In the Wake of AWP
- By Michael Thurston
During a brief exchange at the Mass Review table in Chicago, when asked what poetry I like, I offered a few names. My response was met with the usual “Ah, Language poetry is so dated and passé, and besides there’s no feeling in it and isn’t it so narrow” comment, to which there is a longer answer but, for now:
Susan Howe’s was the first name I had mentioned and it is about Susan Howe that I want to write now, not only because she is one of the very few real treasures in contemporary American poetry, but also because her career refutes the aforementioned “Ah, Language poetry etc.” response. Passé? Narrow? No feeling?
Howe’s most recent book, That This, stunningly links the textual effacement that has often been a key formal element of her poetry to a broad and gendered political sense of what, who, which voices get erased, occluded, rendered invisible or illegible. As she has sometimes done in the past, she manipulates a found text in the book’s second section (titled “Frolic Architecture”), in this case excerpts from the diary of Hannah Edwards Wetmore, which Howe discovered in the papers of Jonathan Edwards and his family in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The densely collaged fragments allow the voices of 18th-century Calvinist women brief moments of audibility and visibility, and the interruption, erasure, and obscurity perform again the work that time and patriarchy have done to hide them. These pages are beautiful and haunting, quietly pulling a textual politics into the aura of the aesthetic. They become heartbreaking when read in conjunction with the first part of the book, a prose meditation on (among other things) the sudden death of Howe’s husband, Peter Hare. In the shadow of this brilliantly composed essay, the hauntingly brief appearances and disappearances of legibility enacted in the collages that make up the book’s final two thirds take on the deep personal and philosophical significance of grief.
Howe has been one of the most fascinating poets on the American scene for over three decades now, and while I have for a long time been a fan of her strenuous re- and over-writings of canonical texts in American literature and of correspondences public and personal, while I have for a long time thought that her Articulation of Sound Forms in Time might be the most important and compelling book of poems produced in this country for a generation, I am most profoundly grateful for That This, which melts the too, too solid flesh of word and world into a chilly beautiful dew.
