The Nonconformist's Memorial: Poems

by Susan Howe

The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

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

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

brillant. engages all angles of poetry / while creating new ones. who is important in literature / which men? / did they do it all themselves / who is the writer? / who are they? / no singulars / cut ups / re-arrangers / difficult movers / what is a book? / fuck you and your answer if you can answer

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe her best: if someone were to try just one of her works, I would suggest this. Even if you're not a poetry reader, Howe is interesting about history & our nations beginnings. So wonderful; I wish I could read her again for the first time!
Ellie NYC

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Howe has the best ingredients for her poems. I mean, really. In this book she juxtaposes the death of Christ with the death of King Charles, talking about the ways that an official version of the death were promoted, and the way people at the time accepted it as fact even while knowing that this was an "official version" that was negligent of facts. This, I think, is brilliant. However, it's the salad she makes with those ingredients, the lyric cut ups, with lines thrown in so many different directions, that I became impatient with. I like it in Singularities because the poems appear to devolve, through process of many poems, into that point. But these just jump straight into that chaos, and it's not a chaos I find all that interesting.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I write in a different style than Howe, I thought what she did with Melville's Marginalia was amazing. She took snatches of what Melville wrote in the margins of his personal library and made poetry of it. This part of the collection would probably also be really interesting to Melville scholars.

[Michael Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

perhaps my favourite poetry book title ever

[bertha mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howe's avant-garde verse takes me into the selva oscuro (dark wood) of The Commedia, but there is hardly a motion of ascent beyond language. Her's is pure language, pure page a "negative way," as she writes. You cannot read Howe without attending to the page itself, with all her collaging and mirroring of words feeling like a wonderful secret to uncover. Reading Howe is though I am reading the marginalia of a scribe from long ago, where the manuscript itself becomes part of the text. Alas, the medieval persists even for the abstract expressionists! yay {} post-modernism |\

From "3. Immediate Acts"
"I am not afraid to confess it
and make you my confessor
Steal to a place in the dark
least coherent utterance
and Redactor's treasured proof
Love for the work's sake"
-
"Inner life led by herself
The clear negative way
Moving away into depths
of the sea
Love once said in her mind
Enlightenedly to do"

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

visually more stimulating than intellectually, but still some lovely moments