My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

THE RESPONSE AS SUCH 183
Howe has gone well beyond previous Dickinson critics and editors in
insisting on the visual integrity of Dickinson's manuscripts. She would
have us read these works as much like drawings as like texts-a sensitivity
to the significance of visual inscriptions that comes from Howe's own
work as a painter (which immediately preceded her earliest poems). There
is a fortuitous symmetry between Howe's discussion of Dickinson's linguistic
graphicity and Renee Hubert's discussion of Antoni Tapies's quasiverbal
inscribings. When Hubert notes that "lines, splashes, fragments,
and incisions are not to be taken at face value in their restrictions or limitations"
and that "inscriptions finally reveal their kinship to scripture", it
as if she has taken on the same subjects as Howe. Indeed, couldn't Dickinson's
practice be described in these words of Hubert's on Tapies's ineffability:
the painter-or poet-"has not only left lines, cleavages produced
by invisible instruments or remnants resulting from unnamed occurrences,
but also spots and strokes prolonging, so it would seem, defunct gestures"?
Howe's meticulously informed scholarship creates a crisis for Dickinson
publishing-a crisis that Dickinson's self-appointed literary executors
do not seem ready to confront. Cover-up will not be an inappropriate
description of future Dickinson editions that do not acknowledge Howe's
interventions. Howe demonstrates that there is no substitution for the
originals-that all Dickinson's readers will benefit from reading the photoreproductions
of her manuscripts, and I include in that high school readers
as well, since these issues ought to be addressed as early as poetry is
studied. Yet if we accept that typographic transcription is inevitable and
even valuable, then Howe's typescripts-with radically different lineation
and word-group endings than the Johnson versions-should be made
available as soon as possible, not necessarily to replace, but to compete
with, the Johnson transcriptions. If it is argued, contrawise, that some of
us like these versions better because it conforms to certain postwar lineation
practices, that is hardly an argument against these alternative versions,
which after all appear to better conform to Dickinson's manuscripts,
but rather can be seen as an advantage of time-that more of us are able
to see linguistic significance in what most of Dickinson's contemporaries,
previous critics, and editors have been quick to discount as inSignificant.
Howe's transforming of invisible or putatively insignificant details into
semantically dynamic articulations typifies the history of Dickinson's
reception since her death well over a century ago.
In the New York art world at this time, the use of language is commonplace.
Yet many visual artists seem hostile to or ignorant of the literary or
poetic traditions that are relevant to their language use. There seems, perhaps,
to be a conscious effort to avoid anything but the most banal or triv-