Susan Howe is a poet, essayist, visual artist, writer, and former professor at University at Buffalo. She was a member of the group that founded the Poetics Program, along with Robert Creeley, Dennis Tedlock, Raymond Federman, and Charles Bernstein, a program devoted to the idea, “that poetry and poetics could be taught in a doctoral program by non-academic poets.”
Howe is perhaps best known for her influential book of reparative criticism, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985), an astonishing work of scholarship, poetic prose, and poetry insisting on the importance of reading Dickinson’s handwritten DIY poetry in its original form. Howe also critiques the inadequacy of the many over-edited editions of Dickinson published in the 20th century, editions inevitably and invariably edited by men. In her lifetime Dickinson personally bound her poems into numerous fascicles that were left entirely unpublished. These fascicles were then interpolated into the textual regularity of conventional codex print norms, thus, Howe argues, removing their material specificity, along with the meaningful mark-making of Dickinson’s own script, including her idiosyncratic use of dashes, spacing, and multiple word choices. Howe also suggests this norming and standardization enforces a masculinist form of archival practice that would seek to “correct” the wildness of Dickinson’s idiosyncratic poems. This work no doubt gave way to wonderful publications like Jen Bervin and Marta Werner’s The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions, 2013) and Cristanne Miller’s Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Harvard, 2016).
Referring to herself as “a cormorant of the archives,” Howe’s work is infected by the inescapable palimpsestic nature of textuality, material, document, and history. Her creative work and essayistic poetic-prose-ventures range across interweaving US literary histories, from Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, to Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy, down to obscure indexes, ledgers, personal history, and beyond. Her work is meticulous, startling, difficult, beautiful, sublime, historical, personal, poetic, and philosophical. It is one of the signal achievements in avant-garde poetics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Given the visuality of her collage-poems, that she began as a visual artist is no surprise. Anecdotally, Howe became a poet when, after hanging her paintings on the walls in her room (“I was at the point where I was putting words on the walls and I had surrounded myself with words that were really composed lines”), her friend, poet Ted Greenwald, with whom Howe was taking a poetry workshop at St Mark’s Poetry Project in NYC (Bernadette Mayer’s, perhaps?), told her, “Actually you have a book on the wall. Why don’t you just put it into a book?” The result was Hinge Picture (1974). (See: Kaplan P. Harris, “Susan Howe’s Art and Poetry, 1968-1974, Contemporary Literature, Autumn, 2006) An early essay, “The End of Art,” discusses Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings and mantra-like writings on art in relationship to the nascent concrete poetry movement, especially the work of Eugene Gomringer and Ian Hamilton Finlay (thank you to Amanda Hurtado for reminding me of this essay). Howe finds concordances between Reinhardt’s pursuit of multiplicity and singularity in blackness and Gomringer’s famous depiction of silence in silencio. She quotes Reinhardt to open the essay: “Art in art is art. / The end of art is art as art. / The end of art is not the end” (1966). Her essay concludes, referring to Gomringer, Finlay, and Reinhardt, “They tell us that to search for infinity inside simplicity will be to find simplicity alive with messages. In my end is my beginning. Finding is the first act. One color, one colorness, one light, one space, one time.”
Building exquisite constellations of entangled histories, histories material and psychological, poetic and philosophical, personal and social, Howe’s work traverses medial confines and severs and crosses the possibility and impossibility of communication, all while remaining writing, while remaining poetry, while doing poetics.
Perhaps, then, it is a surprise that her first (and only) essay on cinema doesn’t occur until our late-ish essay: “Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker” (1996). Like “The End of Art,” “Sorting Facts” focuses on the work of three artists, filmmakers Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, and Andrei Tarkovsky; however, unlike “The End of Art,” it is blasted through with Howe’s later style of radical parataxis, kaleidoscopic reference, poetic interludes, memoir, and tributes. Along with being a powerful reflection on her own work in documentary poetics, and the way that that work resonates with the documentary films (and theory) of Vertov, Marker, and Tarkovsky, the essay is also an elegy to her late husband, David Von Schlegell, a sculptor and educator, who passed away in 1992.
As far as I can tell the essay was first published in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). An Amazon comment by “Mickey Shipwreck” from 2005 about the book quotes Susan Howe referring to her “Sorting Facts”, “the best thing I ever wrote.” It was eventually reprinted in the Fall 2012 edition of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (included), put out by New Directions as a standalone pamphlet (2013), and included in a collection of Howe’s later essays, The Quarry (New Directions, 2015). In the LA Review of Books, Rebecca Ariel Porte calls it, in an article titled, “All That Is The Case: On Susan Howe’s Chris Marker,” “an odd beast, a memoir mixed with notes and queries on American poetry, with Marker as its presiding genius. Digressive, personal, indirect, ranging from Dickinson, Melville, and Whitman, to Vertov, Tarkovsky, and Barthes, Sorting Facts is, generically, perhaps closer to what Montaigne called an “essay” than it is to most contemporary iterations of the form.” We might, after Joan Retallack, call this essay a Poethics.
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet-era filmmaker known for “Man with a Movie Camera” (not to be watched with this bogus sound track) and “Kino-Eye,” and as a major early theorist of film. His writings are gathered here: Kino-Eye. I’ve included an excerpt from the book where Vertov coins “Kino-eye.”
Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the giants of 20th century cinema, and Mirror (1975), often referred to by Howe in the essay, is one of his most personal, idiosyncratic, experimental films, blurring the boundaries between cinema, documentary, biography, and video essay. His book of writings, Sculpting in Time, finished just before his untimely death in 1986, details his thoughts on film and his process of filmmaking in stark poetic prose.
Chris Marker was part of the French New Wave and made films, wrote essays, and explored a huge variety of artistic mediums, including the early online life-simulator “Second Life,” that he often played with Agnes Varda. His film La Jetée (1962) remains a classic for its retro-futurist aesthetic, metacinematic exploration of time and memory, and stark use of still imagery. San Soleil (1983) is a hallucinatory video-essay created from footage mostly shot by Marker in Japan.
Excerpts from many of Howe’s works can be found at her Electronic Poetry Center page:
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/howe/
And an extensive collection of audio readings is available on Penn Sounds:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Howe.php
This includes classics (in my estimation) like her two appearances on Charles Bernstein’s 1990s radio show LINEbreak, several collaborative performances of her work with the musician David Grubbs, and a link to Howe’s WBAI (NY)-Pacifica Radio show that ran from 1977-1981, which includes readings from and conversations with Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Charles Reznikoff, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Barbara Guest, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbury, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Helen Adam, and others.
I’ve also always particularly loved this reading of Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, from 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTGPbiUm-3o&t=1905s
She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Hinge Picture (1974), Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), Pierce-Arrow (1999), The Midnight (2003), THAT THIS (2010), Debths (2017), Concordances (2020), and more.
She was the focus of the sixth issue of Tom Beckett’s The Difficulties (1989), included below, which contains writing from Stephen Ratcliffe, Paul Metcalf, Maureen Owen, Bruce Andrews, Peter Quartermain, Charles Bernstein, and was meant to include an essay by Joan Retallack.
Numerous other books and scholarly essays are devoted to her work, such as Ming-Qian Ma’s “Poetry as History Revised: Susan Howe’s “Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk.” I include here an essay by Drake Sutesman, “Without Words, What are Facts?: Looking at Susan Howe Looking at Marker” (Framework, Vol. 53, No. 2, Fall 2012) (Has Sutesman read Mulvey tho?) for its relevance to the topic at hand.
Looking forward to this conversation!
Brent