* * * REVIEW * * *

Julie Brown, review: Joyce's "Susan Howe"

Julie Phillips Brown

Review of:

Elisabeth W. Joyce, “The Small Space of a Pause”: Susan Howe’s Poetry and the Spaces Between.  Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010.

 

Readers of Susan Howe’s poetry will appreciate the extended discussion of the poetics of space in Elisabeth W. Joyce’s “The Small Space of a Pause”: Susan Howe’s Poetry and the Spaces Between” (Hardcover, $65.00 from Bucknell University Press). “The Small Space of a Pause” is the first of two very recent full-length critical studies devoted to Howe’s work (the other is Will Montgomery’s The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority from Palgrave Macmillan). Joyce argues that Howe’s poetry explodes conventional approaches to charting space—namely, mapping, perspective, surveying, geometry, graphic design, gardening, landscape, and “taskscape,” a term borrowed from anthropology—in order to open an alternative, “third space,” where “Cartesian binaries that persist in maintaining hierarchies that reinforce discrimination based on gender (and race, class, etc.)” can be rewritten and redressed (197). The liminal third spaces that predominate Howe’s poetry include the margins of the page, the edges of gardens, landscapes, and the American wilderness, singularities, the silences in history, and the poet’s well-documented visual and syntactic disruptions of language. Joyce demonstrates that each of Howe’s third spaces serves the poet’s attempt to “presence” and gather a speaking position for herself (as well as other women silenced by history) from the fragments of a “nomadic and fractured self” (234).

 

The breadth of Joyce’s undertaking is impressive. The author displays a deep familiarity with a notoriously difficult canon, and the study draws on a staggering variety of discourses in its discussions of space. Taking its cue from Howe’s poems, “The Small Space of a Pause” is structured as a third space itself, unfolding organically through one corpus of poems to the next like Duchamp’s hinge-picture. The first chapter construes Howe’s citational, polyphonic sounding of the wilderness as the poet’s vexed attempt to establish an authorial self from a heap of fragmented and fraudulent source materials. In the next three chapters, Joyce argues that Howe’s poems “vitiate” the strategies of mapping, perspective, surveying, and geometry from within in order to undermine the binary oppositions of gender these “objective” lenses impose on the feminine landscape. Visual configurations of space—and Howe’s interruptions of typographic convention—come to the fore in the book’s central chapters. The catalogue of Howe’s disruptive typographic strategies in “When Text Becomes Image” is of particular importance because it forms the necessary groundwork for the following chapter’s discussion of activated, disjunctive white space in Hinged Picture. The remaining chapters in the book describe how gardens, landscapes, marginalia, and singularities open onto liminal fields in which the body and its surroundings co-create one another. The final chapter closes on the theme of dislocation, understanding the poet’s struggle to locate herself within the “palimpsestic, concomitant overlay” of Irish and American experiences as a gesture toward the larger displacements that mark everyday existence in a globalized world (224).

 

It seems a particular risk of broad interdisciplinary studies like this one that the multitude of textual interlocutors may overwhelm an author’s argument. In certain passages the author does not sufficiently elaborate upon her argument beyond a concatenation of other frameworks (see the discussion of McCaffery on 131), while in other passages, Joyce forms whole paragraphs by interlacing snippets of the poems with her own words and according to her own syntax (e.g. the discussion of “mark” on 65).  As a result it is not always clear how other critical frameworks intersect with Joyce’s main argument, and it is difficult to discern the extent to which the author’s reframing of the poetic text has determined its meaning. Although it may be reasonable to suspect that Joyce’s study has absorbed the citational strategies of third spaces, which rely on “interspersion rather than separation and discrimination,” this technique has its limitations within the context of literary criticism (165). As one significant consequence of these writing strategies, close reading of the poems occasionally falters, to the detriment of the study’s larger arguments. The most prominent example is Joyce’s inscription of third spaces as distinctly feminine. Although Howe provides ample evidence for such an interpretation in essays and interviews, the poems address gender much more obliquely, if at all. Rather than acknowledge and treat the poems’ reticence on this point, Joyce prefers to assert the presence of gender in the text, even when she acknowledges that her reading depends less on the poems than on Howe’s paratexts. Still more puzzling, even allowing that third spaces do collapse hierarchies of gender (though not to the exclusion of other identity categories, too), are the nature and implications of such collapse. Joyce meticulously shows that the third space hardly ever remains stable, however, and that the poet never quite seems to claim the rooted identity she seeks, so this failing does not lie with the critic. Here we must remain in mystery.

 

“The Small Space of a Pause” is most successful in a chapter like “When Text Becomes Image,” which clearly distinguishes the object of critique from its criticism, and which introduces judiciously other critical perspectives in the course of its observations. In her fifth chapter Joyce provides useful descriptions of Howe’s most prevalent typographic strategies—activated white spaces, slant and skewed lines, nonstandard kerning and leading, and scattering—and demonstrates their various visual effects across a number of Howe’s poems. According to Joyce, the chapter is not “about what Howe’s poem’s mean,” and promises only to describe how “the poems look and how much they take on the look of graphic design” (101). One wonders to what extent meaning and visuality are truly separable, and the author acknowledges a number of critics who have previously addressed both aspects of Howe’s poetry fruitfully. Her insistence on seeing “the poems as visual works” is somewhat undermined by a continual attempt to tame and read the poems’ words as text, and yet it is the passages that merge the acts of seeing and reading that most fully describe the poems. In spite of these limitations, “The Small Space of a Pause” meets its most explicitly stated aims. The study’s index of critical frameworks and approaches to Howe’s poetry will prove useful to both students and scholars, and its central chapters do emphasize the status of Howe’s poems not just as texts, but as visual works.

 

If there is any serious omission in “The Small Space of a Pause,” it is Joyce’s decision not to address Howe’s two most recent volumes of poetry, The Midnight (2003) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007). Neither book is treated in any detail, and The Midnight does not appear in the book’s bibliography or index, despite being mentioned in passing in the introduction. Joyce’s justification for her omission does not satisfy: “Later works, such as The Midnight and Souls of the Labadie Tract, receive little attention as well, as they turn to more textual concerns, sometimes in the literal sense of text’s relation to fabric, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, but also because my interest lies primarily in those moments of close conjunction between Howe’s visual and poetic works” (22). If this explanation does not suffice, perhaps the omission of Souls of the Labadie Tract may be excused by its late publication date. But it seems truly odd to suggest that The Midnight, which juxtaposes verse, prose, found text, family photographs, and images of lace in its pages of visual and textual collage, does not constitute a “close conjunction” of word and image.

 

Like much of the work Joyce has so carefully canvassed, The Midnight emerges from the exploration of a liminal space—in this case, it arrives in the form of the interleaf: “There was a time when bookbinders placed a tissue interleaf between frontispiece and titlepage in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together. Although a sign is understood to be consubstantial with the thing it represents, word and picture are essentially rivals. The transitional space between image and scripture is often a zone of contention” (TM unnumbered). Joyce seems not to recognize the interleaf in her own terms as a third space, nor to note its gossamer veiling and unveiling of other texts and images throughout The Midnight. The possible continuities between The Midnight and Howe’s earlier works are boundless—the interleaf is remarkably similar to the veil Joyce discusses in her chapter on Pythagorean Silence, and the dislocations and migrations in the final chapter have been well-documented of late in Marjorie Perloff’s “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe's The Midnight.” Howe’s own account of her family’s “cutwork” in The Midnight may as well describe Joyce’s observations on the reciprocal transcription between writers in Melville’s Marginalia: “My mother’s close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few survivors remaining in my possession) to be held, loved, carried around, meddled with, abandoned, sometimes mutilated. They contain dedications, private messages, marginal annotations, hints, snapshots, press cuttings, warnings—scissor work” (TM 60). As this passage suggests, it is finally the books themselves, and not just the interleaf, that serve as liminal spaces between the living and the dead. Perhaps the omission of The Midnight is forgivable when one considers that its remarkable cross-genre elegy is deserving of its own entire volume of criticism—and here I must disclaim myself as a avid lover and critic of that work—but one cannot help but wonder what webs of connection Joyce might have traced, had she been so inclined, within a canon more fully representative of Howe’s spatial poetics.

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A painter, poet, and graphic designer, Julie Phillips Brown teaches creative writing at Cornell University, where she is currently a joint-degree MFA/PhD candidate. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and literature of the Americas; cross-genre, multi-ethnic, and transnational approaches to literature; feminist and gender studies; and the relation of visual art and digital technology to literature. Her essays and poems have appeared lately in issues of Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Webconjunctions, Kblog from Kelsey Street Press, and delirious hem. For more please visit her blog, except perhaps a constellation, http://coupdedes.blogspot.com/

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 4 (2010): Emergence

Margaret Konkol, review: Samuels' "Tomorrowland"

Margaret Konkol

Review of:

Lisa Samuels, Tomorrowland.  Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009.

Disney’s Tomorrowland opened in 1955 as a corporate showcase displaying the wonders of the future: an imagined Mars colony, roadways of the future, ovens able to cook a turkey in thirty minutes, plastic houses, and moon rockets. Ten years later men had landed on the moon, the interstate highways were under construction, and the “living blue print of the future” had become a quaint symbol of retro-futurism. Responding to the speculative nature of Disney’s Tomorrowland, Lisa Samuels’ Tomorrowland presents a new world fashioned with the old. The poem imagines a future made with the materials of today, but, rather than corporate products placed in imaginative dioramas, language is the material of Tomorrowland.

In “Relinquish Intellectual Property,” an article published in New Literary History, Lisa Samuels describes language as something outside of possession, as a “porous matrice” of “interchange” in which we consume what we encounter. This interest continues in her long poem and book, Tomorrowland. The poem begins with an epigraph from John Locke, “Thus in the beginning all the world was America.” By referencing the Second Treatise of Civil Government, Tomorrowland explicitly presents itself as an investigation of how, no matter how strong the Utopian impulse, efforts to found new worlds inevitably recreate the old disparities. Later in the same passage Locke observes, “it is plain that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.” Inequality, possession––these terms are central to Tomorrowland’s project.

In the list of further reading included at the end of the poem, Samuels lists such narratives of discovery as Julio Cortozar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Marco Polo’s The Description of the World, St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from An American Farmer, DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Teacher. Traces of these narratives surface in the text:

"The little Mayflower hovers so fine, the big rock sails

The logs roll so beautiful (not thinking where we were not

knowing even though we’re told where are the bound of earth

but have you ever really seen them? Have you touched

with your hands the unfolding parameters of blue

scarcely seeable as blue inside the bright

darkness of your hand enclosing?)

discovery is the softest word we can use in these conditions." (88)

Indeed, discovery erases the violence of cultural conquest. Samuels’s project participates with Kameau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) in revisionist history, recognizing that language carries the traces of the violent and primary encounter of cultures. The inhabitants of Tomorrowland, who first arrived by raft and canoe, landed in “their domesticated ships  / with aches and prejudices intact” (26). Samuels weaves together Maori mythology, American early-contact narratives, theories of modernity, and medieval law discourse to create a work of “bluey” skies,” “translated mourning” and “sandy beaches.” These phrases tinge idyllic landscapes with nostalgia and suffering.

Wandering into and out of frame Eula, the poem’s protagonist, functions much the same way as Pippa in Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes.” At a remove and from a distance, Pippa’s passage through Assolo exposes all the vulgarities and commonplaces of the city. Eula’s presence casts a similar light upon the island world of asphalt and moss as she moves through its cafes, zoos, libraries, and tool-molding factories. In the landscape of “Eula’s short-hand town / Best-selling semi-fictional and grey,” there are moments of release and joy: “…One afternoon he cut the pages / Of his only book and found began to truly love”(16-18). However, these moments are few and far between. Far more common to the text is

"women throwing themselves

Over cliffs whose misty pictures cannot fully resolve

The concept of no beginning nor no end. This type of book

Cannot be arbitrarily selected in a line running mildly without panic." (20)

The abject body, fouled and fragrant, haunts the text’s inner-city alleys:

"they scream for milk they miss the land their mothers 

look to while they perish in petition’s lonely turn.

The mothers mothering themselves they waste

the mountains green with tears they heave the bodies

of their children into caravans" (55)

A place of encounter, Tomorrowland is the new island made old, landing site of the mythical first migrations (perhaps modeled on New Zealand), that, now exhausted of its resources, is “so still you might think young girls  / bodies had been used to make the air” (21). The island deteriorates into discarded language acts and perverse behavior: “The mother polishes her plates over a large  / supper of roasted babies”(55). Historical process turns in upon itself, devouring difference so that “with grit the children [seek] nothing / further than a Safety Zone”(55). Language becomes hermaphroditic: “Load home upon your tongue  / and hold the warm composite / rolling out wide field inside” (24). Like Angela Carter’s The New Passion of Eve, Tomorrowland explores the erotic and the grotesque. In fact, Angela Carter’s novel shares an epigraph with The New Passion of Eve, “In the beginning all the world was America,” a passage from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. Of course, Carter’s novel is set in a Gothic, dark and violent New York City, “Built on a grid like the harmonious cities of the Chinese Empire, planned, like those cities, in strict accord with the dictates of a doctrine of reason, this city—built to a specification that precluded the notion of the old Adam, had hence become uniquely vulnerable to that which the streamlined spires conspired to ignore, for the darkness had lain, unacknowledged, with the builders”(Carter 16).  But, like this city, Tomorrowland has a dark “always cancelled by intenser dark at the hintermost belly at the  / bottom of the island or the post-romantic sea”(27). Tomorrowland is a “scatological” world of first beginnings, of primal drives and lost decencies, a place where a family might carve “its ink along its flesh to remember” (26-30). Language migrates in constant acts of exploration and discovery, but such possessive acts can never fully constrain the things into which they inquire.

Works Cited

Brathwaite, Kameau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973).

Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve (1977).

Cortozar, Julio. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1986).

DeFoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690).

Polo, Marco. The Million/The description of the world/The Travels of Marco Polo. c. 1298, 1310-1320.

Ashton Warner, Sylvia. Teacher (1963).

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Margaret Konkol is a Ph.D. student in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo.  She received her MA from the University of Virginia and her BA from Reed College.  Her dissertation traces the parallel emergence of environmental thinking in popular and avant-garde discourse between the years 1921-1964.  Her article, “Creeley in Age: Negative Poetics in Robert Creeley’s Late Work,” appears in Jacket 31.  Other work appears in Ekleksographia, Shampoo, Little Red Leaves, and Damn the Caesars.  She curates the Mildred Lockwood Lacey Small Press in the Archive Lecture Series.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 4 (2010): Emergence