The Midnight

by Susan Howe

In The Midnight's amply illustrated five sections, three of poetry and two of prose, we find—swirling around the poet's mother—ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, bed hangings, unfinished lace, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, the Yeats brothers, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Frederick Law Olmsted: a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Feminism

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

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

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am assembling materials for a recurrent return somewhere. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous. Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced. […] perhaps there is the surety that after a silence she will contact him again in bits. Escape may be through that dawning light just filtering through the blinds.

What Susan Howe does here is--on the surface--easily boiled down, shrugged off. But if I learned anything from this book, it's that surfaces matter, for it's on the surface that such messes as lives are hidden. Hidden and therefore accessible.

Mind the hidden

Being hidden is the first necessary step to being revealed. Let's ruffle then, the surfaces, the particulars that complicate and trouble our sleep so.

She has shown me that access to the metaphysical is the requirement of a N E E D. Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.

Not only does Howe have faith in a past (both personal and shared) that can be revealed through words found, words printed on a page, words written in the margin, or pictures, photographs and drawings, but also in each word itself.

Portmanteau for a voyage

For each word has a history. An etymology.

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind … The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought."

And in the poetic portions of this book she gives us these words as if cryptic designs etched on a curtain. It is up to us to find their histories, their linkages.

Ten thousandth truth
Ten thousandth impulse
Do not mince matter
as if tumbling were apt
parable preached in
hedge-sparrow gospel

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective, Rustin makes a comment to the effect that some linguists believe religion to be a language virus that re-routes pathways of meaning through the brain, destroying critical thinking, logic, realism, etc. Howe's poetry, to me, similarly re-routs the logic of language, opening words to previously unimagined syntactic structures--so disconcerting it's like looking into a new world with wonder every time I read her verse. Therefore it would be something of a cheat to attempt to logically re-iterate what can only really be achieved by reading the text itself. This is about the highest praise I could give to a text. (Despite this prohibition, the next paragraph...)

The poet's mother acts as a kind of nexus around which the prosimetric text-sections here--alternating or intertwined prose and verse passages--find her visually and linguistically in pictures and texts--even in objects, as the family books and their inscriptions are frequently invoked. The title seems to enunciate the state of the author in the moment of composition, an insomniac's act, and the text's genesis as a product of nighttime thoughts, associations, invocations, inscriptions. The novels of Robert Louis Stevenson bleed somehow into the book, as do texts regarding and describing fabrics and bed hangings. And many other things besides. A fabric itself, the text (The Midnight) hangs about the insomniac poet's bed as she does not sleep but rather composes the fragments all together into a midnight canopy.

Two passages resonated with me particularly:

"Words sounding as seen the same moment on paper will always serve as the closest I can come to cross-identification vis-a-vis counterparts in a document universe. I'm only a gentle reader trying to be a realist. Can you hear me?"

and

"Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form."

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

You beautiful thing, you.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book, quite frankly, was awful. I'm not a big fan of anything experimental to begin with, but this was beyond all understanding, and the parts that weren't were such personal snippets of family history that they seemed only of importance to the poet herself.

[Zachary Littrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

[...]I have
no option but to be faithful to you unlucky half human half
unassuaged desiring dark shade you first Catherine. You
are my altar vow.
This cowslip is a favorite among fairies.


I think I deeply admire The Midnight, even if I'm absolutely boggled by what the hell she's talking about.

You need to step back and squint at Howe's fragmented poetry before it starts looking like something. She cobbles together different books and different biographies (some related to her, some not at all) and literally interweaves them line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Sometimes this is just a peculiar mess, but also some marvelous, insidious collusion.

At the end of the day, here's what this actually is: the coyest damn elegy I've ever read. It openly pussyfoots from admitting the point, which is that Howe really misses her dead mom. Littered with photographs of her mother, and reflections on her mom's career, it's a book of Ghosts -- of people and books and even languages -- and the space/non-space they occupy.

I think it's funny and telling that whoever owned this copy before me underlined exactly one thing on the first page, and then gave up with that whole underlining enterprise altogether. I feel for you, poor soul. I'm glad we got to share this book together, distant stranger, but I sure hope you didn't have to write a paper about it.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 1 out of 5]

New Directions let Howe basically turn this into an artist’s book. There is none of the usual publisher’s information, copyright statement, etc.—just a title page and her text, which is filled with photographs. Partly poetry, party prose poem, The Midnight‘s main subject is the poet’s mother, an Irish-born writer and actress, though plenty of others make an appearance, including Yeats, Lady Macbeth, Emily Dickinson and Lewis Carroll, to name a few. I would refer readers to Jim Elkins' comments about this book here on Goodreads for a great explanation of how I felt as I read Midnight. It felt like possibly the least successful of her books.

[Geof Huth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm trying to read a book by Susan Howe a day now, since she's one of the most important poets for me, and since her poems are so often grounded in archives of one sort or another. In this books, she vacillates between two modes: 1. collecting text to form rigid rectilinear texts that sometimes connect together across lines and sometimes not; and 2. writing, in prose, stories about people, including authors, her family, and herself. Much of her purpose is hiding as a way of revealing, and the density and weirdness of her words here kept me entranced.

[Hazel Bell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t understand 90% of this, but now and then a line would pop up that I really liked.

[Jim Elkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have written at length on the relation of words and images in this book, so I won't repeat that here. (See tinyurl.com/l2zc2cy.) These are comments, instead, on the book's content.

The Midnight is about a bookish interest in Anglo-Irish ancestry, more than about personal loss. As Marjorie Perloff shows in her chapter on The Midnight in "Unoriginal Genius," Howe's mother and her maternal great-aunt were intimately connected with Irish feminism, independence, theater, and literature. But in The Midnight, as Perloff notes, little of that is evident, and with only the book to go on, the picture of Ireland, and therefore the picture of Howe's family, is quite different.

To me (and this can only be a personal position), the statement that "maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is because my mother brought my up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose" sounds at once pretentious, inappropriate, and unnecessary: most Irish and Anglo-Irish children of her generation know Yeats "like Mother Goose," and it's not enough of an explanation for Howe's motivation. It's the same when she says, speaking of Jack Yeats, that her mother "hung Jack's illustrations and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were windows": this was also common, and for an Irish reader the use of the first name may also be cringe-inducing (pp. 74, 75). Howe gives a similar reason for being interested in "embroiderers, upholsterers," and others: "it's the maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance" (p. 66). For a book about reflection, full of reflections, these cultural references are unhelpfully unreflective.

Even if these displays and constructions of Irish identity seem unobjectionable, they are signs of the book's intellectualism and its distance from its subject. Compare the illustrations and the narrative in Roddy Doyle's Rory and Ita, a much richer meditation on Irishness, family, and visuality. The emotional distance here can be seen as an expressive quality, and I appreciate it for its coldness and academic feel (I can certainly picture Howe traveling from one library to another, reading and photographing books): but I am not at all sure Howe thinks of The Midnight as the intermittent and experimental diary of an academic—and that lack of acknowledgment or awareness detracts decisively from my own willingness to engage with the project.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mind the hidden."
"Quick live in my heart I / will trace things things"
"I am assembling materials for a recurrent return somewhere. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous. Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced"
"Even in her nineties she kept leaving in order to arrive one place or another as the first step in a never ending process somewhere else."
"If a piece of a sentence left unfinished can act as witness to a question proposed by a suspected ending, the other side is what will happen."
"It is fun to be hidden but horrible not to be found - the question is how to be isolated without being insulated."
"How far back in history can you look?"
"Quiet for it is a small / world of covered bone."

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

If language is bed hangings, then the intent behind language is sleep and dreaming. It's possible that this analogy, in 2003, would come across as trite or unoriginal. But Howe is too imaginative, too enthusiastic, too insistent on the fullest experience of meaning to leave it there.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly great. Another good book to start with if you've never read any of Howe before.
Ellie NYC

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This taught me quite a bit about the lyric essay, I think. I also learned some stuff about starch.

[Ena Rusnjak Markovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing.