The Quarry: Essays

by Susan Howe

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays of  The Quarry  map the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, Literary Criticism

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).

Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).

She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.

Reviews

[Marty Trujillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book — like other works of Susan Howe’s — is a marvel. Her kinetic intelligence and poetic fire sparkle and gleam from every line of this deft and wondrous celebration of poetry, history, and sociology, all in the service of literary criticism. Howe’s essays read like no one else’s, except perhaps Charles Olson, whose Call Me Ismael she celebrates here with her typically vibrant and boundless sensibility. Howe's unique view of American literary history affords us as readers much pleasure and reward, and her essays exploring sources as diverse as Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, Charles Peirce, Jonathan Edwards, and Ad Reinhardt are marvels of scholarship presented as joy. In fact, her descriptions of discovering the limitless possibilities within a research library read like another person’s retelling of a first taste of chocolate, or sex. Howe’s notes on Stevens are particularly inspired; here, she places Elizabeth Park at the center of the unique universe that Stevens inhabited. She retraces his steps in hopes of understanding his personal and tiny Eden. And she finds it. Howe enlarges our passion for the world and all things in it by refusing to narrow the scope of her interests. She delights in the planet on the table and wants us to as well.

[Clara Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second piece "The Disappearance Approach" is one of the most beautiful essays ever.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

have no blood-bond origin story with this one like i did with the birth-mark—just another book snatched from last year's internship i think. with purpose of course after reading the birth-mark, of course. it can't be as strong because it's just a collection of essays unintentionally united, but at its best it has that sense of wilderness, though weird to see some key moves repeated here—the use—not the use, the careful placement—of quotations, sections, whose placement somehow reveals their strange wildness, that almost cathartic turn into poetry at the end: susan howe creating a wilderness, a landscape, for the reader. (an american one! almost always bored-deep drilled-deep american landscape.) the essays individually bring up what howe thinks Poetry Is, Is For, etc, and the program is sort of surprisingly abstract—as if she doesn't need to say what is clearly enacted for us.

[Mark Fulk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much like Susan Howe, because while she pushes form in poetry and prose to its limits (and beyond), she also has content to match her innovations. This collection of her previously-unpublished prose is worth reading, particularly if you know her poetry. Her reflections in "The End of Art" (on concrete art, such as that practiced by Robert Lax) is very insightful; she shares a certain sensibility in it with Susan Sontag's essay "The Aesthetics of Silence" while still be original and adding to the conversation around art and silence. The essay on film, unfortunately, is not up to the level of the other works included, but the collection is certainly worth the time and reflection it takes to read it.

[sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a “good” collection of essays imo. A bit dated, dead-white-guy-focused, but Howe’s insight & interpretation of American poetry is definitely electric. Many of these early texts went over my head, and I felt as if I was longing for a Joan Didion sort of overhaul, something a little more dream-like & comprehensive. However, my personal writing reflects that more of Howe’s— intricate labyrinths or quarries that turn over or examine each layer. You’re either with Howe or you’re not in this collection, and I felt like I was hanging by a ledge.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howe is one of our great living avant garde writers / poets, I’ve known this for awhile, but I’m always struck by her clarity and precision when writing about cinema (particularly the non-fiction films of Chris Marker).

[Andrew Doerfler]

Can't keep up with a lot of this but Sorting Facts is killer

[Jolava · Rating 4 out of 5]

kaleidoscope

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still top dog

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of great things here. Particularly loved the discussions of Melville, King Philips' War, and Stevens.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i'm dead