My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

"PASSED BY EXAMINATION" 101
break open the fixtures of historical representation and literary space, so
the work-the poetic activity-exists at the border of representation and
presentation, allusion and enactment, surface and depth. The poems are
marked by resonance not reinscription. Howe's art, that is to say, is fundamentally
aesthetic and ethical, not historical or narrative.
Speeches At The Barriers 3
Howe reverses the dynamic of the "difficult" text excluding the reader by
shifting the burden of exclusion outward. For the words are shut out at
your own risk. Inarticulate true meaning .4_1t is not the "marginal" anti-articulate
text that is doing the excluding but the one who closes eyes, refuses
to listen.
What are we divided from, divided by? To divide is to partition, to create
borders, to differentiate, to delineate. These are also poetic acts: the
inscription of a line of verse. These are also language acts: for to write is
to divide, to speak to encode that division.
A sort of border life 5
Take Mark-the name of Howe's father and son, a central figure in The
Secret History of the Dividing Line. The mark (mar6 ) of an enclosure. The border
between. That which mars the undifferentiated, soils the soil, establishes
identity, fixes territory, announces sovereignty. For what's been
marked is claimed, possessed-the sign of a stake (state). At the same time,
a mark is a token, that which stands for something else, the visible trace
of a sign, metaphor for a word, substitute for a signature and so standing
for a name.-An artist makes her mark; but the confidence man finds her
mark, or, as we now may say, target of opportunity.
Scribbling the ineffable
There is no better model of scholarship, or research, than the works of
Susan Howe, partly because they open up to unanswered-not always
even unanswerable-questions. Questions that never finish or dispose or
encapsulate or surmount, but continuously examine.
3. Susan Howe, Defenestration of Prague (New York: Kulchur, 1993). Subsequently republished
in Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990), p. 97.
4. Susan Howe, Articulation of Sound Forms in TImes (Windsor, Vt.: Awede Press, 1987), republished
in Singularities (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), p. 30.
5. "Thorow", in Singularities, p. 50.
6. Susan Howe, Secret History of the Dividing Line (New York: Telephone, 1978), republished in
Frame Structures (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 89.
7. "Thorow", p. 47.