Happy birthday, Susan Howe! 89, today! Here are some quotes from her writing:
“Originality is the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity’s sovereign power.”
“A poet enters the engulfing nature of language itself—the distance and immediacy of words.”
“The world is charged with language; as a poet I am intensely involved in its logic. Of course language can’t be separated from perception. It’s a visibility effect of singular forces dispersed here and there, and at the same time concentrated and compressed between. Something to do with abstracting and recuperating the measure of time and memory. It’s a balance of openness and closure, momentary epiphanies, human voices—unanswered questions.”
“[T]he question about what is unique to poetry, leads me back to thoughts on the circumference of Peirce’s ‘Love in a Universe of Chance,’ and to the visionary company of love in Hart Crane’s ‘Broken Tower.’ It isn’t sky, only words of the sky. An imitation on the surface—drawn icon or written sign. To keep time—to measure. Now this way, now that way. Hit or miss—an arrow aimed at the eye of love.”
“Poems are intentional and intuitive at once. The spirit of execution is a spirit of experiment, an openness to order which chance creates. Words are visually concrete and tangibly audible. A poet surrenders with discipline to the sense of sound, sight, ideas, and rhythm in conjunction. Single words and sentence clusters directly affect involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is lucid, pre-verbal, soothing.”
“The more I’ve continued to write poetry the more important I think sound is; sound is probably the most important mystery of it all.”
“Poetry, grounded in the perception of endings, enjambment, and disjunction, is both a defiance of authority and a deposit from a future yet to come.”
“A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.”
“Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is—profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.”
“I’m so involved with the sound of a sentence or a line, or a paragraph—there is almost no difference to me even if I’m anxious not to make scholarly mistakes. I get so caught up with the sound in my head of the words I am looking at on the page that the aural alchemy between each is the overarching force. One of my models for the ocular rhythm I am trying to explain is Emerson. Prose for Emerson is poetry. Almost always his verses seem to be composed at a less active pitch. For him, prose is where life is. Why am I even calling it prose? Sometimes Stevens takes the opposite approach in that some of his greatest poems are also philosophical essays. Henry James, in his late work, carries language to a place where he breaks open the paragraph. I don’t quite know what I mean by this: it’s almost as though the prose block on the page becomes a window—or widow.
“My sense that art is a calling rather than a profession hasn’t changed over the years. I say “art” rather than “poetry” because work that inspired me, coming from places in the spirit of earlier Black Mountain College, New College in San Francisco, and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, among others, during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s seemed open to collaboration between disciplines, to taking risks and testing limits. Then I felt the page was an open field—words on it an instant fusion of hearing and seeing. This is less the case now, probably because of the radical shift during these years from typewriters and xerox machines to computer technology.”
“I keep hearing that poetry is irrelevant and there certainly isn’t much market for it. That doesn’t scare me. Poetry, grounded in the perception of endings, enjambment, and disjunction, is both a defiance of authority and a deposit from a future yet to come.”
“As to pleasure in terms of affect and the senses—the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce titled a group of essays Chance, Love, and Logic. For me, this title encompasses poetry. Poems are intentional and intuitive at once. The spirit of execution is a spirit of experiment, an openness to order which chance creates. Words are visually concrete and tangibly audible. A poet surrenders with discipline to the sense of sound, sight, ideas, and rhythm in conjunction. Single words and sentence clusters directly affect involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is lucid, pre-verbal, soothing. ‘Affection’ in Jonathan Edwards’s sense of the term is the passion of a mind bent on a particular object but without its actual presence. The word stands in for the object. So the words you choose must be perfect. The world is charged with language; as a poet I am intensely involved in its logic. Of course language can’t be separated from perception. It’s a visibility effect of singular forces dispersed here and there, and at the same time concentrated and compressed between. Something to do with abstracting and recuperating the measure of time and memory. It’s a balance of openness and closure, momentary epiphanies, human voices—unanswered questions.”
“The moment a word is put on a page there’s a kind of death in that, but if it wasn’t put on the page, there’d be another kind of text. So there’s always a contradictory voice.”
“I think in a way I have to hear voices. I do think poetry is a frightening experience in a sense; you have to open yourself in such a way that you do operate as a medium.”
“There’s a disturbing aspect of American culture, which is to turn away from difficulty. If you don’t want to look at it, don’t look at it. My favorite twentieth-century poet is Wallace Stevens, who is nothing if not difficult, but in that very difficulty there’s a kind of mystery. There isn’t one answer, there are many many possible answers to his later work, and that’s what’s admirable about it to me.”
