takes its place with Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael,
Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare, and Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book.” However
problematic these poets might be as scholars, they are nonetheless recognizable, and in some
cases even qualify as canonical forerunners. Presumably their works of “creative scholarship”
(Palmer’s phrase) set tracks for her to follow, or at least to set out from. Still, it must be said,
contrary to Palmer and Bird, that the alternative company of poets is not so easily joined by
51 It’s not surprising, then, to find her invoking Stevens, even despite her qualification that it applies to
“some.” In 1985 when My Emily Dickinson was published the Stevens quote would have been fresh in readers’
minds since Robert von Hallberg titled his seminal study, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art.
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a woman writer. Unlike Olson, for example, who received advanced degrees and nearly
completed his doctorate at Harvard, Howe is in the position of a chronic outsider to
academia. Olson made his first tracks on the well-worn paths of tenure, tracks he followed
for many years before veering off into projective verse. Howe is hesitant in her first tracks in
scholarship. She starts down the unkempt paths of earlier poet historians, but as soon as the
way ahead looks clear, she jerks back from the patriarchal views. In My Emily Dickinson the
epigraph from In the American Grain immediately problematizes her “place” (as Byrd put it)
beside the other historical poets:
It is the women above all—there never have been women, save pioneer
Katies: not one in flower save some moonflower Poe may have seen, or an
unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true women in flower, never.
Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father’s garden, is the very nearest
we have ever been—starving.
Never a woman: never a poet. That’s an axiom. Never a poet saw sun here.
(MED, 6)
“My book is a contradiction of its epigraph,” she says in the first line of her study. Williams
is a mixed blessing, a figure of enabling and disabling authority: “In his Introduction to In the
American Grain, William Carlos Williams said he had tried to rename things seen. I regret the
false configuration—under the old misappellation—of Emily Dickinson. But I love his
book” (MED, 7). Howe’s Dickinson is not going to be “starving in her father’s garden,” but
when she seeks to correct this “old misappellation,” her best guide is also a bitter handicap.
The challenge is to align her work with William’s noble promise to “rename things seen,”
while sidestepping and then redressing his “false configuration.” “The ambiguous paths of
kinship,” writes Howe, “pull me in opposite ways at once” (MED, 7).
A few pages into her study she explains the need to crack through the “axiom” of
“Never a woman: never a poet.”
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Identity and memory are crucial for anyone writing poetry. For women the field
is still dauntingly empty. How do I, choosing messages from the code of others,
in order to participate in the universal theme of Language, pull SHE from all the
myriad symbols and sightings of HE.
(ME, 18)
By claiming a “universal theme of Language,” Howe approaches Walter Benjamin’s idea that
language extends everywhere, even beyond the scope of regular human communication:
“The existence of language… is not only coextensive with all the areas of human mental
expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely
everything. There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in
some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental
meanings.” 52 According to this view, we never use or experience the full extent of language.
Our participation in language is limited, or as Howe says, we are never exposed to its
“universal theme.” For Howe, participation in the writing of American history has been
limited to “HE”; that is to say, it’s been limited by patriarchal structures that manipulate or
control our language. If Howe were reporting strictly on literary criticism, then she would
say that the canon is a club for men and the few women in the canon have only been read
through masculine paradigms. 53 Her desire to write poetry (she is already writing poetry by
this time) runs up against the absence of a field of “SHE” writers on which to ground her
“identity and memory.” But note that Howe capitalizes “Language” as if to suggest language
52 See “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books,
1978), 314-315.
53 Howe pays homage to some Dickinson scholars, including Jay Leyda, Richard Sewell and Albert Gelpi.
As she says in a later text, “In the grace of scholarship, I am indebted to everyone” (BM, 39). But she claims
that Dickinson has been abused by others; one study she even refers to as the “rape” of a great poet. Beyond
familiarity with Dickinson criticism, Howe also situates her work ahead of the leading feminist literary theory,
both American and French, of the mid-eighties. She debunks the authoritative arguments of The Madwoman in
the Attic and Helen Cixous for failing to understand or even heed Dickinson and Stein.
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has a primacy that can never be wholly subordinated in a male-dominated inheritance. So
“Language” is a wider (or wilder) landscape than “HE” could ever control. Simply because a
viable “SHE” has been obscured does not foreclose “SHE” in the “universal theme of
Language.” Dickinson is one such light from whom she can learn about “SHE.” 54
To pull “SHE” from the “code of others” is by extension to pull an “I” and a “my” and
additional language of self-construction. Howe not only wants such language so that she can
craft great poems, but she also wants the language of “identity and memory” that has been
denied. When she pulls Dickinson from the clutches of a patriarchal inheritance, she declares
her subjection before the one true “SHE.” To go back to my argument about Howe’s
subjectivity, according to the traditional model, to say “my” is an act of subjugation before
some entity or power, such “my lord,” “my father,” or “my savior.” In this sense, instead of
my denoting a claim of ownership, it expresses the speaker’s subjection before a sovereign
being. In modern literary theory, subjectivity is a product of language, culture or ideology.
The latter are never fully apprehended but withdraw and remain hidden despite our
investigations. So too does Dickinson resist immediate apprehension. She remains a
“mystery beyond mystery” (ME, 138).
Observe how closely Howe’s search for Dickinson comes to “Puritan theology at its best
[when it] would tirelessly search God’s secrecy, explore hidden meaning” (ME, 46). Howe
admires Puritans because they respected secrecy, mystery, and absence: “It was this
profound conception of obedience to a stern and sovereign Absence that forged the
fanatical energy necessary for survival. Obedience to a higher purpose warmed the physical
and metaphysical loneliness of these pilgrim territories hugging the borders of an uncharted
54 In addition to Dickinson, Howe nominates Stein as “two writers whose work refuses to conform to the
Anglo-American literary tradition” (ME, 11), but from whom she can learn about “SHE.”
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continent” (ME, 39). Her “obedience” to Dickinson is a modern day version of this “higher
purpose.” Throughout My Emily Dickinson the line between religion and poetry is indistinct.
Emily Dickinson’s religion was Poetry. As she went on through veils of
connection to the secret alchemy of Diety, she was less and less interested in
temporal blessing. The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close
up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the
misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist
gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the
incandescent shadows of futurity.
(ME, 48-49)
An earlier version of this passage makes an even stronger claim for the religiosity of
Dickinson’s poems; the last line originally read, “Far from being the misguided modesty of
an oppressed female ego, it was a gesture worthy of God.” 55 A question arises from such
statements: does Howe desire this absent, secretive, and mysterious Dickinson, not to
possess and know it, but to safeguard and cherish it? Close scrutiny of Howe’s writing shows
that she withholds a fixed portrait of Dickinson or a final reading of her poems. As Howe
says of “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—,” “Like all poems on the trace of the holy,
this one remains outside the protection of specific solution” (MED, 35).
To glance ahead is to see the “trace of the holy” become only more pronounced in
Howe’s later writing on Dickinson. In The Birth-Mark her declaration of subjectivity
continues to stay strong: “Emily Dickinson’s writing is my strength and my shelter” (BM, 2).
On the face of it, her essay “Flames and Generosities” publicizes her debate with Dickinson
editor Ralph Franklin. At some point they made some kind of “pact” to exchange research:
“I am much impressed by your joyful appreciation of this pact,” he writes to her. Reading
My Emily Dickinson, however, led him to conclude that they have “basically differing views.”
He explained his position in a letter: “I do not believe, for example that the fascicles artistic
55 Susan Howe, “Part Two: Childe Emily to the Dark Tower Came: from My Emily Dickinson,” in Code of
Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, Io #30, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), 204.
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structures or that they were intended for other readers ([Dickinson] has a long history of
sending poems to others—always individual poems, always complete). Your remarks about
her breaks are interesting. Doesn’t much of the argument depend upon your assumption that
one (she) reads in lines or parts of lines?… Personally I am not persuaded that the placement
on paper of run on lines is more than arbitrary convenience.” 56 Asked about his editorial
decision for The Masters Letters of Emily Dickinson, Franklin explained, “I transcribed the
letters line-for-physical-line solely for purposes of reference with the facsimile. If I were
doing a text as such, I would surely opt for run-on treatment since it is prose and there is no
expected (genre) form generating the line. In the poems, of course, there is such a form and
that is what I will follow—not the accidents of physical line breaks on the paper. Except of
course, where they coincide.” 57
Everyone loves a controversy, and Howe readers have been fascinated by the
“manhandling” (BM, 2) of Dickinson’s manuscripts by her apparently unscrupulous editors.
Dickinson’s refusal to publish is often taken (even by Howe) as a refusal of the political
economy that would control and delimit her texts. I think there is no question, however, that
Howe’s choice of words to describe the editorial controversy illustrate that she sees
Dickinson’s actions in a religious framework: “Her demurral was a covenant of grace” (BM,
1). That Howe can say, “In 1991 these manuscripts still represent a Reformation,” (BM,
139), is possible because Howe thinks of the original manuscripts as a kind of scripture. For
Franklin to alter Dickinson’s poems is taken as a sacrilegious act, even should he explain his
wish to make cross-referencing with the fascicles easier (as he does in fact explain). For
Howe, on the contrary, “Use value is blasphemy” (BM, 137). She believes that
56 Ralph Franklin to Susan Howe, June 5, 1985. Susan Howe Papers. Box 1, File 7.
57 Ralph Franklin to Susan Howe, June 6, 1986. Ibid.
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“‘Authoritarian readings’ confuse [Dickinson’s] nonconformity” (BM, 139). This recalls
Howe’s volume The Nonconformist’s Memorial, where nonconformity refers to Puritan
dissidents.
So Dickinson’s writing is said to come from a source that is irreducible to human artifice:
“Mystery is the content. Intractable expression. Dead to rules of composition” (BM, 143). Its
source is “beyond,” a language that transcends conceptual thinking: “Emily Dickinson’s
writing is a premeditated immersion in immediacy” (BM, 139). Dickinson’s “[l]ine breaks and
visual contrapuntal stresses represent an athematic compositional intention” (BM, 139).
Howe leaves unanswered the question of whether the poems contain a middle term by
which we could interpret them and still be in good conscience. Howe steadfastly refuses to
characterize the fascicles as the products of intention. Instead she reads them as inspired
creations, a “handwritten sequence” that is “outside intention” (BM, 136), for Dickinson
“obey[s] intuition’s agnostic necessity” (BM, 136, my emphasis). Howe reveres “the immediacy
of these spiritual improvisations” (BM, 146). The last sentences of the essay could apply to
Dickinson or Howe: “Wayward Puritan. Charged with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is
antinomian” (BM, 149).
In my view such descriptions are closer to theology than literary criticism. Howe declares
her subjectivity before Dickinson in what can fruitfully be described as reinventing an
outmoded or dormant vocabulary of the sacred. Whereas once upon a time subjectivity was
declared before a sovereign or a religious entity, and now it is more common that
subjectivity is declared before a language or a culture, Howe establishes a new horizon for
subjectivity before the otherness of Dickinson. It is not a regressive, of course, but rather a
progressive turn that builds on the modern critique of subjectivity, which we must consider
more fully in the next section. The critique says that the subject is constituted by, rather than
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constitutive of, the world, which is structured according to language, culture, or history.
Dickinson offers Howe a way to understand and negotiate her historical position through a
writing that is irreducible to convention. Dickinson is an inheritance that shows inheritance
is not determined at the outset.
4.4) “Only the Human Exists”: An Emersonian Conclusion
One way to situate the figures that appear in avant-garde historical poetry is alongside
theoretical arguments about the end of the subject where history is conceived as a sequence
of changes in a people’s institutions, discourse, or culture, and not according to anyone’s
participation in them or whatever they did that was particularly relevant. Ideology and
materiality are taken as responsible for the events that people are haplessly caught up in. The
inner complexities of the mind prove simply a convenience to keep society flowing more
efficiently. An economy of political values weaves its way through the social hierarchies that
lend us whatever might be called self-definition or identity. Foucault put it succinctly for a
generation of historians when he said, “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man
is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” 58 Suddenly history is the
world of The Matrix, where beneath an illusory reality, we are really just batteries that power
the machine.
The avant-garde does not flinch away from these conclusions, even if it might not
always, or at least openly, associate them with the same theorists as in literary studies. On the
contrary, the avant-garde seeks out the historical paradigms that marginalize or limit the
relevance of individual freedom. This can be seen from Pound, who immerses himself in the
58 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 367.
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history of money in order to untangle the interrelationships of banking systems and cultural
practices, to Olson, who employs the latest archaeological research in order to grasp how
material conditions have determined global history, to Howe, who utilizes the tools of
linguistic and historical philosophy in order to reveal structures of power embedded in our
language and thus in ourselves. Even Henry Adams says that Marx was the only one to
foresee radical change in the twentieth century. But while a demonstration of the reality of
those limiting forces is near the heart of avant-garde conceptions of history, this picture is
only half-complete. On deeper inspection, those models of history highlight the very
impediments to freedom that wait to be confronted. The avant-garde poets, insofar as they
recognize that traditional conceptions of the self are obsolete, carry on Williams’s claim that
“[o]nly the human exists” (EK, 38). The avant-garde seeks to discover in what ways human
existence has escaped (and continues to escape) historical codification. When Olson says,
“History is precisely cut to the term man” (SV, 28), the underlying charge is that the “cut”
has never sufficiently matched the “term” in question. In response to Foucault’s call in
“What is an Author?” for a replacement of the author by analysis of discourse, Howe writes,
“How can ‘the subject (and its substitutes)… be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as
a complex and variable function of discourse’… before we have been allowed to see what
she, Emily Dickinson, reveals of her most profound self in the multiple multilayered scripts,
sets, notes, and scraps she left us?” (BM, 20). Howe disputes Foucault because Dickinson’s
work has never truly been “published,” so we have no basis for judging the author.
This is where the historical figures come in. In avant-garde poetry, a particular figure will
occupy an unexplored space beneath the accepted knowledge of the past, hiding out from
categories or slipping through the historical edifice. Having never been reckoned in history,
this figure has never been explained, never counted in or subsumed by knowledge. More to
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the point, this figure has never been calculated in theories of an erstwhile subject. He or she
remains an exception, felt only as a distant cry when our attention is pointed in a different
direction. For Pound, Olson, and Howe, such a figure confers a kind of necessary
orientation for redressing the lines of causation between past and present. Howe writes:
I am going to confine myself
beneath disguises a catalogue
of categories relative to coeval
apostle represented as a plain
if practical preacher I come to
you with neither crook nor shoe
nor script a Presbyterian cloak
though admittedly eyelet holes…
(TM, 23)
Even in the extreme non-representational poems that Howe produces, knowledge of the
past is founded on persistent, albeit elusive figures: unwitnessed witnesses (with “admittedly
eyelet holes”). As shown by the passage above, the “catalogue / of categories” that we use to
interpret the past cannot be trusted to capture these figures. They are cited or evoked by a
variety of strategies that differ for each poet: from Pound’s luminous node that is always
rooted in a historical actor, a switch operator on the “switchboard of knowledge,” to the
“once-living” person whose importance inveterately diminishes beside the works of
literature left to the present, to the fragmentary selves at play in Howe’s work (vacillating
between herself and particular, though often unnamed, historical selves) that confound a
clear portrait, resist narrative placement, or withdraw into darkness and mystery. If I keep
quoting Howe, it is because her work seems the most intuitively non-individualist of
twentieth century historical poetry. But even the recent Pierce-Arrow (1999), features a “Motif
of retreating figure / arrayed beyond expression” (PA, 144) which can be recognized at least
as far back as the nomadic wanderings of Pythagorean Silence (1982):
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He plodded away through drifts of i
ce
away into inapprehensible Peace
A portable alter strapped on his back
pure and severe
…
In the forests of Germany he will feed
on aromatic grasses and browse in leaves
(ET, 35)
It begins to sound like American avant-garde poets are unable to do without a romantic
theory of genius, even when such figures are depicted as nomadic and “plodding away.” 59 In
fact, if we back up a bit, we see that this treatment of historical figures participates in a
longer strand of American writing that hearkens back to Emerson’s idea that knowledge
should be gotten from the study of “Great Men.” The Representative Men lectures that he
published in 1850, on “Plato; or, the Philosopher,” “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic,”
“Montaigne; or the Skeptic,” “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” “Napoleon; or, the Man of the
World,” and “Goethe; or the Writer,” were concerned less with “the usual worshipful
bowing down before the unreachable great ones,” as Robert D. Richardson explains, than
with “the use of the great men in our education.” 60 Emerson’s point was not that his
59 I mean the romantic theory of genius as it operates in the historical figures, not the poets themselves.
For a study of modern poets’ own claims to genius see Bob Perelman’s The Trouble with Genius (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1994). He illustrates the paradox of poets (his examples being Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky)
who claim to be genius, but then produce difficult poetry which leaves the majority of their readers utterly
baffled.
60 Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkley: U California Press, 1995), 413. Richardson
says that Carlyle conceived of heroes that would govern society, and he urged Emerson to find similar kinds of
American heroes. But Emerson was “assembling something quite different. Emerson’s book included no
Americans.” (413). David M. Robinson says further, “Representative Men is often taken to be a depiction of
heroism, but it is in fact much more a commentary on the limits of greatness” (90). “Each chapter begins in
praise of the idea represented by its human subject,” such as Plato as philospher, Swedenborg as mystic, and
Goethe as writer, “and then moves to a section of continuing praise for the man himself…” (94). This part of
each essay locates the ideas they represent in the world they inhabit. Robinson calls the book “resolutely
tangible and richly peopled” (92) and notes the way it “abounds with solid human living, and although its
whole structure revolves around the moral judgements Emerson makes about its heroes, it remains one of his
worldliest books” (92-93). After grounding knowledge in a figure who embodies it, “each essay works
inevitably towards to limits of the hero.” (94) See David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism
and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 89-111.
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audience should imitate or idolize representative men—which anticipates Williams saying of
Shakespeare: “‘the man’… be damned—he is anonymous (nearly) and will remain so, thank
God” (EK, 95). Emerson anticipates instead Williams’s appeal to the “embodiment” of
knowledge because he seeks historical figures that concretize knowledge in ways that are
unsustainable by academic pedagogy. His idea is that to learn philosophy we should study
Plato and not take a course in philosophy (unless it covers Plato); to learn skepticism we
should study Montaigne and not take a course in skepticism. Emerson is like the poets in
believing that education is built on a history of continuous human possibilities that must be
revived throughout the centuries. 61 In this view knowledge flows from the ground up.
Nothing comes from outside the world of humans, so it never breaks away from what
Nietzsche will later call the “eternal return of the same.” It is the world of Ecclesiastes where
there is “nothing new under the sun.” Emerson produces a very interesting theory of
inheritance here: “The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy clothes
or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new
stuff still repeats the scrolls and the rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the
pyramids of Thebes.” (RM, 616). Notice that “articles” are not abstractions but are meant to
fit people. In Emerson’s world, “Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man” (RM,
616). So even abstract art is a form of life: had Emerson been around in the next century, he
would have looked at Pollack’s paintings and seen the imprint of body movements; like John
Cage, he would have entered the silent anechoic chamber and heard rhythms of his own
circulatory system. History to Emerson is the history of human actions. Like Williams, who
61 Ed Dorn, a poet who studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain, in talking about his own study of
the past, eloquently remarked on the “the synchronizations and parallels and correspondences the new times
have with the old, the dark mass of flirting realizations emerging at dusk like bats from the cave of the
Medieval demi-millenium.” Ed Dorn, High West Rendezvous (South Devonshire: Etruscan Books, 1997), 5.
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says “Only the human exists,” knowledge for Emerson is born of human experience and
never leaves human experience behind. In such experience there is little that is new—only
the renewed effort to do something different with what we collectively have, or inherit.
This does not mean that the definition of the human is fixed or delineated from the
beginning. Emerson writes: “I can do that by another which I cannot do alone…. Other
men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different
quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the
otherest” (RM, 616). These are Emerson’s italics in the last sentence. He worries that we might
content ourselves with instruction from conventional sources instead of seeking the
unknown, the heterogeneous, the strange. He adds, “We must not contend against love, or
deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us” (RM,
616). Emerson believes that inheritance is collective and never individual. Richardson makes
the provocative suggestion that Emerson’s views on representative men come close to a
modern concern with heterogeneity and difference. In this view, the education based on
representative men is potentially self-transformative. Emerson’s representative men are thus
not representative at all, but rather a distant echo to the avant-garde poets who seek lost or
forgotten historical figures. In Howe’s case, she seeks those figures who are normalized by
the prevailing structures of power and thus are essentially lost, however much they may be in
“plain” view, like Dickinson.
In competing against the official history that comes down to us, a historical poem can
always be read as an act of recovery. Emerson holds that the accomplishments of
representative men are inscribed in our language: “Their names are wrought into the verbs
of our language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the
day recalls an anecdote of them” (RM, 615). This does not mean that their accomplishments
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are recognized. “As plants convert the minerals into food for animals,” he explains, “so each
man converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity,
magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton; the makers of tool; the inventor of decimal
notation; the geometer; the engineer; the musician,—severally make an easy way for all,
through unknown and impossible confusions….” (RM, 618). Representative men are
“wrought” into our lives, perhaps so tightly that we do not even notice. Avant-garde
historical poetry tends to be interested in figures who are underneath whatever is wrought in
our lives. The figures are unrecognized or unrepresented. When evoked in a historical poem,
they have the potential to disrupt or unravel language and customs. Emerson and the poets
coincide in that the figures are said to resist appropriation. Emerson has it that his
representative men are a form of instruction that is never part of a doctrinaire history. He
insists, “There is…a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from
approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a distance
our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach” (RM, 628). Emerson does not
think imitation is the right way to study representative men: “It seems as if the Deity dressed
each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to
other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote ‘Not
transferable,’ and ‘Good for one trip only,’ on these garments of the soul” (RM, 628).
The Maximus Poems are propelled by a series of figures who offer a “practice of self,” but
not a universal curriculum. The knowledge is nontransferable because it is built on the
immediacy of experience, but not the actual experience. In the first volume of his epic Olson
discusses a 17th-century Gloucester shipwright whose virtues he deeply admires:
That carpenter is much on my mind:
I think he was the first Maximus
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Anyhow, he was the first to make things,
not just live off nature
And he displays,
in the record, some of those traits
goes with that difference, traits present circumstances
keep my eye on
for example, necessities the practice of the self,
that matter, that wood
(MI, 31)
A Maximus figure always arises from the historical “record.” 62 His “traits”—foremost of
which is his creativity—are practices that illustrate the “circumstances” in which he lived.
It’s not entirely clear what Olson means when he says, “for example,” but “practice of the
self” seemingly refers to the ability to activate the natural world. Olson values a person who
can make something with “matter” or with “wood,” and he disdains a person who passively
exists like a cog or a free-loader on the hard work of others. The creativity of a Maximus is
clarified a few lines later when Olson celebrates the painter Marsden Hartley, who once
visited the younger poet in Gloucester. Stressing material creativity once more, Olson says
Hartley’s paintings are “transubstantiations // as I am not permitted, / nor my father…”
(MI, 33). A Maximus, like a representative man, is good for one trip only. “What Hartley did
was according to his lights” (MI, 34), insists Olson. The past can show us “practice of the
self,” but it cannot actually give us a practice that applies today, certainly not in any way that
can be reduced to a textbook lesson: the “men of the matter of this city/ …/are never /
doctrinaires” (MI, 34). This is what Williams meant when he said, “If we cannot make a man
live again when he is gone, it is boorish to imprison him dead within some narrow definition,
62 Butterick tells us the following about Olson’s “exemplar of heroic virtue.” “William Stevens, a
shipwright who came to Gloucester in 1642 having been offered grants of choice land as an inducement to
settle, including eight acres of the Cut [a canal going through Gloucester and emptying into the harbor]. A
valuable citizen and one of some prominence; he was, however, fined, imprisoned, and deprived of his
privileges as a freeman for firmly speaking against royal interference in local government.” (GM, 50).
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when, were he in his shoes before us, we would not do it. It’s lies, such history, and
dangerous” (IAG, 190).
Contrast this approach with a roughly contemporaneous poet whose approach to history
never pushes beyond the doctrinaire. Robert Lowell’s 1973 volume, History, is a long sonnet
sequence featuring a pantheon of historical figures, chronologically arranged from Genesis
to the present. The poems of this volume were written late in his career, well after the
establishment of his reputation as a confessional poet. It is not surprising to find a blurry line
between the history subjects and his personal concerns, such as lamentations about being
past his prime: “we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check” (H, 37). Lowell
incorporates his conflicts into the history. The next poem (“Sheep”) rebounds against the
dour thoughts on his age:
But we must remember our tougher roots:
forerunners bent in hoops to the broiling soil,
until their backs were branded with the coin
of Alexander, God or Caesar—
as if they’d been stretched on burning chicken wire,
skin cooked red and hard as rusted tin
by the footlights of the sun—tillers of the desert!
Think of them, afraid of violence,
afraid of anything, timid as sheep
hidden in some casual, protective crevice,
held twelve dynasties to a burning-glass,
pressed to the levelled sandbreast of the Sphinx—
what were once identities simplified
to a single, indignant, collusive grin. 63
Don’t get tired, Lowell says, “we must remember our tougher roots.” Whenever Lowell feels
over the hill, or “timid as sheep,” then he needs only think back about everyone who
suffered in history; they were like “sheep” too, but their hard lives never stopped them, so
he knows he can persevere too. This is an absurd means of self-assurance, of course, for
63 Robert Lowell, History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1973), 37.
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Lowell has merely appropriated a metaphor to capture his inner turmoil. At no point can
one honestly say that Lowell inherits the suffering of laborers in ancient history.
For Lowell, history never prompts self-questioning, it only assuages his personal
problems. It would be wrong to say history never offers any lessons to Lowell—only that
unlike Pound, Olson, and Howe, he has no experience of history as other than his relative
present. For him, the past is a familiar terrain on which he can move freely and comfortably
from region to region without any threat of harm. History and his other historical poems are
not built on research into what he does not know; David Antin calls Lowell’s allusions
“cocktail-party intellectual history.” 64 There is nothing respected as unknown or strange
about the past. Contrast this even with Pound, whose valorization of Sigismundo Malatesta
pushes the limits of the assistance that we might receive from an guidebook:
INTEREA PRO GADIBUS BASILICAE S. PIETRIE EX ARIDA
MATERIA INGENS PYRA EXTRUITUR IN CUJUS SUMMITATE IMAGO
SIGISMUNDI COLLOCATUR HOMINIS LINEAMENTA, ET VESTIMENTA
MODUM ADEO PROPRIE REDDENS, UT VERA MAGIS PERSONA, QUAM
IMAGO VIDERETUR; NE QUEM TAMEN IMAGO FALLERET, ET
SCRIPTURA, EX ORE PRODIIT, QUA DICERET:
SIGISMUNDO HIC EGO SUM
MALATESTA, FILIUS PANDULPHI, REX PRODITORUM,
DEO ATQUE HOMINIBUS INFESTUS, SACRI CENSURA SENATUS
IGNI DAMNATUS;
SCRIPTURAM
MULTI LEGERUNT. DEINDE ASTANTE POPULO, IGNE
IMMISSO,ET PYRA SIMULACRUM REPENTE FLAGRAVIT.
Com. Pio II, Liv. VII, p. 85.
Yriarte, p. 288.
(Cantos, 43-44)
A translation might help us (as is provided in Carroll F. Terrell’s superbly edited
Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound), yet a translation that tells us the semantic meaning
of the passage cannot gloss over the strangeness of the past in Cantos—strange even to
64 David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” Boundary
2, 1:1 (Autumn, 1972): 111.
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Pound. This is unlike how Lowell characterizes his translations in Imitations: “one voice
running through many personalities, contrasts, and repetitions.” 65 In History Lowell imagines
sharing an intimate moment with Thoreau: “…For Thoreau, / life in us was like water in a
river: / ‘It may rise higher this year than all others.’” Contrast the different presentation in
Howe’s Thorow, where the archaic spelling of the title immediately jostles us (or throws us)
with an impression of temporal distance. Her reading of Thoreau never streamlines into
Lowell’s “one voice running through many,” but instead spreads out with many voices
running through the poem. On the one side, Howe heeds Thoreau’s advice to a
correspondent: “am glad to see you have studied out the history of the ponds, got the Indian
names straightened—which means made more crooked--&c., &c” (S, 42). This is juxtaposed
with a passage from the unorthodox philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: “The
proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of multiplicity.” A brief glance at her poem
confirms that history is unlikely to succumb to easy interpretation. For Howe, history must
be approached for instruction even as it disrupts a settled body of knowledge.
There are limitations to the embodiment of knowledge in a representative figure.
Knowledge grounded in an actual historical person is exposed to human vulnerabilities that
more abstract models of knowledge are shielded against. David M. Robinson identifies the
basis for this vulnerability in a recurring pattern in Emerson’s Representative Men. Each essay
begins by grounding knowledge in a representative man, such as Plato for philosophy,
Shakespeare for poetry, and so on. But then “each essay works inevitably towards the limits
of the hero” (94). Remember that valorizing the figure as such was never Emerson’s
intention. He never hesitates to tell us about the flaws of each representative figure. This is
where Emerson is unlike many of the poets, who do not always go so far in foregrounding
65 Robert Lowell, Imitations, (New York: Noonday, 1995), xi.
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the “limits of the hero.” Sometimes the poet glosses over this part entirely, which leaves the
figure open to critique, often by a later poet who gazes back with skeptical eyes. Rather than
directly attack the poet or the knowledge embodied by the figure, a later poet could instead
concentrate exclusively on the figure. When this happens, the figure becomes a site of
contest between two poets with competing views of history. An instructive case is the John
Adams presented by Pound versus the John Adams presented by Howe. Adams is central to
Pound’s cantos on American history. One of the cantos begins by indicting the corruption
and incompetence of other founding fathers. Pound says of Alexander Hamilton, “we may
take it (my authority, ego scriptor…) / that he was the Prime snot in ALL American
history.” In contrast, the Canto ends by rallying on behalf of John Adams:
But for the clearest head in congress
1774 and thereafter
pater patria
the man who at certain points
made us
at certain points
saved us
by fairness, honesty and straight moving
ARRIBA ADAMS
(C, 350)
For Pound, the virtues are all here: “clearest head,” “fairness,” “honesty,” and “straight
moving.” Absent are any vices or signs of corruption. Notice the final burst in all capitals
which literally translates, “hail Adams.” This line illustrates how quickly Pound’s ear can be
used to rewrite history with a fascist agenda; the double “h” sounds of “Hail Hitler” lend
themselves to a similar double “a” sound for a U.S. founding father—a sonic echo that is
already conspicuous in the double consonants of “pater patria.” Pound’s skill with words
retrieves a “founding father,” tailors him with a fascist agenda, and then holds him out to a
contemporary U.S. audience.
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Howe is probably not responding directly to Pound when John Adams appears in her
work, but the convergence on the same historical figure highlights a stark contrast in how
each understands an American inheritance. In the one case Adams, is valorized for being a
representative figure who, through “fairness, honesty and straight moving,” negotiates
political and economic forces that Pound thinks still dominate his world. In the other case,
Adams is satirized for his obsession with personal property. Howe quotes the following
passage from his correspondence: “Bradbury says there is no need of Dung on upon your
Moving Land if you dont feed it in Fall nor Spring. Let the old Fog remain upon it, and die
and rot and be washed into the Ground, and dont suffer your Cattle to tread upon it and so
poach and break the soil, and you will never want any Dung” (B, 73). Although she provides
no commentary on these “dung” passages, her section is headed “Economy,” which reminds
us of Pound (as well as Thoreau). It becomes comic when Howe quotes a long passage from
Adams’s “Recipe to make Manure”:
Take the Soil and Mud, which you cutt up and throw out when you dig Ditches in a
Salt Marsh, and put 20 Load of it in a heap. Then take 20 Loads of common Soil or
mould of Upland and Add to the other. Then to the whole add 20 Loads of Dung,
and lay the whole in a Heap, and let it lay 3 months, then take your Spades And
begin at one End of the Heap, and dig it up and throw it into another Heap, there let
it lie, till the Winter when the Ground is frozen, and then cart it on, to your English
Grass Land…. If I can so fence and secure Deacon Belchers and Lt. Belchers
Orchards, as not to feed them at all in the Fall, Winter, nor Spring I could get a fine
Crop of English Hay from thence. But I must keep up my Fences all Winter to keep
off my Neighbours Creatures, Hog, Horses, Oxen, Cows and Sheep.
(B, 73)
She also quotes his attempt to keep the neighbor’s “creatures” away: “My Men at Braintree
have been building me a Wall, this Week against my Meadow. This is all the Gain that I
make by my Farm to repay me my great expence. I get my Land better secured—and
manured.” (B, 74). Separation, security, suspicion: these constitute the “economy” in Howe’s
view of the national inheritance. She is keenly attuned to how people ordered space and
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power in the formation of social relationships. The primary form that such relationships take
determined by “Gain.”
Keep in mind that the later poet almost invariably has the last word over the earlier.
Olson gets to say whatever he wants about historical figures featured by Pound (see for
example “A Lustrum For You, E.P.” [1945/46]), and Howe gets to say whatever she wants
about historical figures featured by Pound or Olson, or anyone else’s work for that matter.
Finally, when two poets converge on the same figure, it’s not always easy to pick out
differences in their approach. Melville is a good example because he is decisive for both
Olson and Howe, but the Melville put forth by Olson is of a different order than the
Melville put forth by Howe. Where in her recourse to Melville she is responding to Olson is
not entirely clear, if she is responding to him at all. Olson (in Call Me Ishmael) praises Melville
for his social insights but thinks his work after Moby-Dick represents a loss of power—one
reason being that Olson sees Melville’s late interest in Christianity as misguided. In Melville’s
Marginalia Howe argues that, “Marks [which Melville] made in the margins of his books are
often a conversation with the dead” (NM, 89). Melville offers Howe, then, a lesson that
language is participatory and that it traverses historical periods. These are two different ways
of understanding Melville. Olson believes that Melville’s importance lies in his attunement to
the sea, because it makes the earth spherical and renews the possibility of a global being with
others. Howe believes his importance lies in his grasp of language, because it opens the
present to all it has forgotten and continues to forget. Both are in agreement, however, that
Melville reveals the contours of this world we have inherited. He is a representative figure
for both.
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POSTSCRIPT: NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I'm tempted to say that the projects of dissolving the unitary self, and of
bracketing or disabling reference, have gone about as far as they can go -
though they've produced quite a lot of good writing….I think we are
indeed imagining a person when we read a poem: we are imagining some
psyche that has made this, and asking “why would you make it that
way? what kind of person would say or write, construct or sound like
this, and why?”
—Stephen Burt 1
This study has looked at avant-garde historical poetry as a reinvention of autobiography.
The assumption that the self is a product of history alters the question of how to understand
and write about one’s experience of the world. Whereas traditional autobiography focuses on
memory and experience and organizes the writer’s life in a series of self-representational
narratives, the poets in this study are more interested in the determining influences of
history, or as I say, inheritance. Like Henry Adams, the poets of this study are skeptical of
received history and the habits of intellectual thought and scholarly convention. Pound,
Olson, and Howe are alike in that they take poetry as a means to revolutionize historical
paradigms and thus the inheritance that determines the present. From such a viewpoint
history is not a burden that must be discarded, but is rather the very make-up of the person.
For each poet there is no self that is defined apart or independently from its history. History
1 Stephen Burt, “Poetry Criticism - what is it for?” A paper delivered at a conference “Poetry Criticism:
What is it for?” http://jacketmagazine.com/11/burt.html
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ecomes a terrain of struggle, and one changes oneself by finding another history.
Autobiography thus becomes an investigative form of writing.
My study has discussed this reinvention of autobiography in several areas that I think can
change how historical poetry is understood. In what I read as an ars poetica of autobiography
and history, Adams demonstrates how the failure of the stories that we tell about ourselves,
that is, our education, necessitates a fresh view of history. Conventional autobiography is
made up of stories about personal growth, family, career, social life, and so forth. It locates
the writer outside of education, as a graduate, a product, a finished being. But for Adams and
the poets of this study, autobiography is an on-going process that must be founded on the
investigation of inheritance. Whereas in the first chapter I took a long view, from Adams all
the way through the other poets discussed in this study, in the second chapter I took a short
view with Howe’s writing in the 1970s. Howe begins her investigation when she turns from
painting to poetry and replaces her earlier metaphysical view of “universal language” with a
historical paradigm of inherited language. All of the poets in this study make use of
documentary forms to understand the past. Because the document does not originate with
the poet, it would normally seem to foreclose any autobiographical reading. But I argue that
historical poetry documents inheritance, so it is autobiographical for an inherited self. Finally, I
discussed the historical figures who embody the past and thus help the poets to conceive of
history in experiential terms rather than abstractions. The historical figures exceed historical
codification, so inheritance remains open to new possibilities for the present.
I would like to conclude by briefly suggesting how my argument might extend to poets
who are attuned to the construction of the self not so much by history as by language or
culture. If a poet assumes that the self is constituted by language or culture, then a poem that
investigates that language or culture is in effect an autobiography. What I offer is a new
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sense of autobiography, or new autobiography, which completely changes the view that
avant-garde or innovative poets are interested solely in discarding autobiographical forms of
writing. Rather, I think that such poets have long recognized the need to rethink how
autobiography makes sense of one’s life. Before looking at a few examples, let me note that
innovative and avant-garde poets have often invoked the name of “autobiography,” though
in a way that does not draw attention to itself. Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1965) is subtitled
“An Autobiography” and Robert Duncan’s essay “The Truth and Life of Myth” is subtitled
“An Essay in Essential Autobiography.” Zukofsky once called Bottom: On Shakespeare a
“poet’s autobiography.” 2 David Antin has two early poems “Autobiography I” and
“Autobiography II” (1967). Among Language Poets, Bob Perelman has an early poem called
“An Autobiography” (1978) and Michael Davidson has a newer poem called “The
Autobiography Project” (1998). 3 Recently Rae Armantrout and Leslie Scalapino have written
relatively straightforward autobiographies. A much wider list could be made from poets of
the last few decades whose emphasis on what constitutes the self is fundamental to their
poetics. This list would include Language Poets, poets of the Americas such as Edward
Kamau Brathwaite (whose long poem trilogy Ancestors (2001) is an autobiography of an
inherited self), and some other contemporary poets who published first books in the 1990s
and who have directed attention towards the cultural frameworks that define the world they
live in. Despite the tremendous differences in the work of these poets, the issue they can all
agree on is the urgent need to rethink how the self is understood. In what follows, my
intention is by no means to provide an exhaustive account of the various ways that
2 “To me, Bottom: on Shakespeare is… A poet’s autobiography, as involvement of twenty years in a work
shows him up, or as in the case of Shakespeare his words show it, are his life.” P+, 167.
3 Bob Perelman, “An Autobiography,” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1999), 4-
6. Michael Davidson, “The Autobiography Project” in The Arcades, (O Books, 1998), 78-81.
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autobiography has been reinvented, but rather to gesture to possibilities for future thinking
on the problem.
Take for example Bruce Andrews, a Language Poet whose work would seem entirely at
odds with any autobiographical form. In my introduction I quoted Andrews’s review of
Roland Barthes: “Author dies, writing begins. The subject loses authority, disappears, is
unmade into a network of relationships, stretching indefinitely…. Subject becomes simply the
‘instance of writing,’ is hollowed out by the operation of a linguistic system” (L=A, 55). In
his infamous long poem, I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (1992), not
only is the subject “unmade” in “the operation of a linguistic system” but, more radically,
Andrews confronts the ways that language perpetuates social identities in late-twentieth-
century U.S. society. Beyond being merely a poetics of the material text, as the main title
would seem to indicate, (“I don’t have any paper so shut up”), the problem investigated is
the social production of identity, an issue which is parenthetically broached in the second
half of the title, “(or, Social Romanticism).” The book alphabetically arranges one hundred
poems with such titles as “Am I Alive?,” “If Pods Could Talk,” and “You Do Their Own
Thing.” The form is ostensibly a prose poem, or better yet, large blocks of prose with
irregular indentation and the occasional line break. Andrews is a poet of the speech around
us, working with overheard sentences and fragments which he then choreographs together
in a choppy and abrasive style. He is not out to embrace a common tongue, as with
Whitman, but to strangle or squeeze it at the throat so that it releases its bite. “I’m…feeling
that a self is constructed out of inducements, solicitations,” says Andrews in an interview, “if
I’m bringing into the poem a variety of raw materials, social materials that are embodiments
of those very kinds of solicitations and commands and inducements and seductions that
make the self, make the readers identify what is, then that might make a celebration of any
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existing identity, whether it is that of the heroic, privileged individual or the oppressed,
marginalized individual begin to seem – not enough….” 4
I Don’t Have Any Paper is an attack on the linguistic structures of identity, but through the
haze of malediction, it can be seen as yet another form of autobiography. Consider one
poem, which begins:
Education helps me squirt. Heavy metal frizz in outer space
megahertz jokes little stab at renewal, magnum putz
spit shine hot sauce tap-a-clod; blood is a big expense—
if you meet the communications standards, you become jelly.
And some grenades of Communist-bloc origin, the vasectomy
bishop; well, that’s a real dipsy-doodle, experience the pedal-
pushers; most of Egypt’s 45 million people live in poverty on
most imports. Mortgage of sin, I can make it legible – those
who are knowledgeable are untrustworthy & those worthy of
trust are stupid… 5
I chose this passage from the poem “Education helps me squirt” on purpose because it
compares with Henry Adams saying that his education was a complete failure. I find that
Andrews has an affinity with Adams because they are both sons of fortunate families, but
they are also disillusioned by the inheritance handed down to the present. Andrews testifies
to the failure of his inherited self-understanding, but he goes one step further by gesturing
towards new possibilities for selfhood, or as he speculates in an interview, towards “[s]ome
global discursivity, you know, and then some intergalactic constitution of the human, maybe,
beyond that – ” 6 His vision of the self is social rather than individual; the global scale is
apparent in the poem when he briefly cites the disproportionate social conditions in Egypt.
Andrews is still a romantic, but a social romantic rather than an individual romantic. His
search for a social framework for a new conception of identity is symmetrical to Adams
4 Bruce Andrews, Paradise and Method, 103.
5 Bruce Andrews, I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism), (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon,
1992), 81.
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when he searches history in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. One might even schematize their
work as follows:
“Education helps me squirt” / (Social Romanticism)
The Education of Henry Adams / Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
On the left are the works that testify to the failure of inherited forms of self-understanding
(the failure of autobiography) but on the right are the new forms that might extend new
possibilities for autobiography. On the right you have attempts at a solution—with Adams
to rethink the course of modern history, with Andrews to rethink our linguistic and social
predicaments. Andrews even structures his follow-up volume, Lip Service, around Dante’s
Paradiso, which is strangely similar to how the Virgin of Chartres provides a structure for
Adams’s views on commerce, design, trade, and social order. As I see it, Andrews is on the
path toward a new form of autobiography in which the self is constituted by its social
conditions, but in which the terms of that constituting process can be reconfigured through
a poetics of textual radicalism.
For a younger generation of poets, whose first books came out in the 1990s, the onus on
rejecting the self is not as urgent as it was for experimental poets who began writing in the
so-called “Age of Lowell,” meaning Robert Lowell and Confessional Poetry. 7 For such
younger poets, one of the best commentaries on new autobiography is found in Pamela: A
Novel (1998) by Pamela Lu. This so-called novel teases us with an autobiographical
framework because of Lu’s first name and the eponymous title. But of course her
autobiography/novel does not postulate an easy one-to-one identity between the writer and
the subject of the work. Rather, the work meditates almost obsessively on what it is like to
be part of the generation that came into intellectual life in the wake of deconstruction (or as
6 Bruce Andrews, Paradise and Method, 101.
7 I borrow the phrase from the title of a chapter in Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum.
256

she says, “we were ‘living’ post-structuralism” 8 ), and why such one-to-one correspondences
can never be assumed. Lu writes:
The very fact of our existence, amidst the flux of circular debates about the state of
our very existence, felt like a parody of these debates themselves; hence we could
only be real, really real, when we mimicked the representations of ourselves as they
appeared in theory, commercials, and general conversation, which in turn seemed to
suggest that we had just missed being real by fifty years or so. We were being
influenced by all the books we read, but these same books had all been written at
least ten years before we discovered them, so that we were always playing catch-up as
all the new ideas expired before us. In fact, we were always expiring before ourselves,
or before we could convince ourselves that we existed, and had impact on the world
outside us, if it was accurate at all to speak of the world as being “outside” anything.
(P, 19)
Unlike the autobiography of the inherited self, in which self-representation is not a necessary
condition, Pamela: A Novel goes back to the core questions of what constitutes the self. For
Lu, all formulations (and forms) of the self are put in question by the multiple and
conflicting cultural conditions that determine existence. One of the most important themes
of Pamela is that identity can never be more than a pose. Here is another passage that directly
speaks to the contemporary condition of the self:
The self was a mystery so consumed by its own questioning that it had no room left
for us, a condition which we nevertheless preferred since we were totally unprepared
for the alternative. Nothing was more sublime or terrifying than the thought of
waking up each morning completely renewed, with only ourselves to fall back on.
We desperately depended upon the spectacle of the large “I,” with all its artifice and
white noise, to keep us alive and functional in the world. We sometimes wondered
who this “I” really was. Raw speculation placed “I” at the dawn of Western
civilization—“I” was the shadow on the far wall of the cave, in which we were still
living, or it was the cave itself, which had evolved over the years to accommodate us
more comfortably, like a second skin that we could never shed or live without. In
this sense, “I” (which expanded during times of war or crisis to “we”) was the most
ubiquitous, and therefore elusive, self we could imagine: there was no way to find “I”
without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves.
(P, 34-35)
8 Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel (Berkely: Atelos, 1990), 19. Henceforth abbreviated as P.
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Pamela: A Novel builds autobiography on new objects of self-understanding, including the
parody of philosophy, pastiche of cultural identity, and reduction of selfhood to a bare
minimum—throughout much of the text the protagonist is referred to simply as “P.” It is
also a story of friendship among several characters (based in fact on actual friends of Lu)
who choose different solutions to their shared contemporary plight. All of the friends are
likewise reduced to letters rather than full proper names, such as “J,” “R,” “L,” and of
course the ubiquitous “I.” For Lu, autobiography is defined by an existence that can never
attain an unquestioned state. Lu’s writes her autobiography through those very questions.
I’ll close by quoting two other younger poets whose work reinvents the basic terms of
autobiography. The first is Lisa Jarnot in her poem, “Autobiography.” Like Lu’s use of
letters to represent a reduced existence, Jarnot relies on a series of short-hand roles that she
or perhaps anyone else can interchangeably assume:
I didn’t sleep with anyone for six months until
I met X. While I was sleeping with Y I also slept
with Y’s girlfriend. While I was sleeping with
Y’s girlfriend I also slept with S and T. During
the six months between sleeping with Y and
sleeping with X, I spent a lot of time with K.
I never slept with K but J slept with K and Y’s
girlfriend and also with S. After leaving Y and
before meeting X I didn’t sleep with anyone for
six months. 9
This is a gossip-filled poem where roles are defined primarily by fleeting sexual encounters.
Steve Evans has likened Jarnot’s earlier book, Some Other Kind of Mission (1996) to “staring at
a bruise you can’t remember getting, after a night you can’t recall the conclusion of, in a
room you’ve never seen before.” 10 In “Autobiography” the bruise is not the fault of any
9 Lisa Jarnot, Ring of Fire (Cambridge: Zoland Books, 2001), 11.
10 Steve Evans, “The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History,” Assembling Alternatives:
Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, Ed. Romana Huk (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2003), 95.
258

individual but rather of the limited configurations that are allowed in a discourse based
exclusively on gossip. Jarnot foregrounds (and parodies) the limits of this gossip by her
frequent references to time (“months”). The sole verb is “sleep,” which is arranged in several
Stein-like variations that make the word seem less natural. “Sleep” could also mean not just a
sexual encounter but a repose or rest. In “Autobiography” what each figure ostensibly wants
is to keep the encounters going, but each figure might also want repose or rest. The third
and final stanza begins with what seems like a more-detailed encounter than before, and
indeed we are primed for such details after not having them in the first stanza. As it unfolds,
however, each sentence immediately switches registers to keep us from forming a fuller
picture:
One Saturday in July the cable man came to
the door and she let him in. Once he was
standing on the edge of the balcony and he
saw a dog-headed man on the beach…
The stanza, rather than developing to a full-blown pictorial scene, frustrates attention in
order to keep it moving. What is a “dog-headed man” and why is he “on the beach?” More
to the point, why would this be autobiography as the title of the poem insists? If we make
the assumption that life is like this for Jarnot, then we are presented with an autobiography
that is split between interesting and fantastical experiences (as seeing a dog-headed man
certainly would be) but also severe limitations in the roles allotted by the culture. It’s this
latter that the final line of the stanza (and the poem) drives home: “It was that simple but
somehow / it seemed all wrong.”
My final example of a new autobiography is Rob Fitterman’s Metropolis, an ongoing long
poem built from the conditions of life in contemporary urban culture (or urban blight). In
his most recent installment, Metropolis 16-29, Fitterman pushes cultural poetics to a limit
from which I do not know if anything else can be done. By cultural poetics I mean a poetry
259

practice directed at critiquing the culture at large and how it determines contemporary forms
of life. Fitterman’s poem is built largely on found materials, but rather than founding a new
“Metropolis,” it creates text that allows one to experience the culture differently. This
metropolis is the exact opposite of Olson’s polis, for it is not centered on an individual’s
attention while looking outwards. In the opening poem, “#16,” the polis has not eyes but
signs:
McDonald’s
Burger King
Taco Bell
Home Depot
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
KFC
J. Crew
Home Depot
Staples
Sunglass Hut
Wendy’s
Kmart
Wal*mart
McDonald’s
Wal*mart
Sunglass Hut
Kmart
Wendy’s
Starbucks
Taco Bell
J. Crew
Staples
Home Depot
Gap
Home Depot
KFC
Dunkin’ Donuts
Dunkin’ Donuts
Taco Bell
Kmart
Home Depot
Sunglass Hut
Staples
260

Wal*mart
Gap
McDonald’s
J. Crew
KFC
Taco Bell
Staples
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
Wal*mart
KFC
J. Crew
Kmart
Starbucks
Sunglass Hut
McDonald’s 11
And on and on this goes for six more stanzas. Fitterman wants you to ask where the
Superman of this Metropolis is hiding. The Superman of the comic books was a metaphor for
the immigrant experience—starting life from scratch in a new country (because his old
planet had blown up)—but any hero of Fitterman’s Metropolis has disappeared behind the
cultural landscape of endless strip malls wherein a closed set of consumer outlets is simply
rearranged in each new location. I take this poem as an autobiography because it renavigates
this landscape in a way that resists the official values associated with each name brand.
I could have chosen many other examples of new autobiography, and the examples that
I have chosen deserve far more attention than my cursory comments provide. My purpose
here is simply to demonstrate that the argument of this study can extend to the work of
poets who assume a self constituted not by history but by language or culture. The Language
Writing or Cultural Poetics that results, even if it does not directly represent the self of the
poet in the text, has an inescapable dimension of autobiography. Of course these
possibilities for new autobiography do not share a unified formal terrain. Fitterman and
11 Rob Fitterman, Metropolis 16-30 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002), 8-9.
261

Andrews both use found materials, but Andrews works primarily with overheard speech
while Fitterman works like an urban anthropologist. Lu writes an autobiography in which the
questions of existence that are foisted upon her by the contemporary culture are the basis of
her kinship with others. Her work is a prose poem, or we might say a novel poem, as in her
title, Pamela: a Novel. In each case, as with the inherited self, the crucial assumption is that the
self does not precede or anchor its world but is constituted by some determining influence in
its world, such as history, language, or culture. The resulting poetic practice, when aimed at
exposing how the determining influence operates and how a person might negotiate its
limitations, creates a work that takes autobiography in radical directions. These are directions
that I might like to pursue in the future.
262

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