The Europe of Trusts: Poetry

by Susan Howe

The Europe of Trusts  contains three brilliant, long-unavailable books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980  The Liberties ,  Pythagorean Silence , and  Defenestration of Prague . These are the landmark books––following her volumes from the previous decade ( Hinge Picture ,  Chanting at the Crystal Sea ,  Cabbage Gardens , and  Secret History of the Dividing Line )––which established Howe as “one of America’s foremost experimental writers” ( Publishers Weekly ). “Her work,” as Geoffrey O’Brien put it, “is a voyage of reconnaissance in language, a sounding out of ancient hiding places, and it is a voyage full of risk. ’Words are the only clues we have,’ she has said. ‘What if they fail us?’”

Genres: Poetry

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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

[J]

Hound memory lie down

hare and the moon

Hurl shivering sacrifice
hearth to break in pieces

Finn like fire
Finn in magic mantle

Shouts of the blue men

weary of war

Elopement forays wooing and voyages

no written traces

Souls sighing thrash branches
Threshold of sleep

Scatter and ravening

Fairs held on hilltops
(mummer and strawboy)

Pastoral freedom of hills

Walk three time sunwise round the fire
Ensure a year

Vague Gods

Bed of the down of birds
My hair streams out as wind water

wood




twenty lines of

boughs bending into hindering
Boreas

the thin thaws wander off

Presence
October drawing to its long

late edge
Understanding of time endlessly

sliding
(trees hung with false dreams)

endlessly running on

Distant forget
Tiny words of substance cross

the darkness

Who are they
(others between the trees)

falling into lines of human

habitation
Tread softly my misgiving heart

To chart all

Versimilitude
Throw my body at the mark

Parents among savages
Their house was garlanded with dead

theologies
(fierceness of the young)

Then to move forward into unknown

Crumbling compulsion of syllables

Glass face
caressing the athwart night


https://archive.org/details/europeoft...
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[Job]

she kinda writes in 3D

[Rock Point]

Mainly picked up this book for "The Defenestration of Prague" and that was indeed the poem that had the greatest presence. Especially "Speeches at the Barriers". I think that the early poems in this chapter are totally unconcerned with sound -- the words themselves are rather ugly. But Howe has imported the system of work and reward (compression and release, etc.) from the regime of sound/phonetics into the regime of images/movement/space i.e. semantics or signifieds or what have you. The images are quite humble and do not draw attention to their own precision. If anything the defining feature is intentionality. The Europe of Trusts sounds nothing like Olson but I haven't yet grown out of making Olson comparisons with Howe: the substance being managed here is distance, and Howe is like a woman standing at her backdoor looking out at her backyard, looking up at the sky and down at the ground, being her own sort of Gloucester. In each poem the substances starts out and comes in, or starts in and goes out, or something else--each poem is like one discrete historical vector. But you have to really picture the meaning of the words; reading the words is not enough. Even now, writing this review and going back to look at these poems just a few hours after reading them carefully, skimming over one (even reading every word) is like nothing, I can't recognize or call back up the feeling. It demands a continuous motion of the phantom, a suspension. But yeah, this poetry sounds nothing like Olson: Howe rebukes breath here, completely. Was a good trial for me in remembering that my one way of reading poetry isn't universally compatible.

And GOD the last one is so good, coming on the tail of all the others, of all those discrete sweeping motions; "20. Horsemen with outstretched arms...". This is poetry that doesn't make me anxious that I didn't write it myself. Why? It is so slow, it is affective but in the very deep point of interior thought grappling with a boatload of facts and book-knowledge and HIStory. It's like the thought-phenomenon of rationally pursuing a historically distant affect. It reminds me of the feeling when the going gets good with my ancient greek and Xenophon starts recounting his dream... We're dealing with history, it refuses to be symphonic. But after much time and many words, we can feel little glides, or swoops...

I didn't get there with "Pythagorean Silence". And while I enjoyed the introduction to "The Liberties" and some of its poem, I really didn't get there with the play(s). I think part III is most effective, playing the declarative historical voice present in the rest of The Europe of Trusts against the materiality of Stella and Swift's mutual burial site.

[Shaun]

One of the most striking features of Howe's poetry is how affective and effective the language. There are a great deal of moments in her poetry where Howe's language doesn't make syntactic or narrative sense, but still conveys a certain rhythm or implacable meaning. Howe's work did not always make complete sense to me, but the construction and intricacy struck me.

This collection showcases some of the breadth of Howe's experimental style, particularly with the inclusion of The Liberties. This collection features an examination of female suffering at the hands of tyrannical patriarchal figures, particularly centering around Cordelia from King Lear and Stella, a major figure in Jonathan Swift's life. The poetry shifts between dramatic form and poetic form, adding to the complexity of the "performative" aspects of Howe's poetics.

One of Howe's strengths as a poet comes with her attention to polysyllabic sonic textures. Her works are always attentive to a sense of hearing the work, even if they are not necessarily meant to have a musicality to them. The sense of interrelation between lines, stanzas, and images also comes from her sonic sensibilities.

Her work is above all intriguing. It provokes thought and consideration, and is particularly helpful for poets who are beginning to look towards experimental forms and experimental language. Howe provides a point of entry for writers and readers to recognize the power of individual words and the work they do.

[Muthee BM]

Bought this the same week as My Life from a different vendor but both books were from the same library. Pythagorean silence is now a favourite though it took some time to get (dis)oriented by the words, to see how they moved my eyes across the page, how they moved my feelings, and their sound on my lips.

[michal k-c]

who cares if you can follow along when language is useless anyway. Pairs well with Dickinson

[Loisa Fenichell]

first quarter of the phd is over in a week and I’m feeling Susan Howe pilled and sooo smooth brained

[Jen]

Among my favorite of Howe's books, I go back and back and back to this text, obsessively re-reading into and around it, examining how it moves on the page, in my mind, what it says and evokes, how it sounds in my head or on my lips, where it places me and what it tells me of self, other, thens, nows, language, leanings.

[Cooper Renner]

Generally speaking I understand almost nothing of what Howe writes, but I love the work anyway. This book was mostly disappointing to me. Often skirting right at the edge of "sense" but feeling too abstracted and "brainy" and not rooted enough in language.

[David]

Initially found this less accessible than the others I'd read, but after two readings I think "Pythagorean Silence" is one of the most amazing poems I've ever read.

[S]

1937-
sister of Fanny Howe

[matt Sandler]

splatter. swift. defenestration.

[Ellen]

Original, brilliant, exciting.
Ellie NYC