Make Up Post: Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

“I speak of the intimate relationship between salmons and humans, / between humans and icebergs, between icebergs and salmons, and / how this is just the beginning of the circular list” (21).

This is truly just the beginning of the revolving references that encompass the poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; in her book, Juliana Spahr brings awareness to “suspended dust spores” (9), the square footage of a city, Burkina Faso, foot soldiers, parrots, beloveds, the Oscars, Nazi Germany, bus bombs, Celine Dion, those exiled, those evacuated, those lost, and those who lie in their beds and worry about war.

The first section filled with a single poem, a tribute to September 11, Spahr hypnotizes the reader in a repetitive form that mimics the rhythm of breathing as “everyone with lungs breathes…in and out” (4) the distance between molecules, cities, bodies, and islands, exhaling out to the mesosphere and inhaling back again, a connection of everyone that is both “lovely” and “doomed” (10). The second section is a compilation of “Poems Written From November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003,” an account of America’s invasion of Iraq and the experience of watching the war unfold, both on a universal level and on a personal level; the speaker feels both distant and utterly close to the war in the middle east as she watches the news from her home in Hawaii.

On the scale of contemporary American poetry, Spahr seems to fall somewhere in the middle of the line between transcendent and immanent styles; while the multitude of cultural references - events of war, politics, the media - all embody the world we live in, Spahr’s specific play of language, the music of her hypnosis poem and her usage of “yous” in addressing her audience, both constitute a type of poetry that reaches outward to the events of daily life, as well as challenges the reader to experience this collection in a way that connects him or her to the speaker, the war, the many “lovely” and “doomed” subjects of this book.

For example, Spahr uses both transcendent and immanent styles according to her form and content in the poem “January 20, 2003” as she draws upon lists of images of love and war while questioning what is beautiful. She writes, “some say the thing most lovely is the thirty / thousand assault troops from Britain today joining the sixty-two / thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and a further / sixty thousand from the US on their way” (46) a compilation of statistics, the “thousands” and “thousands” of “cavalry” of “foot soldiers” of a “fleet” (45) that concentrates on the idea of a group of people, a faceless, strong thousand parallel to a ship as a whole or an army of “self-propelled guns” (46). In the second half of the poem, Spahr contrasts the images of war with what is said to be most beautiful, opinions compiled in a very repetitive form: Spahr says, “But I say it’s whatever you love best. / I say it is the persons you love. /…I say it’s what one loves. / It’s what one loves, the most beautiful is whomever one loves. / I say it is whatsoever a person loves. / …For me naught else, it is my beloveds, it is the loveliest sight” (46-7). Also containing a hypnotic element much like her first poem, “January 20, 2003”’s rebounding form brings the idea of priority, of the world full of thousands of soldiers or the specific “ones you love” (47), our perspective on love and war, of people and what is “the most beautiful thing upon the dark earth” (46) to the reader, who creates his or her own meaning by considering this question. Spahr even admits her repetition: “I say it again, the sight of the ones you love, those you’ve met and / those you haven’t. / I say it again and again. / Again and again. / I try to keep saying it to keep making it happen. / I say it again, the sight of the ones you love, those you’ve met and / those you haven’t” (47). Both transcendent in reaching to the throngs of armies gathered in war to the collection of personal beloveds, this poem immanently repeats its form in questioning what is beautiful, what is valued on a global and personal scale, and how a lover is the same as one of the thousands of soldiers; Spahr encourages the reader to love these soldiers, which are both “the sight of the ones you love” and “those you’ve met and / those you haven’t” (47).

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is successful at bringing awareness to the war, to cultural events spanning the course of two years, to the connection we have with strangers, friends, our own “beloveds,” soldiers, victims, and ourselves and our actions, or lack of actions. Spahr’s “Poem Written After September 11, 2001” is successful in its immanent style, the rising and falling intonation of the “entering in and out of the space of the stratosphere in the entering / in and out of the space of the troposphere in the entering in and / out…” (9), capturing the swinging sound of breathing that happens when exhaling, speaking, or reading poetry aloud.

Matejka: Black, White & Gray

Adrian Matejka’s book Mixology has a rhythm to it that is the most unique out of all the readings we’ve done so far this semester. I can feel the beat to it while reading it in my head and aloud. This gives the feeling of a distinct flow, and the fact the title is Mixology makes me think of this book as a perfect blended mix of words. I say that Matejka has flow, but this is not like a calm river—more like a river with rapids that shape jagged rocks into smooth curves. An example of this is with the poem “Synth Composite Basketball: No More Leather,” when he says, “Rust makes / my hands hurt, / busts jumpers / and lungs. All my theories / and historic stamina left / in the Gus Macker me and my team / almost won.” (16). The smooth “s” sounds in “rust,” “makes,” and “hands” compliments the harsher sounding syllables in “jumpers,” “historic,” and “Macker.” Matejka has seemed to master the placement of words and how to make his poetry smooth. The beats of the harsh and smooth syllables throughout this book make the rhythm incredibly distinct. His poetry isn’t music, it isn’t lyrics, but rather a mix of both.

One word that is one of the main themes in this book is “Mulatto.” This word is used in a couple titles and in many poems. Mulatto means a mixed race, and this was a concurrent theme. He uses this theme to portray this mix of cultures and uses his own stories to allow readers to experience his thought processes about life. That’s another thing about Matejka’s poetry—it is incredibly dense. There are so many words packed into short stanzas, something I am still in awe about. For a poem as short as “Samson and Delilah”, there are so many different sounding words in each line: “guitar pick circling reverb’s foxhole.” (30). Try saying that ten times fast. Since a lot of poems have tricky sounding lines, it made me slow down and hear the rhythm more closely. This corresponds to the hip-hop culture and the urban lifestyle that Matejka continually displays. You don’t have to be one specific culture, race, or ethnicity, but rather, I think Matejka was trying to convey that one should be proud of their mixed heritages.

I enjoyed this book a lot, although I am not “hip” enough to know a lot of these references he wrote about, which made me Google a lot of phrases, words, and names. I think he was successful overall; I genuinely enjoyed reading every poem. I found that I’m taking away from this book that there shouldn’t be so much black and white, but rather people should celebrate the shades of gray.

Thoughts on Matejka

Adrian Matejka’s Mixology is a treatise on mixtures. His poems read like slam poetry, but are written in more traditional form, with uniformly-sized lines and verses. Many more traditional poets like to use literary allusions in their poetry, referencing classical works and authors. Matejka chose to go this route in most of his poems, but instead of referencing dead white men, he chose to use Public Enemy lyrics, and references to a more urban culture.

If one did not know that Adrian Matejka is of mixed heritage, I feel that much of the meaning of the poems would be lost. However, all it takes to resolve that problem is a quick Google or Wikipedia search, which isn’t difficult since many terms in the poems need to be looked up anyway. Growing up in post-World War II Germany must have been difficult for someone of African-American heritage, even with Nazi rule over. The book begins with the line “Today, I’m assimilating like margarine into hotcakes;” to Matejka, assimilation is everything, whether or not he even wants to fit in. He was coming of age in America just as urban culture was becoming popular; at a Public Enemy show, he and the rest of the audience “didn’t know what to do as a rap crowd either.” He didn’t know how to assimilate to either of his backgrounds. He’s like the basketball he writes about in “Synth Composite Basketball: No More Leather:” “mulatto/ of homemade leather and rubber/ now named a “basketball.” Just like the basketball, he is mulatto, a combination of opposite-looking things.

Overall, I think Matejka was very successful with Mixology. He was able to mix high-brow and low-brow cultures in such a way that leaves a huge impression. His ability to take such a traditional literary convention, the use of allusion, and twist it into something using urban pop-culture references shows just how versed he is in the struggle to be a mixture of two things and still be successful.

Adrian Matejka: Mixology

Mixology is a text unlike others that we have encountered thus far, the poetry contained inside is dense, intricate, eloquent, and contains references to pop culture icons such as flavor flav or Denzel Washington. The Poems inside act like works of Larry Levis where much of the references need to be looked up (with Wikipedia or Google) to fully understand what the poet is trying to accomplish. A good example of this is found in the poem Seven Days of Falling, if the reader doesn’t know who Danny Larusso (the star of karate kid who went on to be a pro skateboarder) or Juan Valdez (Columbian coffee advertisement person) or where Zanzibar is, etc. then the reader will not fully understand the poems intent. Unlike levis the references in mixology are not high brow poetry and Greek myth references, they are hip hop and pop culture references that comment on Matejka’s life experiences in the latter half of the 20^th century. German born raised in America with mixed parents (one white one black) Matejka was harassed and felt out of place early in his life (Hispanics would make fun of him for looking Hispanic but having a German accent, etc.) this and other events that happened to him (due to his mixed race) resulted in one of the major themes of mixology being race. The term Mulatto refers to his mixed race and appears many times throughout the text both as the “in your face” subject of the poem, and as the insinuated subject of the poems.

The poetry in mixology is flowing like a rap song, it is dense like a Levis poem and it is on the subject matter of race. However there is another aspect of the poetry that I have yet to discuss and it is a matter of great importance. The poetry is incredibly urban yet at the same time it is unbelievably literal and poetic (even though you could rap certain verses of the poetry it is still poetry and not a rap song, and as poetry the poems are incredibly successful at being, they tell stories of the human condition, how it feels to be different, growing up etc.) Mixology’s greatest success is the poems ability to be both flowing and eloquent but at the same time represent subject matter that is real to the poet. I really enjoyed this text and was surprised to find dense rich poetry that used hip hop and pop culture references to get its point across.

The Science of Mixing

Matejka’s Mixology is an in-depth study in the mixing of cultures, genres, musics, and poems written in a startling and refreshing hip-hop lyrical collection of poetry.

There are poems titled after song lyrics, stolen from song lyrics, epigraphed with dead musicians and inspired by them. Matejka completely immerses his readers in a culture of music, city, basketball, and skin. These multiplicitous landscapes are used by Matejka to map a place of middles. He is between genres of music, between styles of poetry, between groups of people, between borders. In the title piece, “Language Mixology,” he simultaneously answers “’The Mulatto Question’” while playing with the language of formal, syntactical English and slang phrases and words making “verbed blackface” out of “-izzay” and “off the chain.” Here, as in most of his other poems, we are adrift with him in discovering the marginal culture of his youth. This is after a brilliant and puzzling ode to Fela and another to Eddie Hazel. Matejka makes us play basketball with him and listen to Radiohead while contemplating the formation of states and the culture/politics of naming and Estevancio.

The only drawback to Matejka’s collection is the necessity of Google or Wikipedia. If you are not in his world of hip-hop and funk or are generationally challenged as I am, it becomes necessary to look up the references to understand the poems. It is successful as a composite mixture of ideas, cultures, images, and explorations, but only for those with the time to explore his world of middles, or those who also straddle his lines. He has, in fact, given us the science of mixing.

Emily M.'s response to Mixology

Mixology is exactly what it sounds like a collection of everything Adrian wanted to say and address thrown together. It is lines of lyric over lines of traditional poetry, mixed together with some urban slang and mixed race issues for good measure creating a new genre all its own. There is a pull from this book to its reader, that engages us from the very beginning with its rhythm and soul.

Adrian Matejka’s Mixology utilizes a generation’s music to as inspiration to tell the stories of that time. Whether it be a word, a line of lyrics, or a musician the rhythmic tone of this book cannot be denied. Poems like “Wheels of Steel” say it all, the passion of music of all kinds, the generational slang and references and the confusion of race, it is typical but never tiring, with a fresh set of lines and a new perspective every time Matejka takes his readers on a journey through a truly unique experience. Although he seems to identify most clearly with his African American heritage, Matejka struggles to find acceptance in urban culture as a mulatto. It seems to me that Adrian’s goal was to create a genre that emulated his mixed heritage by bringing together the more traditional language and the urban language. By referencing great rappers, blues musicians and black power figures in very traditionally formed poems he was able to lessen the gap between his two cultures. He at the same time puts this gap on display in poems like “Mullato Ego Remix” and “Language Mixology”, where the meanings of words and phrases are changed from culture to culture, leaving things lost in translation. “Half brother of the same halves, /simulacra is fancy for ‘absent.’/Like Banging means ‘good’/ or off the chain means ‘good.’” On page 76 Matejka brings his two halves together educating each half of his mixed race on the other half. Here he still identifies with his black side more than his white, but here his tone is not as resentful as it is in other poems where he talks about being a mullato.

Overall I think that his work was a successful piece. He was able to effectively bring together genres that seemed to distant from one another to create any real connections. His musical allusions and quotes made the piece fresh and relatable to his readers. The balance he was able to strike between these fiercely different language styles made it accessible and enjoyable. The rhythmic beat set the tone for the book perfectly as each piece followed its own beat and mirrored the musical figures and genres alluded to throughout the book.

Mixology

Adrian Matejka's Mixology is well titled, in that it is a complex blend of references to music, cultural icons and literary works. These all largely pertain to the poet's conflict with his identity as a half-African American, half-Caucasian male. Mixology is flavored with allusions to music and musicians alike, including George Clinton, Public Enemy, and Hendrix right alongside other cultural icons such as Spike Lee and the Black Panthers. The book remains true to what the poet himself said, that he tried to "fit in as many of [his] favorite things as possible," and therefore gives us both a picture of the poet and the world he inhabits.

Adrian Matejka uses language to create a collage effect, mixing urban lingo with lyrical, more traditional diction. The opening poem of his book, "Seven Days of Falling" prepares us for this with it's first line, "Today, I'm assimilating like margarine/into hotcakes." True, throughout the entire book, we see phrases prefaced with "Man," and profanity, slang like, "dub" and "yo" blending in with references to The Cantos, biblical passages and William S. Burroughs. We are here given the impression of Matejkas "world," one of pop culture and urban grit, making its way into literary, traditional and stereotypically "white" culture. Matejka's lines are generally of short to medium length, relying heavily on the dialects of slang and pop culture in order to deliver lines that reflect the blending of the music they speak of.

i believe Matejka is very successful in his blending of cultures in Mixology. He speaks of all his references with an ease and a familiarity that makes the quick jumps between cultural icons brings us through the book with the sense that he easily navigates both of these worlds. The way he is able to seamlessly bring together utterly different musical references, pop culture icons, etc., makes the book a smooth read. Even though I often found myself looking up name after name in order to educate myself as to what he was talking about, more than anything, I was comfortable with not necessarily knowing what he was talking about, as I was comforted by the fact that Matejka clearly knew what he was talking about. The overall effect I gained from reading the book was what it is like to navigate between various different facets of a culture, to live between them.

Adrian Matejka's "Mixology"

Adrian Matejka’s book Mixology is full of poems that, through the typically short lines, word choice, and constant references and allusions to musical artists in varying genres, create a unique, definitely purposeful, rhythm. Reading through the poems, even when just in my own head, I read with a consistent beat much like the beat in most hip hop songs. The content of the book is based off of Matejka’s experiences as a mixed race child, teenager and adult having to deal with issues of race and not quite fitting in with either race. Matejka’s poems are also heavily about rap, hip hop, blues and jazz music and the artists that performed those genres, such as Flava Flav and Bob Kaufman.

Adrian Matejka’s poetry mixes urban culture, hip hop, blues, and his own life experiences, with highbrow traditional poetry. He does this by using poetry, an old art form that has come a long way and changed exponentially especially in the last century, to relate his struggles with race and where he lived and the culture that he grew up in, I believe during the 1990s. He uses the form of poetry and the feel of hip hop to produce a new rhythmic, urban literary masterpiece.

I believe Adrian Matejka’s work is successful because it caused me to begin to understand and learn about a culture that I wasn’t familiar with. It also works because while reading the poetry I instantly read with a definite rhythm as if I were reading to a beat. The meld of urban and mixed race culture with literary poetry is perfectly balanced to create something new and unique.

Susan Howe, The Midnight

Susan Howe’s “The Midnight” is a book that encompasses the tossing and turning of insomnia, of bed hangings and boundaries between dreaming and memory, a collection of history and the heirlooms of an Irish heritage—poetry quilted in verse, prose, and visuals that redefine the space between text and textile, requiring a re-reading of this Language poetry, a combination of three mediums in a new contemporary poetic style.

“Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin,” says Howe as she steps into the space between jumping into the undefined or defining “SLEEP,” two ideas separated by Emerson’s quote, “Every word was once a poem”(115)—and this is the substance of Howe’s poetry, a question of the REAL in the dreamscape of poetics. Every paragraph, every stanza, every line, every picture—paintings, drawings, curtains, photographs, book covers and pages of books and marginalia and illustrations—are a quotation in themselves (116), everything in itself and together is a poem. “Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form” (124) says Howe—and in her collection she explores the limits and limitlessness of her research and her art in history and her family.

In her combined-medium form, Howe switches from fact to lyric, from memories to ideas about history and her heritage. “She loved to produce and destroy meanings in the same sentence” (64) Howe says of her mother as they perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and in memory Howe’s mother appears, clearly or hazy as if in a dream, the two of them sharing a love of books as objects and chaotic fragments. Howe’s mother is a powerful theme throughout “The Midnight,” an exploration of Howe’s Irish heritage and the connection she has with her mother, playwright and actress Marry Manning. Under a picture of the book Later Poems, Howe explains the note scribbled there: “Six Irish actors have inscribed [my mother’s] copy of Later Poems: “‘28 October 1924 To Mary with love from us all. Sara Allgood, Dorothy Day McCauliffe, Joyce Chancellor, Gertrude McEnery, Maeve MacMorrogh, Shelah Richards.’ Inside, five narrow strips of what looks like wrapping paper, once meant to serve as markers, are still intact” (75). On the next page is a picture of these make-shift bookmarks, each with fine notes written on them. “Sometimes I arrange the four snippets as if they were a hand of cards, or inexpressible love liable to moods. I like to let them touch down randomly as if I were casting a dice or reading tea leaves,” says Howe. “She loved to embroider facts,” she says of her mother. “Facts were cloth to her. Maybe lying is how she knew she was alive because she felt trapped by something ruthless in her environment and had to beat the odds.”

Howe’s ideas and memories of her mother throughout her poetry are either factual, personal, poetic, or thoughtful, a reoccurring and important node that incorporates Howe’s connection with her mother to the other themes in “The Midnight.” As we can see in this single example, Howe incorporates visuals, facts, history, and textiles in her thoughts about her mother, which also, I believe, mirror thoughts about Howe herself and her poetry book as a whole. On the previous page, Howe writes, “[my mother] hung Jack’s illustrations and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were windows…They marked another sequestered “self” where she would go home to her thought. She clung to Williams’ words by speaking them aloud. So there were always three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory” (75). Inspired by her mother’s love for these “dimensions” of books and objects, Howe weaves this personal node into the fabric of her image-and-text-patterned poetry book. The purpose of her work is best shown in her last poem: “Style in one stray sitting I / approach sometime in plain / handmade rag wove costume / awry what I long for array” (173). As we talked about in class, Howe’s interest in “re-arranging” the “expected course” is the result of this book, a collection of fragments woven into a solid cloth of poetry; to “approach…in plain / handmade rag wove costume,” Howe is on an exploration. “If poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form, so in memory, the character of ‘either’” (64) Howe says. “The original is untouchable, what I see before me, incorporeal” (137).

“The Midnight” is successful in its structure of image and text stringing together history, heritage, cloth and books, the real and the unreal, Howe’s mother and Howe herself. In a new contemporary medium, this Language poet successfully requires her audience to read in a new way, to read visuals as texts, to read and reread definitions until definitions are lost altogether, to explore connections and boundaries in combined art forms.

For those who love listening to poets read (like me): Howe discusses reading aloud and spoken poetry in thoughts about her mother: “Waves of sound connected us [my mother and I] by associated syllabic magic to an original but imaginary place existing somewhere across the ocean between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. I loved listening to her voice. I felt my own vocabulary as something hopelessly mixed and at the same time hardened into glass” (75). Stumbling around online I found an audio of her mother reading from a play (http://www.flashpointmag.com/manningwake.htm) and an audio of sound art with Howe reading her poetry (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EueDt28FIs&feature=related). Kind of interesting listening to them both; they sound rather similar, except Howe’s mother has an Irish accent. I find Howe’s sound art compelling, her mixing of genres, of poetry and music, much like her mixing of text and visuals in “The Midnight.”

Joana's response to Howe

Susan's Howe's book midnight was, I have to admit, an extremely confusing read. While many themes such as family and heritage are prevalent, the entire book seems to be hinging on the theme of exploring the mindset of an insomniac. While insomniacs are chronically unable to sleep, that doesn't necessarily mean that their thoughts are coherent.

Many of the connections she makes seem to be very rambling, and the poems that she prevents are more stream-of-thought than poetry usually is. With Armantrout, for instance, her poetry was very abstract but still seemed to have a meaning, even if that meaning was often left up to the reader to decide. The short poems at the end, in particular, seem to have little coherence to them. However, as someone who has gone through insomnia before (if not clinical then the kind that all college students go through at one time or another) I can understand how something that makes no sense to you in the morning after you've gotten sleep can make perfect sense when you're typing or writing it up at 2am.

In this way, going between prose, poetry and scans of the book that she inherited, the disjointedness of the book is a perfect example of an insomniac's thought patterns as he or she just tries to get through the night.

Susan Howe Blog Response

Susan Howe's book The Midnight is a chaotic compilation of various texts, histories, people, and emotion. It is difficult to describe the structure of her work for it lacks any real grammatical or thematic boundaries. She separates her text into different sections composing of prose-like pieces along with parts that are structured like poems. There are many images scattered throughout the text that give a collage-effect to the book. Howe threads numerous themes and nodes in her text which force the reader to make connections and be active. This also makes the book not only significant in its content, but also in the experience of reading it.

To be honest, when I read the first two sections of this book I couldn't get myself into it. This worried me because usually even if i Don't understand a text, I can appreciate it for other aspects. It wasn't until the last section and our class discussions of this section that it became more clear to me what Howe is trying to do. As many people have mentioned, a major theme of this book includes the disorienting effects of insomnia. Never is a mind more scattered, confused, and overwhelmed than in this state, and this is the primary aim of Howe: to extract all the chaors and strangeness of a human mind as well as different texts and bring them to the surface. This is why many of her images and references don't immediately make sense or connect. For example all the Alice and Wonderland images set throughout the text don't necessarily relate to the text displayed next to or around the image, but Howe is more focused on the ideas surrounding the story of Alice and Wonderland such as dream-like adventures and the question of what is real or unreal. Additionally, on page 74, there is an image from Alice and Wonderland that has been cut and pasted onto a newspaper which goes with one of her other central themes of books or texts as objects. She places emphasis on her belief that texts tell a story and should be manipulated, added to, and decorated in order to make them unique to oneself. Her family and Irish heritage play a large role in her book as well which at first can be confusing to try and distinguish the specific people but becomes clearer as the text unfolds. Howe plays around with the concepts of revealing and covering up objects which is a recurring effect of her book as well. She unveils certain ideas or images while hiding others so while reading it one has to work to break down the different concepts.

I believe Howe is successful in grasping the madness of life and pieces of texts. She utilizes so many devices to convey a chaotic representation of these thoughts and images. All the different styles and ideas that How presents create a disorienting reading experience which is exactly her goal. Multiple people have mentioned that while reading her book, it is almost like entering this insomniac state of mind where objects or ideas may exist on some level, but are distorted and altered in one way or another. I don't believe her book holds many things to "figure out." It is a representation of all the insanity we repress in our mind and that is sensored in texts. What is so interesting about her book is that what is repressed will never end. There can be no real closure to her book. My reading experience took a big 180 after realizing all the tactics she uses and how relatable it really is to everybody, whether they'd like to admit it or not.

Susan Howe’s The Midnight is a rather unconventional collection of prose and poetry that appears to lack a clear focus and may be a challenge for a reader not used to Howe’s particular style.

The Midnight presents to the reader an eclectic mix of topics ranging from insomnia to musings on the author’s Irish heritage. In alternating prose/poetry sections Howe relates little factoids and anecdotes that eventually converge at an “ah-ha” moment for the reader (every reader’s will most likely be different).

The best grasp at an overarching theme present in The Midnight would be connections. Throughout the book, Howe is constantly making connections: connections from herself to her family’s heritage, Shakespeare’s Macbeth to her bouts with insomnia, connections between the concepts of textiles and text. In fact, the entire work becomes a sort of textile with each fact and story woven into the whole of the book.

The material is varied and each form has its own indelible style. Howe’s poetry looks as if it is a conglomerate of words smashed into a square cookie-cutter; each poem is almost perfectly justified into the same square dimensions. It became noticeable when the pages of the book were glued and cut at a different height because of the similarities between every page of poetry.

As far as the language of the poetry, it is abstract, at best. It borders on incomprehensible were it not for the fact that many of Howe’s central themes are included in the poems.

The prose of the book is interspersed with various photographs and illustrations, for one of Howe’s objectives of the book is to present the relationship of text and the image it represents. The subject matter—as mentioned earlier—is varied. One of the book’s sections will bring you through such diverse subjects as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet;” biographical notes on Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind New York’s Central Park.

It’s hard to pinpoint whether or not Howe is accomplishing what she has set out to do since it’s hard to describe what exactly she’s doing in her book, The Midnight. It’s easy to pick out central themes but to connect them all becomes somewhat tedious. This is why it becomes necessary for the reader to step back and take in Howe’s work from afar.

Thinking logically about this book does not work because it goes against most conventions one comes to expect from a work of literature. The reader has to, instead, look at The Midnight from the perspective of what he or she can get out of the work. In other words, take one of the main themes and use that to explore the work.

The Midnight is a highly challenging and versatile work. It pushes boundaries in what readers expect from a work and also what they take away from it. Versatility, though, is the main attribute of the work; the book can be just about anything the reader wants it to be, he or she just has to look for it.

Benjamin's Response to Howe

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Susan Howe

Susan Howe both writes poems and poetical prose...of sorts. In Midnight, she manages to combine the poem with the memoir, but doesn’t make Midnight come off as narcissistically personal. Howe combines history, personal history, and literary illusions to create...something. What that is, of course, I’m not entirely sure!
Howe’s ultimate objective, however, despite her myriad number of themes, is to hammer home the idea that a book, a collection, regardless of what it is, is inherently personal. A text is unique to an individual, and not necessarily just to the author, or the reader. In the case of Midnight, Howe attempts to create a book in the traditional of her family’s own “constructed” books, of sorts. In recollections of her family, Howe states,

“My mother’s close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few survivors 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*” (60).

Howe goes further to state:

“Every mortal has a non-communicating material self––a waistcoat or embroidered doublet” (60).

Howe connects her idea of the personalized text to another theme of the book, that of the textile, something that come through most in the first part of the text, “Bed Hangings I,” which will be enough to make you never want to hear mention of drapes or bed hangings ever again.
The most meaning of the text (or at least, the clearest) comes through in Howe’s prose sections, heavily on history as well as personal reflections that occasionally diverge into the completely incomprehensible. Still, this does not mean that Howe’s poem sections do not contain any meaning. To the contrary, “Bed Hangings 1” alludes to philosophy, religion, and various individuals referenced and expanded upon in the later prose.
In these prose sections, we see Howe fulfilling her family legacy, of taking a text and making it her own. We see “private messages” in her references to Alice and Wonderland, one of the most clever and obscure examples being on page 64 in the photograph of a torn up newspaper (the phrase “looking glass” can be seen in the top and middle of the image, above the picture of a woman), and “warnings” such as “Go away and do something else, grave robber” (60). Numerous pictures, paintings and pictures of textiles are mixed throughout the text.
In terms of history in the text, Howe utilizes real historical figures and events as a sort of inroads to her own personal experience. This in turn allows the reader to know of her personal history which leads to to her thesis of the personalized book. A very roundabout way of doing things, but sufficient nonetheless. For example, to speak of her own insomnia, Howe commonly references MacBeth, or Frederick Law Olmstead, and so forth. To lead into the history of her family member’s unique way of enriching (or defacing, depending on how you look at it) their books, Howe notes that figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson did similar things to books, ripping or removing pages and assembling an entirely new text of particularly special quotes.
Howe’s misdirection and escapades into the incomprehensible or really “out there” stuff, however, feel like a distraction from her main themes. However, I went along with Howe, stuck with her through some of the more bizarre sections of the text, and feel as if I got most of what she was trying to say. I will admit that attempting to read Howe isn’t easy. There’s no real easy way to enter into this text. It’s something I simply had to jump into, and sort of find a direction after I got about fifty pages in. In this sense then, The Midnight feels like a great ego trip, and we’re along for the ride. The Midnight is Howe’s, it defines her and it has meaning that can only be known to her. But that doesn’t mean we can’t derive meaning from it as well. Howe encourages us, or at least me, to want to make a text like this of my own!