Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe (review)

What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened.

Susan Howe, "My Emily Dickinson"

Susan Howe stands at the center of a debate current in Anglo-American poetics as to the public role that poetry can play in culture at large. Ignored on the one hand by both mainstream academic and general readers of poetry, lumped together with the group of "Language" poets with whom she shares a similar intent to critique the ideological underpinnings of "normative" language practice, Howe resists easy classification and remains a figure subject to intense scrutiny, puzzlement, and outright suspicion by many in the U.S. poetry establishment who would prefer that "poetry say what it means, and mean what it says." For those poets and critics, on the other hand, devoted to carrying out the modernist and post-modernist programs of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, or Charles Olson, Howe is a figure whose work has come to emblematize the multiple strands of a poetic practice that is at once autobiographical, historical, feminist, and heterodox in its intent and procedures. Her influence on an entire generation of late-experimental writers in the U.S. and abroad has, in its way, formed a prescient counter-tradition, as poets as diverse as Eleni Sikelianos, Joan Retallack, Jena Osman, and Harryette Mullen have taken up aspects of Howe's antinomian project and engaged with her in a form of "radical poetics [that looks] into a future of the new even as her form is fully facing, and pulling from, the past" (Back 15).

Rachel Tzvia Back's Led by Language is the first full-length study we have of this remarkable poet and, as such, should be required reading for anyone interested in postmodern poetry and poetics. As Back repeatedly shows us, Howe's work constitutes an iconoclastic and distinctly "antinomian" effort to resituate in radical ways our understanding of what it means to read "marks" on a page, to hear poetic language as re-inscribed in the voices of the missing, the historically and culturally absented. Back, whose own poetry is similarly marked by questions of cultural voice and personal exile that exert such a powerful pressure on Howe's multiply voiced texts, comes to this material with a fierce sympathy for the multi-layered meanings at work in Howe's project.¹ Her readings are dense, powerfully resonant retracings of the "marks" Howe places before us. Acutely aware of the instructions and opacities of language as both a mottled surface of meaning and an intricate web of associations (historical, literary, autobiographical), Back brings to the task of interpretation the scholiast's intense patience and scrutiny. Her readings perform the work of an exegete, refusing to ignore the smallest detail as she tracks and mediates signals emanating from the text itself.

A particularly good example of Back's interpretive strategy appears in her discussion of the following section from Articulation of Sound Forms in Time:

Posit gaze level diminish lamp and asleep(selv)cannot see

is notion most open apparition past Halo view border redden possess remote so abstract life are lost spatio-temporal hum Maoris empirical Kantian a little lesson concatenation up tree fifty shower see step shot Immanence force to Mohegan

blue glare(essence)cow bed leg extinct draw scribe upside even blue(A)ash-tree fleece comfort(B)draw scribe sideup

(1987: 14)

Intricately enmeshed in this passage are the linguistically specific (yet referentially troubled) particulars of an argument whose primary locale is the border region between the historically distant past of 17th century American wilderness and a contemporary construction of this past. As Back suggests to us, any reading we make of Howe's singularly discursive text depends on a cooperative movement of our sympathetic imaginations into the language of the poem; it is through this "commitment to transforming the reader into an active participant in the process of the poem" (15) that...