Concordance

by Susan Howe

A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event “Only artworks are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,” Susan Howe has said. In Concordance , she has created a fresh body of work transmitting vital signals from a variety of archives. “Since,” a semi-autobiographical prose-poem, opens the concerned with first and last things, meditating on the particular and peculiar affinities between law and poetry, it ranges from the Permian time of Pangea through Rembrandt and Dickinson to the dire present. “Concordance,” a collage poem originally published as a Grenfell Press limited edition, springs from slivers of poetry and marginalia, cut from old concordances and facsimile editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, Dickinson, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as from various field guides to birds, rocks, and the collages’ “rotating prisms” form the heart of the book. The final poem, “Space Permitting,” is collaged from drafts and notes Thoreau sent to Emerson and Margaret Fuller's friends and family in Concord while on a mission to recover her remains from the shipwreck on Fire Island. The fierce ethic of salvage in these three very different pieces expresses the vitalism in words, sounds, syllables, the telepathic spirit of all things singing into air.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published May 26, 2020

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

[Michael Ewins · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Paul Valéry says the first line of a poem should come from the edge of things like a magic formula deep inside the chamber of a mollusc shell."

[Samantha Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate fragments and the occasional parsed thought. In this book there is theft and poetry. A quick flip

[Kristina Gashi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m so confused but it was cool

[Konstantin R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

[rating = B+]

Like her previous collection, Concordance uses fragments and pieces of found text to create new perspectives and ideas. Though the first section is in longer sentences and paragraphs, more prose, it was not any easier to decipher. I would actually skip this part, except for the first ten pages of it or so; there were some beautiful lines and images.

The second part was her usual cut-ups or "Narrative of a scissor", which I thought was a brilliant way to put it. It is indeed a story of cutting and rearranging lines and words from various texts. Though I think Debths did this a bit better (it used fairytales, so was more straightforward to piece together), the section is not incomprehensible and deals with nature and editing and finding something new out of one's (old) self: "vision-weaving", "Fragments / feed and shelter it", "proof reading".

The third part is my favorite is taken from letters sent from Thoreau about Margret Fuller's death. These are not cut-ups like the previous section (all the words are perfectly clear), but the syntax is a bit jumbled and this makes for an interesting read. I loved the way details like clothes from the shipwreck are drudged up and displayed, tender yet cleanly, scientific almost. This section alone guaranteed the book at least 4 stars!

In all, I am thoroughly impressed with her scissor exercises and cannot wait for her next work.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impulse choice at the library. I found it interesting, especially the last section "Space Permitting" -- created from Thoreau's writing about a shipwreck that killed Margaret Fuller -- but there wasn't anything that really grabbed me or that I felt much of a connection with.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howe takes "found poetry" to a new level, assembling fragments and her own thinking into provocative frames. Some of these lean closer to display art than poetry (indeed, pieces of the title poem have been framed as wall art), and in fact the entire work has somehow been released with musician David Grubbs on vinyl (and streaming). But that deserves its own review.

I was most compelled and inspired by the opening length prose poem, "Since." Slipping through time and across figurations of language and poetry, this (I think) autobiographical reverie is haunting in its connections and, in her own words, "chthonic echo-signals." Now what does that mean? I think, that as the words are invoked, arranged, patterned, and deferred, we sense evidence, markers, of not just undertone between them but of something deeper still, underworld.

And so "reading" this book is not exactly what we are about (though the final poem of three, "Space Permitting" is accessible enough), but perhaps intoning, examining for installation, or submerging.

This is not an artist flippantly tossing fragments onto paper--I am currently reading her famous "My Emily Dickinson" which powerfully redraws our cliched tropes about this brilliant poet--Howe is onto something much larger than mere narrative or traditional verse can tolerate.

[Tracy Conway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skimming through this book initially I felt as though it might be the first work published by New Directions that I wasn’t going to connect with. Thankfully I was completely incorrect. Though presented as three separate pieces, thematically these works connect to each other in both blatant and underlying ways. “Since” is reminiscent to me of many of the disjointed stream of consciousness lyrics of mid 90’s hardcore and screamo acts such as Combat Wounded Veteran, The Locust and Men’s Recovery Project, just with a more classical literary upbringing. In that sense, it’s very much like Nick Cave lyrics at their most precious rambling. “Concordance”, for a collection of seemingly haphazard snippets from text, was surprisingly cheeky, leading up to the somber notations of “Space Permitting”.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This unique collection of three poems by Susan Howe shows the power of form in poetry. The first poem, Howe's own words in poetic prose, captures a sense of movement through time and space. Once a rhythm is found, it flows beautifully yet filled me with a sense of melancholy. The second poem is experimental, but it, in some sense, "rhymes" with the first poem. It is a collage of excerpts from concordances and marginalia, but it captures some of the same themes as the first while also being presented in a visually interesting way. The third poem is somber, being a collage of sorts of journal entries and letters about the death of Margaret Fuller.

This is not everyone's cup of tea, but I found it resonated with me in some way, and I enjoyed the experimental presentation.

[Maggie]

Concordance is actually three books of poetry (at least I think it's poetry): Since, Concordance, Space Permitting. I found it oddly enchanting, whimsical and charming,

Concordance is all images of text - collaged bits cut from bits of other books, mashing birds against "lost notebooks", type all crashing together framing other bits of type. It has a feel of Joseph Cornell - has the torn out piece of a page become background, or are the words that it contains germane?

Space Permitting is another jumble of a poem, a telling of a shipwreck off the coast of Long Island, in which Margaret Fuller* died:
"Tasseled dress torn by wreck--
spike lead color shut tin box"

I found this oddly enchanting.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margare...

[Aaron · Rating 1 out of 5]

The fact that the most common rating for this is 4 stars is indicative of people wanting to believe this is good but not being able to say what any of it is about. I think they are fooling themselves. I like collage poems/erasure/found/visual stuff in theory but none of this sticks. The best part is the shortest and most traditional piece at the end, but what does that say about her experimentation? Too bad. The bits of theme that I could put together (creating a series of links between various sources; art continuing conversations throughout the centuries) are decent. The points don’t come through clearly and I didn’t find the writing aesthetically compelling enough to see past the vagueness.

[Leonard · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult to figure out what Howe is trying to tell us with her poetry. Her work fits in the category of found poetry and comes from archives and concordances, as in the title of this collection. If you haven't seen her work you should check it out. Perhaps she's trying to tell us to keep our eyes open for poetry anywhere.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the title poem, a visual collage work, is the bulk of the book, for me the true heart is “Space Permitting,” the shorter closing work created from Thoreau’s writing about the shipwreck that killed Margaret Fuller and family.

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

if the archive can talk back, it can also talk with and across. so much rich visual pleasure here in the ways howe braids bristling fragments together, within and across the page. makes me rethink the spread as a unit of the book and for encountering poetry.

[Mandy E]

signals and transmissions, ciphers and senses

[Ton Hof · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://poezielog.com/2020/12/18/diag...

[Yu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished it yesterday and really liked Howe’s concrete poems! I wish I could get some of her explanation for those !

[rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked depbths better

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book I've been waiting for her to write