Singularities

by Susan Howe

A celebration of language by a gifted poet.

Genres: Poetry, College

80 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1990

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

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review time! In reading this collection of three long experimental poems by Susan Howe, I felt like I was reading something archaic and primordial but at same time, postmodern. These extremely unique works read as though Transcendentalist essays and historical first-person accounts of early colonialism in North America had been deconstructed and the fragments had been rearranged in alarming and unexpected ways.
I have been a lifelong devotee of Thoreau for my entire adult life, and Howe’s “Singularities” feels like the works of Thoreau and earlier American writers have been boiled down to their granular essences and artfully crafted into poetic abstractions of wildness, root, bone, blood, faith, violence, and solitude by the deft alchemical talents of Susan Howe.
This is easily one of my favorite books of poetry I’ve encountered.
My pulse rose as I read.
Also the texture of the poems further collapses as one gets closer to the collection’s conclusion. Like we’re lost in old growth forests, being hunted, and it’s getting darker. Madness creeps closer in the desperation.
Seriously, one of my new favorite books of poetry.

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since Susan Howe came to read last week, I’ve been thinking that I really must immediately read everything she’s ever written starting now go. Before hearing her read I’d read her major works: The Europe of Trusts (which I’m planning on re-reading because it was almost a decade ago I read it); My Emily Dickinson. Recently, you’ll remember perhaps, I read That This. So I went to my local friendly university library and got every book they had of hers. Which it turns out was only Singularities. So while I’m waiting for the others to come in through interlibrary loan, I devoured this book.

A very slim volume in three sections. Triptych, again. Challenging, as most of her work is, but rewarding. I find myself having to really slow down, read and re-read passages, engage them with different minds. My listening mind, my tactile mind, my unfocused mind, my graphic mind. One of the things I love most about this book is that the first two sections have an introduction talking about the intent, and a little bit of the process, of the following work. The prose is far from explanatory, though, it feels like the necessary entry-point. “You have to know this in order to begin.” I love that apparatus included unobtrusively. It’s not an explication, not an explanation, but a positioning. You are here, in relation to the poem. Now go there. Not directions but a map.

[Read the whole thing: http://alluringlyshort.com/2014/02/05... ]

[Benjamin de Boer · Rating 4 out of 5]

At best: pages that morph like a gust within fog, shape and channel some kind of nonuniform unpeacable froth. In contained bundles memories pulse inward like lint rather than forward like string. Pulling from the surplus of our metrical unconscious Howe etches a posthuman lyric whose fragments are not sharp, but rounded beach-glass. Their deadened struggle to end up in your hands makes you feel guilty for surviving.

[Liz Cettina · Rating 5 out of 5]

theft, settlement--on the heels of a critique of Manifest Destiny, delves into language as borrowed, archival (and therefore mutable, necessarily transcribed) and poet's responsibility/debt to words that are not their own. revision of language linked to revision of history

much that i have not understood on first reading

"They do not know what a syllable is" i guess i do not

[Matthew · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Howe's historiographical mission here is to put some literary-aesthetic elements of 17th century colonial history into a box, shuffle them all up a bit, and then spread the newly rearranged fragments on the ground in a pleasing and free-associative manner. The effect is convincing and elusive. Short lines skimble down the page, and vaguely-connected, imagist networks of things like "gravel rubbish vandal," "oak and old hovel grow gossamer," and "scythe mower surrender hereafter" eventually begin to feel like an old, primordial god's shopping or to-do list.

Singularities has a very academic tone, due to Howe's clearly rather painstaking period research, mostly pertaining to the largely forgotten Massachusetts clergyman Hope Atherton, who was weakened and ruined after an antagonistic encounter with the Nipmuc (though her research also brings up Thoreau and a whole lot of other antique Americana as well), but the book's egghead feel isn't just thanks to whichever research holdings Howe got herself into. This is a book deeply invested in the semantics of lingustic expression, how one object can have several names, and in language's maddening and generative inability to express exact meaning. These are perennial fascinations for professors, philosophers, and poets, and in Singularities Howe approaches them in such an oblique, hinted-at manner that one might not even notice that these lines of inquiry were being taken up if one didn't already have prior knowedge of the fact that they're the sorts of things 20th century poets like to play with. A section late in the book links Thoreau's name to variant spellings of "through" found in contemporary para-literary texts, and a letter in which Massachusetts laywer Daniel Ricketson puns upon the name of his Transcendalist friend:

"So leave the land of Thor and row along our shores!"

It's all very insiderist. They were exciting connections to make in the reading room, I'm sure, but the ultimate effect is the university press version of a hyperobscure instagram meme, a big old exercise in "if you know, you know."

In the end, however, Howe's poetry wins the day. Her vivid formulations like "Wordweary flesh by Flesh bygone bridegroom," "crumbled masonry windswept hickory" and the like resound with immediacy, and are rife with the natural, sensory pleasures of old New England. There is some sort of very clever postmodern game going on in the book at large, but when Howe tells you that "laughter hallows the house in summer," you know exactly what she means.

[era · Rating 4 out of 5]

the page is a field where the corporeal and the cerebral meet, words like a winding path in the woods, careful of surroundings, as not to trip. observation of sound and dialect, a culmination of frayed diction, and of hurt. bleeding wilderness, entwined with instinct and intellect. fragments of fear and of losing, what has been lost, and what cannot be.

[Patch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this! only reason its not a 5 star is i want to read more of her work so I can pick a favorite. The style is really reminiscent of Gertrude steins "verbal cubism", but with a little more cohesion and planning. I like the almost interactive feeling of gradually picking up certain themes and repeating images- colonization, industry, academia- and the reader being relied on to connect the dots.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As focused a book as Howe has ever produced, and as profound a poetic engagement with history as one is likely to find. I've never been overly fond of her typographical experiments; shunting the text out of its usual orientation seems a bit easy, a cute pomo gesture, one of its gimmicks of exhaustion. Here, however, against the frame of historical fracture, the gesture assumes new significance for me and not a little pathos.

[Edmund Davis-Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly a loved book of poetry from the reviewers, didn't grab me at all.

Honestly missed the punctuation. Feels very MFA in poetry to me. Prefer my poetry more raw and direct. So it goes.

[Erica Eller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured, wrote a thesis, learned about the history of my own language and country, still reeling in enigmatic disquiet.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much less satisfactory than Howe’s more recent work: three longish poems, the shorter, latter two with a good bit of her later feel, the first—occupying half the book—a cacophony of disconnected words and phrases conveying almost nothing. Sharply disappointing.

[Kelsey]

I can tell, on some level, she's doing really interesting things and making interesting arguments in this work, but meaning is too far out of my grasp here. I can't make it out, and don't currently have the brain capacity to do the deep parsing a work like this requires.

[Geof Huth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange book filled with depths of language, quiet rage over the murder of indigenous peoples, and language (often of others) that reveals the fragility of speaking with words.

[Rock Point · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars especially for the first poem, "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time". This writing is a feat of compaction. In the spirit of the John Cotton quote near the beginning (Prohesie is Historie antedated; and History is Postdated Prophesie), there are pairs of narrative time that co-occur in the poem: the settler warband and the Native Americans; the approach to the camp and the unsettled aftermath; the 17th c. New Englanders and the 20th c. poet; the attacking men and the women & children killed in their sleep. In some ways these break down into the Knowers and the Ignorers (not respectively). And Howe does something with all these dyads that I've never come across before, in that they are not co-present as mirrors or echos or mutual resonances, nor do they feel interwoven, at least not in a discursive way. Instead, the poem reads like a linear clod of all these things at once, advancing haltingly as sympathy for the bygone ignorer comes to blows with the placid, hindseeing knower. Comes to blows with and continues to rattlingly clang against. Sometimes it reads like a settler-penned account whose individual words have been taxed by the competing votes of Howe, the dead Native women & children, and the estranged & traumatized Hope Atherton. Each line is bisected (in half) by the conflict of perspective, and re-prototyped (by the end) with a counterbalancing limb of a different origin, that yet forms a functioning historical body with what it came to rectify.

Range loom and lacing Clear
companion

shuttle face lost Prelude
Straw portion

seed to be called Sarah's laughter

Dodge tinder huge hush
dodge thoroughfare outside since (p. 18)

There is an eternal return to the locale and to the hush that immediately preceded the attack. The forest and trees and birds and shadows and straw and foot path sand and gravel rubbish are stable impartial parties (p. 6), and when Howe names them she does so in a self-dissonating voice; Logic hail um bushell forty-seven (p. 8). The voice is fraught but maintains an impressive degree of Cartesian continuity. Sort of Mozartian in how it confuses the tones of benevolent omniscience and Errant Fool. So glad to have finally discovered Howe for myself and eager to read more of her work.

[Matthew M.]

I first came across Susan Howe’s Singularities at a used book store in Boulder, Colorado a couple of years ago. Reading this collection of poems for the second time has me reflecting on the experience of reading, and how I have come to these poems, on a second reading, with a new sense of her project as a poet. The noun, project, seems appropriate as the poems in Singularities carry with their assonance and cacophony of phrasing, an effect that is cumulative, where parts partake of the whole, and whole of the parts. The poems accumulate into a constellation of sounds that are aural, and where the so-called authority of their speaker is both hidden and exposed in what I think of as a twilight zone where history undergoes a transposition of sense, in the outer regions of a private mind. Howe makes this transposition into a new atom that must be split for it to remake the experience long lost to our historical consciousness.
At stake in such a re-imagining, is how her found history must not echo those texts that held a world, but that the extraction and appropriation of the materiality of language be set at a distance from their original authors. The counter-narratives, formal disjunction, and archaic spellings of the poems, interrogate the reader’s idea of location, even while Howe attempts to create a verbal environment that’s specifically located in an act that I’m not uncomfortable calling subversive. Rather than focusing on the content of the poems, Howe’s preoccupation seems to revolve around erecting a vortex of syllables, where the welter of language overcomes any prostration to the confines of the archive. In this environment, we are not in the midst of a pleasance where we can fondle the words with our eyes, speak them at leisure with our mouth, but in a cauldron where the words lead towards agitation. Howe’s engagement with local history would have us, in turn, rethink the practice of reading, and in a broader sense, question the “Colonnades of rigorous Americanism/Portents of lonely destructivism.” The “Rash catastrophe” the poems incite, pluck history from off the shelf, where the personal, which is always political, finds expression in the “former facts swell[ing] into new convictions.”

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is where it began for me, my passionate obsession with a poet who some have in fact described as cold and cerebral. The excerpt of one of the poems from Singularities printed in an anthology and the question of "how/why/whatfor" with the page's movement captured the attention of a group of students I had at the time, and lead me to begin asking myself more about that question. I felt so compelled to explore it, that I wrote my DEA in France on her work and that of Claude Royet-Journoud, Maurice Roche and Lisa Jarnot. I felt the pages here visually activated and spoke with or as part of the text. The sound plays, the echoes, the languages and minds mingling through voices and fragments throughout time--all so lovely! An exploration of wilderness found, to be conquored, which conquors, which is part of who we as contemporary city-dwelling beings are perhaps fleeing, the way she takes us out into a space of being exposed and vulnerable and explores the language that might happen if we were released, there, unbound, in a new interior liberty. Tightly tethered, still, to the literary references that, as in all her work, people every page, Howe explores a land of the pluralized singular that is being in its most honest forms, revised, revising, processing.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otherworld light into fable
Best plays are secret plays

Mylord have maize meadow
have Capes Mylord to dim
barley Sion beaver Totem
W'ld bivouac by vineyard
Eagle aureole elses thend



Impulsion of a myth of beginning
The figure of a far-off Wanderer

Grail face of bronze or brass
Grass and weeds cover the face

Colonnades of rigorous Americanism
Portents of lonely destructivism

Knowledge narrowly fixed knowledge
Whose bounds in theories slay

Talismanic stepping-stone children
brawl over pebble and shallow

Marching and counter marching
Danger of roaming the woods at random

Men whet their scythes go out to mow
Nets tackle weir birchbark

Mowing salt marshes and sedge meadows

*

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess what I'm most interested in is the transitions made between the prose/context pieces at the beginning of the first two sections, and the very dense poems that follow. For Howe, the transition is perfect. Just enough background information that I feel attached, and guided through all these splintered fragments. In fact, what becomes even more interesting is the juxtaposition between the Captivity Narrative, and the origin of place names in New England.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

So very difficult to understand, but after talking it over in class, I began to like and comprehend this poem a little more. The references to early American history had me thinking back to a class on this time period, and I was particularly fascinated with the references to the naming of rivers by both Native Americans and European colonizers [the power of language and naming]. I would love to take on the challenge of reading more Howe, like her book 'My Emily Dickinson.'

[Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's tough to pin this work down. Poetry? Certainly. Beyond that - linguistic play that reads like someone hit a regularly metronomic poem with a hammer and reassembled the bits in really wonderful way. I was enormously impressed with this book, and found the price I had to pay - due to it being out of print and fairly tough to find to begin with - well worth it.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

cerebral but deep feeling is how I would sum up Howe. This is a little off my beaten path, but I think there is enough original worth here to recommend the book to anyone wanting to step away from the noise of their own life for a while.

[Elizabeth]

This book, like all of Howe's work, is brilliant. This is a study of gender and the literary tradition that should not be missed.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think the library's getting their copy back. Just kidding. Some books, like this one, are just worth purchasing. I don't want to ruin it by talking.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it: all her poetry is amazing!

[Joe]

Returned to most of Howe again. This book seems more and more essential.