‘Afraid of the forest’ no more, or Susan Howe on Emily Dickinson, and the poem as constellation
Update: great piece here on ‘what is a constellation’
(Thanks to Shane Anderson for the pictures of Dickinson’s poems, below. He also reported on Susan Howe’s talk).
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Last Tuesday Susan Howe (1937) gave a fascinating lecture at the American Academy (which overlooks Wannsee lake, where the famous conference took place). Her topic was Emily Dickinson. Howe talked about the tremendous difference between the fragments of Dickinson’s original writing – on pieces of paper and envelope – and the way they have since been presented in print as neat, tidy, safe poems.
Howe showed that the original poems have been radically changed, ‘manhandled into print’ as she said (with a pun on the fact that two white men were responsible for Dickinson’s legacy). 1. extreme editing choices have been made (in the publishing of Dickinson’s poetry) that leave out many of the words in the original, for a long time without any mention of these deletions even in the form of notes; 2. the form of the poems was radically altered, sometimes even changing line-breaks, but more importantly, giving the poems a tidy look and according to Howe perpetuating the myth of Dickinson as an ‘afraid-of-the-forest spinster’. (Although near the end of her talk Howe said half jokingly that she did not consider Dickinson’s books violations of the original, since she (Howe) is a writer herself).
I and clearly many others in the audience, were indeed very taken aback at the difference between the two versions of the poems that were shown. I had not even the beginning of an idea that Dickinson had written in such experimental, playful form. Although some present did not see the significance of the difference, for me, seeing examples of original fragments completely changed how I will think about these poems.
In some pictures the text is clearly written according to patterns; writing runs both horizontally and vertically along a paper, the well-known dashes are seen, but in one case there are also crosses, like plus signs (unfortunately no pictures of that one). In yet another example the small piece of paper has a triangular shape which seems to have influenced the poem’s language, or perhaps the other way around), and there are also pictures (of which one is a stamp, but one is a (Dickinson’s?) drawing of a gravestone).
Of course we simply cannot say anything, or at least not much about Dickinson’s intention with the forms of these fragments, since hardly any (was it six poems?) of her work was published during her lifetime. But regardless of the poet’s own intention these fragments nevertheless present poems of which many more elements are in mutual interaction than the printed versions of those same poems. A poem can always be seen as a constellation (assemblage, collection) of various elements – language, the qualities of language, the way it is laid out on the page, the page itself, etc. However, in the original fragments, more elements are brought into open connection with one another – the poem becomes more ‘holographic’.
The poems, as Howe points out, become characterized by a hybridity of disparate elements, blurring for example the boundaries between visual and verbal art. They inhabit what Howe calls a space of inbetweenness, and what could also be called transversality, a network of disparate elements. Transversality thus allows for a much more inclusive consideration of a poem (or any other object of analysis) than a reading that only looks at the language on the page. Simply anything can be included and the photos of Dickinson’s original fragments make clear that they indeed merit such a transversal approach. Not only language, but the spatial organization of the text and the paper, the plusses and dashes, other visual elements, Dickinson’s handwriting.
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The pictures and description in themselves are not so spectacular of course, what is amazing is that they are so very different from the printed poems and that they do not at all fit the image that has been constructed of Dickinson. However, the distributive style of writing immediately point forward to Olson’s page-as-field, which is a term Susan Howe also used in her talk (as Howe also remarks, quoting someone (I don’t recall who): she was ‘out of her time, in her time’). It is also similar to some of Susan Howe’s own poetry, like this section from ‘Thorow’ (in Singularities, 1990):
Other examples abound: there is Ezra Pound, the endless experiments of the Language poets, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, and going back, Apollinaire’s concrete poetry, Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’. It is this last example that Louis Armand evokes in his essay ‘Towards a Techno-Poetic Method’ (Solicitations, 331), in which he describes a method of transversality, whereby the poem is read as a constellation-event, rather than a linear sequence of words:
a flattening out of depth-of-field in the simultaneous vision of the page and the typographics of visual intensity, such that the mimesis of linear evolution of a meaning is broken apart, replaced by a generalised transversality, wherein, as Mallarmé writes, ‘NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION’.
So the poem is no longer merely referring to a supposed external reality, but becomes an event in itself, an occasion of experience, a block of intensity. Armand thus reads Mallarmé’s poem not only as a description of contingency, but as performative of contingency in its appearing. In other words, as the famous throw of the dice that is mentioned in the poem: ‘A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE…NOT EVEN WHEN CAST IN ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES’ (Solicitations, 334).
And Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the only constant is contingency:
…the term contingency refers back to the Latin contingere, meaning ‘to touch, to befall’, which is to say, that which ahppens, but which happens enough to happen to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens – something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything , even the improbable, is predictable. (After Finitude, 108)
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I believe this poem was on the triangle:
One note from one Bird
Is better than a Million Word–
A scabbard has – but one sword
He stares blankly into space.
‘Space’ hides between apostrophes.
He imagines that he screams louder than he can
then he screams as loudly as he can, he thinks.
He breathes as if there is only a movement of air
where he sits. There are apostrophes everywhere.
In between the brackets a fire crackles, objects move
this stupid tail flicks, a child outside screams something –
joy or rage or pain. Something that differs from something.
As if all at once happens together again. He turns thoughts
in his head – around the axis that is infinitely not there.
Black patches on his leather chair, his mind, his skin.
With thinking eyes, glass beads: he is death.
With only pulse, indifferent horror: he is unnamed.
Rats live longer when they are always a little hungry. She was a human animal. She was kept in an otherwise empty white room. It had no windows and the walls were indistinguishable from the floor and ceiling. She was kept there because she did not choose to stay there. She did not know how she had gotten there. It is uncertain if she was kept there, sometimes she felt like she might leave. She was given precisely such an amount to eat that she was always a little hungry. Even when she got used to the feeling, the feeling was still there. She lived to be very old, more than 50% older than the average female human animal.
Abandoned experiment, this, but dumping it here anyway. Together with ‘Knot I‘ (all the sentences in a newspaper containing the pronoun ‘I’) and ‘Names I‘ (all the sentences in Beckett’s Unnameable starting with ‘I’) ‘i’ was supposed to be one part of an ‘I’-engulfing triptych. It uses (nearly) all of the words in a German/English dictionary that only have the long /ai/ as the vowel sound.
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Pyrite-lined smiles sidle by sight. Slice night like twilight knives. Fine lie pried by shires. Riot site, ripe strife, vile fights, slime climbs. Tire fires, timed right, rise thrice, like wild pyres. Sigh quiet cry, fright. Strive sidle by dire site. Find trifle plight like mine quite trite. Smile while child cries. I grind nine pipes, dive, tires, find flightline stripes, triumph! Ride bike like life-line. Glide miles, smile riot bye-bye.
High like fly kite, I slide my stride. Wired by spiced pipe. My scribe titled Christ dials, Skypes divine shite, types live. Writes signs like rhyme, rhymes life like dice. I wire my hype. ‘Psyche!’ chimes Christ. I rise, wipe pride by side, type, ‘right, right.’ I bite bile, tired by tight tie. Lice fly by like lies. I strike my side, pry spine; ripe lice bites. I eye fine find.
Try my vice, buy my vial; ripe, vile wine like vine. I sigh my mind white while I slice chives, brine, rye, thyme, pie, spice. Wild child chimes trite rhymes, cites sites like rime, shire, prize, dice! Quite pyrite rhymes my child. By quiet light lies wise climb. Dire cries glide high – rise like quires – rise bright-eyed guys’ ire. Flies fly by, time wide flight. Kind guys find fire, hide by dry shrines. Fined tithe by snide Christ-like guy.
Tight bind. Guys jibe while trying mild chide, thrice tri-vice. Jive-like hive slights Christ. Guys rive time like snipes, skive life by scythes. Blight piled lyres, smite die, pry dimes. Pile hi-fi high like might.
As part of a series of literary portraits of European countries Dutch critic Margot Dijkgraaf writes a broad survey of Dutch literature of the past 50 years. Something about a ‘profound Holland’ and the new Dutch.
The liberal, atheist era has come to end in the Netherlands and contemporary Dutch literature reflects that, writes critic Margot Dijkgraaf. The new need for security is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction, free of references to contemporary life, evokes the “profound Holland” overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose representations of male disintegration blankly refuse any such reassurances. But there is a parallel strand of current Dutch literature that sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles and identities into the Dutch literary repertoire.
Very joyful and also promising looking trailer of a documentary by Stephen Silha and Eric Slade about poet, experimental filmmaker, and gay rights activist Richard Broughton (1913-1999).
Broughton, ‘Crazy old men are essential to society because young men need role models.’ (He forgot to mention old women and young women. But I apart from that, nice).
Oh yes and, ‘Follow your own weird’.
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Why is it that some names continue to be susceptible to misspelling? And I mean not only by journalists or so, but by people who are familiar with the names they’re misspelling. Is it ‘name dislexia’?
What to think of the often misspelled John Ashbery (Ashberry by many, for example in a recent poetics listserv mail, and in the table of contents of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice, ok, so that was probably just a typo).
Then there is Charles Olsen
Frederic Jameson
Illiad
What else? I dunno. Maybe literary scholars have a blind spot where it is most obvious, like the purloined letter, or an aleatory point in the eye of the storm
And usually the only order we can come up with is the stubborn repetition of the same actions, performed in the same way in the same place and on the same time; only the forces from outside are able to change us, but we adapt ourselves to the change and begin again with the repetition of our new actions. – from Quiet Chaos, S. Veronesi (someone’s Facebook update)
..well dunno actually. But he could’ve – the first Levis were made in 1853. But if he didn’t wear them he’s certainly trying his best to sell them in an ad in which he reads his poem ‘America’. Exploitation of the ‘poet of democracy’? Or a teaming up of two American icons? Dunno either. But beautiful short film (via Slate):
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America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
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This is great – a sound poem by David-Baptiste Chirot played over the score of the visual poem.
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Enough irony for today – thanks to Paul Zukofsky’s invective a few days ago I am now the happy ‘owner’ of ‘A’, and so, should you wish, can you be. Unsurprisingly, someone read Zukofsky’s open letter as somewhat of a dare and made all 400+ pages of it available as a free download.
‘The self is an imaginary construct, made of parts of one like the other so to be recognized as one by an other, thus made contingent. Mimicry/mimesis being the means by which the subject makes the imaged self. Contingency/multiplicity is therefore the one true nature of universality’ (Notes on Conceptualisms). ‘Dance as thought equals, ‘also play, of course, frees the body from social mimicry, gravity and conformity.’ (Badiou). ‘I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think.’ (Lacan). Where I is not, lamella is. Pre-subjective substance, ’something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba…’ (Lacan) The dancer does not dance. Lamella dances through the dancer. The dancer without organs. The dancer amoeba. The dancer dances amoeba. The bones are emptied of I, the I becomes gelatin, ground-up bone. Sweet death / ‘drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake look / out where yr going.’
cruel angel bite
angel bites heaven
muscle palpitations toward
palpitations toward folded
connect forgetting arch
forget arc onto
lumps rejoins open
re- open concession
joinders centreless field
race field swells
centreless ceases borderless
beginnings boundless allow
cease area bubbles
again bubbles regain
Oh please, nothing new about this:
‘LSD is a potentially very valuable substance for human health and happiness.’ and
‘If you handle LSD with care, it isn’t any more dangerous than other therapies’
Statements from an academic and a psychiatrist both conducting separate research on the benefits of LSD. Haven’t we known this since its ‘discovery’ by Hoffmann in 1938? Yes. Yes, we have.
The Guardian reports on new research and also relates accounts of people, for example a university teacher taking LSD once or twice a year (instead of being an alcoholic).
For Paul Auster readers: there is a nice interview on Dutch radio. It’s the second of three hours, which you can download here (at bottom of page).
