The Art of Poetry No. 97

“Howe’s work summons broad historical vistas, encompassing the violence and possibilities of the American frontier; the lost voices of Native Americans; shunned, exiled, or captive colonial-era women; scorned preachers; the New England landscape; the Adirondack wilds; domestic intimacy; and the obscured brilliance of the linguist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. She is, among other things, a serious war poet”

“Howe has been most often associated with the experiments and rigors of the Language School, emergent in the 1970s”

“her combination of formal invention and historical consciousness recalls modernists like Joyce, Williams, and the poet H. D.”

“Most of her books contain several discrete works; her most recent, That This, includes a prose elegy for her recently deceased husband, the philosopher Peter Hare; a meditation on the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards’s family archives; and photograms by the artist James Welling. In her youth, Howe studied painting, and she is a visual as well as a verbal artist of the page. The page, not the line, is her unit.”

“Her many books were on my desk; we never opened them. The quality of Howe’s attention is fierce yet friendly. She has a darting wit. Howe is in person both delicate and formidable; so, too, her work.”

“Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI”

“As for my mother, she and I read with and to each other, aloud. Shakespeare, the Brontës, Keats, Matthew Arnold, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Tolstoy, Ibsen—reading was our vital bond.”

“When I was young, Holmes seemed to be a stultifying figure. What did I know about his membership in the Metaphysical Club, the friendships with the James brothers, Minnie Temple, Clover Hooper— Henry Adams’s wife—and Fanny Dixwell—Holmes’s wife—and Charles Sanders Peirce? All these authors and their friends who mean so much to me now.”

“The sense of poetry and politics as being one emotional unified force was new to me.”

“When I was a visiting poet at Temple, I encountered two huge volumes called Melville’s Marginalia. Its editor, Wilson Walker Cowen, had collected and printed all the passages Melville had marked in his personal library. At first glance, this alphabetically arranged collection of quotations from numerous authors resembled a giant Charles Olson poem. The preface said Cowen died young. All this immense labor had been for his graduate- student degree. I thought of the pale usher and the sub-sub-librarian in Moby-Dick. Then, as I was going over the material, I came upon Melville’s notes in his copy of the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan’s collected works. I remembered singing Mangan’s “Róisín Dubh” with the Reddins. I looked into Mangan’s life and work, and by following Mangan—God! I couldn’t believe it—I found that he may have been a source for the character of Bartleby.”

“INTERVIEWER Don’t you quote Dickinson, “Luck is not chance”? HOWE That’s right. “Luck is not chance—/it’s Toil—/… the Father of/the Mine/is that old-fashioned Coin/we spurned.” That sense of the spurned book, the hidden one, is intuitive. It’s a sense of self-identification and trust that widens to delight—discovering accidental originals or feeling that you’re pulling something back. You’re rescuing or bringing them into the light. You could call it civilly disobedient telepathy.”

“William James says that in times of trauma and crisis a door is opened to a place where facts and apparitions mix.”

“Peirce’s ideas of the Categories—Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness as a way to explain the process of artistic inspiration—are dear to me. I love him for his titles—Man’s Glassy Essence, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Evolutionary Love—and for the fantastic words he invents or adopts—ideoscopy, tychism, abduction, synechism. Synechism is the tendency to regard everything as continuous in the way no “scholarly interpretation can be.” It suggests the linkage of like and like-in-chance contiguities and alignments. That idea is in my writing generally. He was willing to carry the doctrine so far as to maintain that continuity governs the domain of experience, every part of it. Synechism denies there are any immeasurable differences between phenomena, not even between sleeping and waking.”

“I never approached Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lyotard, or Derrida on a systematic basis. In magpie fashion, I went for the bits and the pieces, the fragment and usable quotation. The essays in Foucault’s Language, Counter-Memory, Practice—particularly “What Is an Author?”—were crucial to my thinking about Dickinson’s editorial history and much else. The marginal marks all over “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” show how much that chapter once meant to me, even if I never look at it now. When it came to poets, the emphasis in the Poetics Program during the nineties was on Stein, Williams, Spicer, Riding, Mac Low, Zukofsky, and other Objectivists.”

“I was more interested in teaching twentieth-century American authors. I liked teaching Eliot’s Four Quartets rather than The Waste Land, as well as H. D.’s Trilogy and Tribute to Freud.”

“You seem to have a really different relation to Williams than to, say, Olson. You don’t insist that there be some huge project governing everything, à la Olson’s Maximus Poems, or even Williams’s Paterson.”

“I should insert here that my favorite twentieth-century poet is Wallace Stevens, and he doesn’t really fit into this company. Neither does John Ashbery, whose poems I adore. Poems in The Tennis Court Oath were as important as Maximus to me when I was beginning to write, and every new collection since then is a wonder. Stevens and Ashbery are American but are without governing projects, apart from the most important one—nobly riding the sound of words.”

“In Paterson Williams tries to continue in an epic tradition, influenced heavily by Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, and Crane’s The Bridge, but always with an American difference.”