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Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism
In pursuing Susan Howe s own writing through words of her literary predecessors, Collis ranges deep in and beyond the American archive s wilderness, catching sight of various elusive quarry: Charles Olson and Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Fuller; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, James Clarence Mangan and William Shakespeare. At the heart of this are the simple literary exchanges embodied here in a selection of correspondence between Howe and Olson editor George Butterick that remind us that poets invariably find their poetry in other poets poetry, that the future is waiting for us in the past, and that no original or origin is ultimately possible.
156 pages, Paperback
Published May 19, 2015
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November 22, 2016
"'Entomber of itself,' [a word] must 'shatter' and 'test' the limits of linguistic communication--'she explored the implications of breaking the law short of breaking off communication with a reader,' Howe writes. [The word] must 'crowd out a space for itself'--each word, self-sovereign from systems of meaning and exchange--antinomian and abdicating. This is the space poets from Dickinson through Stein and on to Howe work--'mutual monarchs'--moving through the dark of poetry's sovereign wood. ... 'In poetry all things seem to touch so they are.'" 66
"Libraries may be archontic enclosures, but they contain wildernesses--small pockets of the wild and common--if you are able to wander there, if permission can escape the ban on trespassing. Howe's library struggles are attempts to break fences and squat on former commons. Often it is Harvard and its Houghton Library that feels Howe's iconoclastic wrath, as in Midnight, where she describes her blocked attempt to look at Dickinson's papers in 1991. Standing in the panopticonic antechamber she can read the architectural signs of 'power and regimes of library control'--here, in the 'Kingdom of Houghton,' 'every researcher can be a perpetrator" and "nothing...awakens security sooner than curiosity.'" 48
"Libraries may be archontic enclosures, but they contain wildernesses--small pockets of the wild and common--if you are able to wander there, if permission can escape the ban on trespassing. Howe's library struggles are attempts to break fences and squat on former commons. Often it is Harvard and its Houghton Library that feels Howe's iconoclastic wrath, as in Midnight, where she describes her blocked attempt to look at Dickinson's papers in 1991. Standing in the panopticonic antechamber she can read the architectural signs of 'power and regimes of library control'--here, in the 'Kingdom of Houghton,' 'every researcher can be a perpetrator" and "nothing...awakens security sooner than curiosity.'" 48
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