Voices of Construction: On Susan Howe’s Poetry and Poetics (A Citational Ghost Story)

My purpose here is to give a fairly comprehensive account of Susan Howe’s work, particularly from the standpoint of her later writings, principally The Midnight (2003) but also with reference to the more recent Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007). My general thesis is that Howe’s work is a project of self-formation through the appropriation of the writing (and therefore the subjectivity) of others. This self-formation is not just metaphorical but is meant to be taken literally, because for Howe the texts that she reads and cites are pneumatic—inhabited by the ghosts of their authors. I take this to be a deeply Yeatsian dimension of her poetry, which becomes increasingly pronounced as her work develops. In My Emily Dickinson (1985), for example, Howe writes, “My voice formed in my life belongs to no one else” (13). To all appearances, this is a straightforward statement, but “voice” and “life” turn out to be terms of considerable complexity, as we are reminded by one of Howe’s statements (in her “personal narrative” introducing Souls of the Labadie Tract) in which she recalls her reading of George Sheldon’s A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts (1895), one of the source texts for her “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” (1987), and the text in which she encounters (and embraces) one of her alter egos, the Puritan minister (and outcast) Hope Atherton: “I vividly remember the sense of energy and change that came over me one midwinter morning when, as the book lay open in sunshine on my work table, I discovered in Hope Atherton’s wandering story the authority of a prior life for my own writing voice” (Souls 13). Note where “authority” is located here: “voice” and “life” are heteronomous rather than univocal or self-identical. We shall have to imagine the poet as a fluid or, to turn the metaphor, a porous subject, not the sealed-off, punctual ego of modernity. Howe is not interested in self-possession but in self-alterity (if such a term can be permitted): “For something to work,” Howe said in an interview with Jon Thompson, “I need to be another self” (7).¹

Let me try to locate Howe’s statement about life and voice, and others like it, within the conceptual frame of her poetics considered as a whole, which I’ve taken the liberty of distilling into five propositions, each one of which seems in some way paradoxical or even antinomic when taken in relation to some of the others.

1. The poem is a physical object, a spatial and visual artifact, in which words and letters are images to be placed like lines and colors on the white space of the printed (or perhaps handwritten) page. As Howe said in an interview with Lynn Keller, speaking of her early career as a painter, “I moved into writing physically because this was concerned with gesture, the mark of the hand and the pen or pencil, the connection between eye and hand. . . .Though my work has changed, . . . I’ve never really lost the sense that words, even single letters, are images. The look of the word is part of its meaning—the meaning that escapes dictionary definition, or rather doesn’t escape but is bound up with it” (“Interview” 6–7). What is it to write physically—or, for that matter, to read that way?² (In the Talisman interview with Edward Foster, Howe asked: “[H]ow often do critics consider poetry as a physical act? Do critics look at the print on the page, at the shapes of words, at the surface—the space of the paper itself? Very rarely” [Birth-mark 157].) Howe’s poetry forces you to look at words, letters, shapes, and white space, there being (at first glance) little else to do. I must confess to looking with a blank stare at “the shapes of words,” or the white space of the page. Here is the first poem from Hinge Picture (1974), Howe’s first collection of poetry:

invisible angel confined...