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  • "Out of Bounds of the Bound Margin":Susan Howe Meets Mangan in Melvile's Marginalia
  • Jessica L. Wilkinson (bio)

Across several decades, Susan Howe's artistic interests have shifted from a focus on theater (very briefly in the 1950s) to visual art (in the radical period of New York City's 1960s and 1970s) towards poetry writing (from the 1970s to the present day). Her most enduring career as a published poet carries with it the evidence of this diverse life experience, as we see in her poetry a love of the intertwined visual and audible fibers of words and their capacity to invoke and activate narratives of the past. Reading a Howe text is rarely a leisurely experience—her disjunctive scattering of words and markings into complex visual/verbal arrangements, coupled with ambiguous lyrical fragments and borrowed text, combine to form an intense poetic landscape that challenges the limits of convention and collapses the boundaries between media forms.

But Howe's poetic sensibility has also been shaped by her identification, as an Irish American woman, with the marginal voice. As the daughter of Harvard University law professor Mark DeWolfe Howe, who once suggested that her entrance into the stacks of the Widener Library would be "trespassing," Howe's sympathies lie with those wild and inspirational (often feminine) voices excluded from the stage of History and scholarship.1 Navigating through the ruins of textual landscapes past, Howe pokes at the stammers and silences of literary history for signs of life. These thematic concerns with revisiting the forgotten or ignored in history are thus aptly bound to her radical poetic form: it is her view that in order to even begin to find or write these voices onto the page—voices that have been relegated to the periphery of history, libraries, or memory—a new means of expression is required. Whilst Howe has been compared with the postmodern Language poets, whose writing (amongst other things) challenges the lyrical/authorial "I" voice and emphasizes the materiality of language, her concentrated interest in history arguably distinguishes her from the language-based practices of her peers.2 Critics such [End Page 265] as Marjorie Perloff, Peter Nicholls, and Kathleen Fraser have celebrated the ways that Howe combines scholarship and radical formal experiments, both in her interrogation of authority and power within the canon of literary history and in her determined attempts to find an adequate textual space to convey the (ignored or silenced) feminine perspective.3

Whilst some of Howe's works, such as Thorow4 and A Bibliography of the King's Book; or, Eikon Basilike (1989),5 have attracted significant critical attention,6 there are relatively few essays focused on her long poem "Melville's Marginalia," a composite and intertextual work that stimulates our senses and renegotiates historical pathways to allow for the exploration of antinomian voices.7 The title is taken from Wilson Walker Cowen's two-volume compilation of the same name, which collates and orders the markings inscribed by Herman Melville in the margins of the books he owned and read.8 In this Harvard dissertation, Cowen has reproduced every marked page from Herman Melville's library—an extensive, immense antiquarian project that not only demonstrates the breadth of Melville's literary interests, but also attempts to set forth Melville's agreement or disagreement with the authors of the texts he owned and read. Reading and writing were Melville's life—his markings indicate an intimacy with his texts. Cowen notes in his introduction to Melville's Marginalia (1965) that

[b]ecause Melville did not mark his books with the intention of gratifying the researches of later scholars, we have the advantage of an intimacy and spontaneity in the marginalia, the recording of direct and unconsidered reactions, which is not present in his fiction or even in his letters. The marginalia provide a kind of road map or chart of his mind but, in part because of its unpremeditated nature, the information it conveys is not always complete [my italics].9

Cowen expresses some interesting assumptions. In the same way that a road map gives us an iconic, virtual representation of the landscape, Melville's markings provide us with...

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