Pierce-Arrow

by Susan Howe

Through Pierce and his wife Juliette, a lady of shadowy antecedents, Howe creates an intriguing nexus that explores the darker, melancholy sides of the fin de siècle Anglo-American intelligentsia. Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rückenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

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

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I have learned from teaching uninterested university students about literature is that there's a threshold of effort dividing "confusing" from "relatable." That is to say, there are books that are too much trouble to read to understand and other books that are comprehensible enough, that required no more effort to understand than was given them and are therefore, not really good--because any effort at all is surely "bad" and takes away from the much valued freedom not to read, or think--but, are anyway "relatable," whatever that means.

I can only imagine what these students would think of Susan Howe's poetry, so filled with cross-references and dismissive of grammar, essay-logic, and grounding context for what seem like an army of hostile, fragmentary non-sequiturs. Her verse/books are quite difficult for me--this one particularly--although I enjoy the challenge, the puzzle of references, the meanings created seemingly out of impossible grammatical constructions and fragments of discourse. I really enjoyed the introduction on Pierce, a figure who I knew nothing about going in to Pierce-Arrow. Then the poetry, although metrically lovely and pleasing me frequently with the frisson Howe gets in a phrase or the pairing of certain words, frequently lost me in references I didn't get, or was too lazy to research, or seemed oddly brought into the Pierce/Trojan Women/my library research world that the first section of poems seemed to create. And it was very long. It made me feel like my own hopelessly lost and frustrated communications and business undergrads, who had hoped, by choosing thses majors, to get through college without ever having to read any book at all. But I refuse to use the word "confusing." still, my enjoyment level was diminished by a combination of my own ignorance of the context of the references, by the nagging feeling of not getting it and the helplessness of not really knowing how to go about figuring it out.

I really, really enjoyed the shorter final section/poem cycle(?) "Rukenfigur." Primarily a Medievalist by trade, I've done my time with the Tristan & Isolde story and the medieval love lyric so these poems were familiar ground reshaped wonderfully in Howe's inimitable style for me. Just excellent. I loved this section as much as I have loved much of Howe's previous work. But I'm pretty sure it's me and not her that provides the difference.

[Tristan]

I will begin with review with an apology. I am sorry that it will not offer anything remotely resembling a coherent account of what this book is about or how it works, rather it is my attempt to make sense of what I just read.

I did not enjoy Pierce-Arrow. I found it frustrating and alienating and largely unpleasant to read as a result. There were moments that I liked well enough--especially in the final section/sequence "Rukenfigur" which focuses on Tristan and Isolde.

I think Howe is attempting to represent some sort of associative scheme that connects Charles Peirce and his wife to the Iliad and to Alexander Pope and Tristan and Isolde and George Meredith and Theodore Watts-Dunton and Swinburne and philosophy and history and I'm really not sure what all else she's going for when she says things like

Phenomenology of war in the Iliad
how men appear to each other when
gods change the appearance of things
Send him down unwilling Captain of
the Scorned he is singularly doomed

or "Staring in in the face the material the unreal real thing that is in money enters into language by determining it. Recklessly they acquire more land, apple and nut orchards, a slate quarry. Both of them are very nervous very often very ill. / An authentic modern tragedy if we think of gold as being money. / A capitalist who loses everything is hurled into the enormous wave of a money-fed river." or "Hector self-object of Achilles / Who by impersonating Achilles / will ever overtake the tortoise / Mirror-impulse ask Fortinbras"

She flies back and forth seemingly at random between verse and prose (although all the prose is in "Arisbe") and between topics, coming back to Meredith, Peirce, Swinburne, Tristan/Iseult, Troy most often. I assume there is some sort of connection that she is trying to make--scholars who blurbed the book and wrote on it seem to think so--but I can't find it and I can't tell whether the problem is me or her. I think her grammatical play/discarding of the rules is uninteresting and unbeautiful (although I have encountered similarly a-grammatical and nonsensical poems that are not). Perhaps I would be better able to understand the book if I understood the history she was using? But I wonder if poetry should need a scholarly background (especially one in philosophy, or history, or anything other than poetry itself) to understand it. Part of this is that she, unlike some other poets and poems I have read (see Novel Pictorial Noise or Invisible Bride or Lo Kwa Mei-En's The Bees Make Money in the Lion (which I haven't yet reviewed)) seems to really want to be understood in a scholarly, historical/philosphical way. These don't feel like poems that are designed to be experienced by the reader; they feel like poems designed to be understood. I don't understand them and I have trouble seeing how anyone does, although I know people must. People have touted the musicality of Howe's verse, but I can't find it.

I will be reading some literary criticism this summer that will hopefully help me learn how to read this sort of work, or else articulate better why I like some superficially similar pieces but very much do not like this or some other people she is affiliated with.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierce-Arrow has a reach and ambition few books of history (or poetry) can match. Howe makes fascinating use of biographical fragments from the lives of American philosopher Charles S. Pierce and his 'gypsy' wife Juliette, George Meredith, A.C. Swinburne, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander Pope, and Theodore Watts-Dunton, with dollops of Husserl, the Iliad, and the Tristan & Isolde story thrown in for good measure. All these figures turn out to be connected in a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and the incidents Howe picks from their lives conform to a similar pattern: undisputed brilliance, Establishment rejection, long-suffering wives or caretakers, dangerous loves, ignominious deaths.

Howe's out to bring the archives to life in a way that recovers one of the poet's most ancient roles: to give a voice to the dead. But the connections she makes can seem so eccentric, so much like facts pulled out of a hat, that the work risks becoming a celebration of her own enthusiasm rather than an insight into her subjects' lives. In the end, I learned a lot more about Susan Howe's obsessions than I did about Charles Pierce's. That's certainly Howe's right as an author, but it tends to unfairly reduce Pierce's life and work to a pre-text for her own poetic concerns.

Then again, I can't think of a poet since Pound or Olson doing anything this audacious with the archives. Her book is an absorbing, sometimes maddening attempt to transform neglected microfilm into myth.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day binds the wide Sound

Bitter sound as truth is

silent as silent tomorrow

Motif of retreating figure

arrayed beyond expression

huddled unintelligible air

Theomimesis divinity message

I have loved come veiling

Lyrist come veil come lure

echo remnant sentence spar

never never form wherefor

Wait some recognition you

Lyric over us love unclothe

Never forever whoso move

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slippage all over — between the academic, the abstract, the biographic, into the subject, into madness, the prosaic. I found myself quite moved by the first section — you can almost feel these people dissolving, even as their voluminous lives and work whirl around you.

[Emmett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very very interesting conceptually, but maybe less interesting linguistically.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sort of toggling Howe does between essay and poem in The Midnight might have opened this one up a bit more, especially as the ostensible subject matter is so obscure. I felt more rewarded when I got to couplets like "Duration flowing away / passes into emptiness" & lines in the fairly triumphant final poem--"Motif of retreating figure / arrayed beyond expression / huddled unintelligible air." Historical persons reduced to textual fragments, frustrated genius, figures being lost in other figures, these are, in the larger sense, some of Howe's concerns here.

Early poems in "The Leisure of the Theory Class" are maddeningly flat. The final line of the 1st poem in this section in which fountain pens figure so prominently: "Fantastic lyric material." Maybe. But reading the seemingly chopped up prose in the opening movements of this section is like eating a sleeve of saltines w/o water. Starting with the minutiae and telescoping outward seems to be part of her strategy and, in a way, authorizes the later disruptions and intensity of language, but early on itself offers very few rewards for the reader not already interested in her subjects. I like me some Howe, but this one was tough.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, a more difficult going into this collection of Howe's. I felt daunted by the immense layers of textual and historical references and at first kept having to start again. But then I let myself go into the present, the presence of the text itself, its explorations of Peirce, of Swinburne, of the Illiad, of so many other texts, myths, personal and other histories, until it wasn't about what I knew or fully put together as a whole but the nettings of language, image, life and lives lived and living that the book transported me to and through that I finally got caught up in, forgetting the "pleading particulars" in a way, for links, for lines like "scraps of notepaper/refusing to settle into/stable", for scattered liaisons in time, character, point of view, people emerging, the objects that the departed once owned, collected, touched, left behind. For "to exist is one thing, to be perceived another", as the book tells us, and to perceive this book is at times a challenge, but once we catch a glimpse in all this movement, the image will haunt us, call us back for more, and more, and more.

[A L]

Imagine each page as a minimalist painting.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes when I read Susan Howe I think, hey, is she related to Sonic Youth in some way? And I guess with this book it comes up because of the whole Charles Pierce versus Mildred Pierce connection. But it's also the extra intense integrity that the Howe and the Sonic Youth share. This book, as with other, has Howe giving the reader a context she's soon going to screw around with. This time, well, I didn't feel like I really had the same handle on the lyric exploration. Though I did like the move from Pierce to Troy. Very nice.

[Tye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still in the process of re-reading this book, but I have to say it's exciting me in a dazzling kind of way that, oddly, is not growing from the intellectual (which would be the obvious place for a book of experimental "poetry" named after a turn-of-the-century semiotician who was friends with William James, and a luxury car). It's opened the whitespace of the page out into the world and it's bleeding everywhere. It's a goddamn massacre up in here.

[Bronwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A birthday gift from Bonnie Emerick, this book has a lot in common with Howe’s recent The Midnight, which I got a chance to hear her talk about.

Part essay, part scrap-book documenting doodles, notes, photographs, part lyric short lines that shift but don’t settle. Howe looks for connections and gaps.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and inviting journey. Howe weaves together bits of information from the lives of the philosopher Peirce (sic), Swinburne, George Meredith and Thomas Love Peacock in not necessarily linear or "sensible" ways. I'm often at a complete loss as to what Howe may be "saying", but enjoy the ride--the sharp comments or images that surface at times, the detached voice, etc.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of her works: but still wonderful.
Ellie NYC

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head responded to logic with logic, where discovery of the heart of the text was a true love and world of lasting passions.

[Sam Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

75/100