Debths

by Susan Howe

Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize A collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory’s threads and galaxies, “the rule of remoteness,” and “the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.” Following the preface are four sections of “Titian Air Vent,” “Tom Tit Tot” (her newest collage poems), “Periscope,” and “Debths.”  As always with Howe, Debths brings “a not-being-in-the-no.”

Genres: Poetry, Womens

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 27, 2017

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

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the poet Susan Howe is always a delight and a challenge. Her fascination with the early Massachusetts' settlers and her use of erased documents is intellectually fascinating and aesthetically pleasing.

Debths (the title is taken from a line in Finegans Wake) is like trying to break a code or penetrating a mystery to which only some clues are given. The book begins with a fascinating forward by Howe, describing her childhood experiences at Camp Echo (much is made of the echo) where she was unhappily deposited by her parents. She also discusses other influences on the book, including the art of Paul Thek, the art collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner and many others (from Bing Crosby to Titian). The poems are a kind of collage referring to folk tales, Spinoza, Hawthorne, Melville and others. Debths is a multivalent word, that can refer to debt, depth, and death. The poem itself is made of barely discernible words, a kind of death of language. Titian Air Vent, the first poem in the volume, uses more visible language but it is still obscured, often crossed-out, fragmented. The experience is like diving for treasure while watching it slip away even as you think you've grasped it.

I wanted to draw out the experience of reading this work (Howe has said this will be her last book; hopefully, she'll decide differently) but I was unable despite my intentions, I was unable to put it down for long. Howe is addictive: fascinating to try to decipher, physically beautiful on the page. I want to keep reading this book for further insight (which I will) and return to her other works as well.

A truly American poet, who makes tremendous use of history and explores language in various and exciting ways.

[Geof Huth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this today in a single sitting lying exhausted for unknown reasons on my bed.

I love the cryptic quality of Howe's prose, which opens the book. This foreword doesn't explicitly note it is explaining the genesis of the poems that follow (in four different sections). When we begin to read those poems, we see what she is doing.

I love the cryptic quality of Howe's poetry. How a line may not be a line. How we come to see the places from which she has stolen her words but cannot quite understand what the words mean. How she is an abstract writer, forcing us to dream in another language.

I love the cryptic quality of Howe's visual poetry, which is usually found and sliced texts fit together in little collages that sometimes hide the lines between the snipped pieces. How she barely gives us anything to work with, so we look and look and make and make the poems herself.

While reading the "Tom Tit Tot" section, I wrote her this sequence of pwoermds, some from her snippings, some only inspired by the same:

aptism

(for/from/of Susan Howe)

forgetng

ortable

istory

xpires

raygn

apploy

allth

undle

numan

orisoned

ndistinc

pistle

uments

rying

itside

viviv

unidy


Think about "uments" for a while.

ecr. l'inf.

[Bruno]

"We have so little time in the distant present."

*
"When writing personal letters I have sometimes gone too far. Maybe belief and trust in another's love is an obsessional desire to control a wayward eyewitness. I could go on and on about the origins of transference via H.D. and the The Sword Went Out to Sea but a foreword is like a fish tank so there isn't room here for leaping dolphins, solo seances, hallucinatory visions, dead pilots, the atomic bomb, nervous breakdowns, the Küsnacht clinic March – November 1946.
"Sigh sough rough wind world war."

*
"I try as hard as I can to wish myself into your presence through art foreshadowing life after death for some notes of promise that the aesthetic holds out or holds on to an idea of the formal rigors of poetry as light and impulse."

All from the foreword.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"These tallied scraps float / like glass skiffs quietly for / love or pity and all that"

"My body is made of bones. In times of trouble and perplexity I am able to bend my limbs and stretch myself into a Forsaken Merman but Oh, little school chair with Manhattan cityscape hung at child's eye level I wish I were young again"

"So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden. Lilting betwixt and between. Between what? Oh, everything. Take your microphone. Cross your voice with the ocean."

(Susan Howe reading the preface of this book to Anne Carson is my favorite YouTube video to exist).

[Tracy Conway · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no middle ground with Howe’s poetry. You either embrace the fragmented, dreamlike quality of the text or wholly disregard its significance and purpose. Thankfully it clicks for me in a way that even I sometimes don’t understand until weeks later. I obsessively revisit some of the most damaged texts in an effort to make sense, when sometimes enough information isn’t offered. She has turned her devout readers into anthropologists.

[Alix · Rating 5 out of 5]

"show me affection as a small nonunderstanding person", pensando no acidentalismo místico e nos ecos de nossos fantasmas que aparecem em esplhos e que contamos em fogueiras de acampamentos. "he vanished as transitional objects tend to do."

Fallen oak and maple leaves on the sidewalk outside are bound to childhood memories...

me recordo de mim, de nós - "only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead."
me recordo do que não existiu, mas vagou no ar como Existência, "The last time I looked you seemed to be hoping for something. Stormy landscape out the window to your left." (o lado esquerdo! novamente fazendo tal aparição, das moléstias).

apaixonada por ti, Susan.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antique Mirror
Etce ce Tera. Forgotn quiet all. Nobody grows old and crafty here in middle air together. Long ago ice wraith foliage.
I had such fren



So long as one fact stands
isolated and strange one
fact supported by no fact

Woodslippercounterclatter
I can spin straw by myself



If to sense you are
alive is pleasant itself
or can be nearly so—
If I knew what it is
I’d show it—but no

What I lack is myself



Come lie down on my shadow
Being infinitely self-conscious
I sold your shadow for you too

Let’s let bygones be bygones
Dust to dust we barely reach

*

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this vein Howe is as perplexing and idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson was in her day. Five stars for what I could understand but mostly I'm just flummoxed.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

ONE COULD ORGANIZE a great course on American culture and literature around the books of Susan Howe, reading Mary Rowlandson in conjunction with Howe's Singularities, or Emily Dickinson in conjunction with My Emily Dickinson, and wrapping up with a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in conjunction with this one, Debths.

The tricky part would getting the students to engage with Howe's writing, which makes few concessions to ordinary readerly expectations. Debths, for instance, contains "Tom Tit Tot," a fifty-some-page poem created by collaging photocopied bits of old books (some legible, some not) into spiky clumps of text.

The relatively more conventional poems would also discourage a reader unprepared to make an effort.


John Chipman Gray and the Rule Against Perpetuities

Something more ancient than what you remember or may not

remember moved me to lean on you. Because of all the dead.

I can't.

My cry is in the frost.

John Chipman Gray is the Gray of the law firm Ropes and Gray and also a much cited authority on property law. He wrote an influential book about the limits of perpetuities, that is, efforts to legally bind how the people of the future can dispose of property...which is in a way what Isabella Stewart Gardner tried to do in creating her museum with the stipulation that it had to remain exactly as she arranged it...but can one really do that? Does that make the dead more powerful than the living, to the point that life starts shutting down "because of all the dead" hedging us in with their demands that things not change? Does "my cry is in the frost" evoke one of Howe's illustrious predecessors as a poet of New England, someone who might not even recognize Howe's poetry as poetry but is nonetheless part of the tradition that enables her work?

Howe's poetry opens up if you, the reader, work at it. But you do have to work at it.

Howe is someone whose work I respect and admire more than I enjoy, but I do respect and admire it.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Debths sure was something. I liked it better this time around than I did when I read sections of it for class (though I definitely still hate the sentence "Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals") but it's hard to find footholds in Howe's writing. The Foreword (which might be a foreword and might be a poem entitled "Foreword") explains some things, but doesn't make the actual reading of "Tom Tit Tot" or of "Debths" any easier--these two collage poems are remarkably difficult to physically read. I'm intrigued by their fragmentary nature, by the idea of names that goes with calling something "Tom Tit Tot", by the collage of thoughts on "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", but I can't enter them whole-heartedly because I can't make out the words in a lot of it.

These are poems about ideas, or perhaps constructed out of ideas. "Titian Air Vent" takes on the museum as a structure by positioning poems that feel as though they are labels in a museum of the mind. This was my favorite section, and I think the most coherent of them (after perhaps the Foreword). I wasn't quite sure how to get into "Periscope" but I did enjoy the way she worked with sound and it bears some amount of reflection on the idea of perspective. Difficult, and I don't expect to be able to find definitive answers on what it's about, but I think it has rich opportunities for thinking with and through it, perhaps a touch of nonsense creates the entrance to a vision of the nonsense in our own world:

Once when the real world
was our world in its nature
to mind our would world
Threshold word little hinge
hope of bewilderment its
parchment memory sign (from "Periscope")

Each part of the book is like that; a chance to try, even though it isn't going to present itself as something with "sense".

[Goldfinch Bolton · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

As is so often the case with metaphysical poetry (or at least the good ones) I am not entirely sure what all has been conveyed, or what all I picked up and reinterpreted for myself.

This is where the structure of Debths, and Howe's imagery really help to provide a necessary starting point to go from, and a haunting apparition that looks over each piece and the book as a whole. The introduction (which reads as fresh prose poetry that could easily have been written today) lays out what Howe is pulling from and the action behind the more abstract sections in Debths. We are unearthing meaning, constructing narratives from primary sources and ghosts of those long since passed; emerging unsure about how much we can say for certain is a valid summation of events and what is simply our own projection onto disparate elements.

Will be revisiting as time goes on. My apologies to anyone who borrows my copy as it will probably be feverishly annotated over time, and I don't want to influence your personal reading too much

I have to read more from her very soon

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the avante-garde today in poetry.

Three sections resemble traditional poems, but they are brief and patchwork. Two other sections are like print collages.

Howe is interested typos and smudged. The title of the books is a play on the debts, deaths, and depths. Maybe this is her last work. Howe is a total Boston Brahman. Her dad was a Harvard Law prof and her mother an Irish actress. So she focused on New England history and the rule against perpetuities - fun times.

"A work of art is a world of sings, at lest to the poet's
nursery book shelf shelter behind the artist ear.
I recall each little motto howl its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
illu illu illu"

This is the first poem which is a better forward than her actual intro which while in prose manages to be spacey and confusing like her verse. It was interesting to read but not a keeper for me.

[Darcy Jay Gagnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels weird to rate a Howe collection but giving this four stars only because there were a few more instances than in some other works were I would flip the page getting nothing from what preceded it, whereas there is normally a nice balance of grounded language and visual or sonic collage that is harder to parse. As a whole though, there is some tangible movement between these topics despite it being a collection of four pieces over roughly five years, and the foreward also helps to contextualize the themes. I tend to prefer Howe's collages over her free verse but I think this first prose poem from Titian Air Vent very nicely sets up the reader for a Howe experience: "A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet's nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist's ear. I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs to those of us who might as well be on the moon / illu illu illu."

[Lukas · Rating 4 out of 5]

like the part of her poems where it goes w̴̤̳͖̲̫̣̐̏͊̑͂̑̊͑͛͗͋͘ó̶̩̝̮̖̞̪o̸͖̱̰̝̎̾͂͘͜ó̷̡͕̫̼̈̑̂͂̾̿̊̈́͂̕̚͠͠ö̸̡̡̰͍̗̭̝̯̩̱̱̳́̏o̴̙͉̦̰̯͖̺̰͉͙̎̏̌̆̔̈́̋o̵̥̯̩͉̖̫͕̐̑͂́̍͊̇͗͌̚͝ơ̴̢̱̲̝̠͓͙͔̳̤̖̹͑̂͊͝ǫ̴̛̞̫͎̙̋̄͆̽͗̃͌͂̕͠ō̴̢̫͕̄̄̾̂̏̄̚ǒ̷̢̪̝̫͎̹̲̺̹̹̱̩̫̾͗͂̿́̒̒̉̚͜͜ơ̷̦̣̫͇̩̣̞̯̣̥̘͇̺͉̓̅̑̃͒̎͑͌̿̚̚ͅơ̶̻͉̟̹̽̌́̓̒̊̓͒̃̇͂͘ö̶̧͕͉̜́͐͒͌̕ơ̵̢͖̻̟̠̳̣̳̻̭͈̍̎̄͂̓̀̽̚̕͜͠o̸̧̝͖̓̏͛̐̃͂͑̚͜͝o̶̖̯͉̰̭̟̥̻͔̽̌̽̀̽̆̈o̴͓̣͌̋̚o̵̼͚̻̽̆͛̉̅͂̀͝͝͝͠å̶͖͕̱̝̯̬̪͓̗̤̦̿͂̑͒͒ͅa̵̧̪̱̙̬͙̗̐͌̕ą̵͉͎̳̬̳̻͇̮̜̹̾ä̶͓̑͗̔̐̏̍̊́̒͑̾͝a̵͉̫̤̞͑͋̎̆͐͋͋̐̎̚͠͠a̵͈̤̘̱̯̦̼̺͚̎̇̈̾̈́̅̓̇͂̽̕̕͠͝͝a̴̝̪̯͐̋̆͘͠ä̵̛̝̪̱́͗̐̍̾̊̏͑̍̋á̴̜͇̟̭̭̜̭̝͓̺̿̑͑̎̐̍̎å̷̢̟͎͕̹͈̠̺̹̙͌́́̃̈͋͐̈̍̆̑̌͘͜͜ͅa̷̞̬̎͋͑̍̇́͆͆̿͜͠à̴̛̰̯̜͗̐͌̄̎͛a̶̙͈͍͕͎̜̜̲̠̫̐̆́͠à̷̝͎̲̻̽̃̐̆̐̿̊̔̄͐̿͘͜a̷̛͈͈͉̙̦͎̯̦̜͊̋̌͌͋̽̌͊̊̏͐͐̀̕ͅa̶͍̻̓̀͒̋̈̀̚a̸͉͖̟͍̩̪̣̭̱͔͎̦̲͝ȁ̸̢̢̻̖͕̲͇̣̥͙̱͇̲͈̜̈́a̸̛͕̙̜̟̙͈̼̣̅̔̌̀̓͋́͂̊̏́̐͜ȁ̴̡͇̱͓͕̳̊̋̇̕͠ḁ̶̡̜̏̓̈́̔̑̐̿͜a̷̛̤̎̃̀́̈́͒̑͒͒̋͗̋̚͘ḁ̸̟̮̺͖̖̬̬̤̈́͊̄̄̋̓̊̎͊̾̆͘̕e̵̡̢̛͙̜̱̳̫̪͉̳̩̘̭͑̌̓͝ͅę̶̡̙̫̗̭͎͉̦̰̹̹̟̤̚e̶̛̯̞͖͚̙̾̂̓̽̽̿̄̈̍̕̕͝ȩ̷͎͉̻͈͕̮̩͍̲̜̦͍͌͛͑̃͛̽̈̀̕͠e̸̟̤̓̋̈̏͊̓͛̄̃͂͒͑́͘e̶̛͉̲͕̓͋̉̑̈́̐͌̆̆͐̚͜ę̴̲̘͉̬͖͚̊é̸̳̼̙̳̠̲̗̰͓̺̖̺̎̅̿̈́͌̂͐̌̃͛̐̑͗͜ͅe̵̱̬̐͐̈́̎͆͝͝e̶̢̖̝̺̳͍̖͓̟͕̲̩͓̍͋͘͜͝͝e̴̦̠̝̥̗͖̐́̈́͗̈̈́͒̀̆͜͝͠ͅ

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poetry preceded by a forward that offers the sources of its inspiration. Howe mined history, art, her personal history, books on language, books on poetry, and came up with a haunting book of poetic art. Tiny art objects made from cut up and arranged texts, and short poems that echo the obscured reading of cut-up texts.

I admit I didn't read much meaning from this book besides the lovely feeling of reading/wading through text, the fun of discovery, the pleasure of puzzling language.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a class presentation I'm doing and found it very moving. I'm always very picky with my choices in reading poetry because it's not a medium of art that I am drawn to naturally; but this succeeds in being complex and thought-provoking, sometimes with just a line or two of text. Sometimes with only a couple of words, in fact.The disentangled nature of Howe's poetry may be unattractive to some people, but I think it works seamlessly, and so much of this collection is captivating. A win for my overall reading this year, and for my academic development! I'm a big fan of this work :-)

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

I very much applaud Howe's experimental and intuitive approach with the visual print poems, but they gave me nothing to grasp or savor. This book and I crossed paths speaking different languages, but with a different timing, who knows?

[Erica]

lovely book for lovers of words

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange unusual and intriguing.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of like abrasive blasts of experimental neoclassical music in poetry format. I dig it.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

80 years plus, and still challenging us to see and understand poetry in new ways...

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wonderful—the slowest reading I’ve done in a while. Barely poetry, maybe art or scraps. Good reminder that there need be no program for thinking.

[Niki Rowland · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Every individual thing, or everything, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, by another cause other than itself.”

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love ... so much

[Fernando Fernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book for poets, (as well as) artists, its merits lay on the exploration of how the page and typesetting can break, kollapse, turno onto textyal rubber. Very good research, some (a few) good poems

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

objet d'art tbh

[m schippa · Rating 5 out of 5]

irreconcilably masterful; will touch one in ways

[nkp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so glad Susan Howe escaped containment

[Eggy G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could say I understood this book, but I think it left an imprint nonetheless

[Kevin Mckinney · Rating 4 out of 5]

i mean