My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

"~assed ~~ [Kamination"
Paragraphs for Susan Howe
The poetry of Susan Howe marks a singularly engaged play at the crevices
of the audible & the hidden. This luminous-illuminated-poetry refuses
the categories of lyric or historical, mythopoetic or word-materializing,
rather enlisting these approaches as navigational tools, multilateral compasses,
on a journey into the unknown, denied, and destroyed.
Form in Howe's work is allegorical, the lineation miming (mining) the
themes of the poems. Structure of truth / Truth of structure. I While references
radiate exophorically (outwardly), they are pulled vortically into a compositional
orbit in which anaphoria and cataphoria-internal textual
dynamics of backward and frontward reverberation-hold sway, averting
any fixing of the text's references outside the poem.2 There is a constant,
scaled reciprocity between abstraction and representation-neither is left,
neither has the right, to "settle" the matter.
Look at a page as border marking the intersection of sight and words. Look
at words as site of historical memory, as compost heap decomposing the
past. Writing can engage the attention in such a way as to obliterate
awareness of this border, this site, or can engender a hyperactive awareness
of the page's opacity and impenetrability: stopped up short by an isolated
syllable or by the space between syllables, then jolted by a line that
becomes a crack into long-sealed chambers deep below the surface.
Here's the rub: the historically referential (exophoric) dimension of
Howe's work is not used to ground the poem in an extra-linguistic truth
any more than the literary allusions that permeate her work are there to
send readers back to canonical sources (as if in replay of High Biotic Modernism).
Howe's collage poems use their source materials to break down /
1. Susan Howe, "Heliopathy", Temblor 4 (1986): 53.
2. Peter Quartermain usefully contrasts "exophoric" (outward pointing) with "cataphoric"
(forward pointing) and "anaphoric" (backward pointing) in his Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein
to Louis ZukoJsky to Susan Howe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 24-25, 41-43.