Amanda Bissonette- Howe Response

Susan Howe’s book The Midnight discusses many aspects of the self. Howe discusses many aspects of herself and her life that have contributed to the way she lives and her writing. These aspects include her family, her relationship with books, and sleep deprivation. In this book Howe discusses the different themes of her book in two different ways, poems and prose-like sections. She switches between the poems and the prose sections throughout the entire book. Howe also uses illustrations in the prose sections. Howe’s book has so many themes that there are different routes a reader can take when looking at this book.

Howe’s many themes allow a reader to take different paths when reading and in turn Howe has created a piece with different meanings that can be interpreted different ways by the readers. Along with the self, Howe has created the themes of insomnia, sleep, and dreams, books as objects, and family and Irish heritage. Howe does a very good job incorporating all of these central themes into the book and makes sure that they all connect and the reader is left with a better understanding of her book as a whole. “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.” (Howe, 60). This is one of the examples of how Howe ties together multiple themes to make connections. Here she is connecting books as objects and family. Howe’s structure of the book allows for more of a connection to be made. The reader must reference back to understand parts of the book, especially Howe’s illustrations. There is almost never a place in the book where an illustration matches up with the surrounding text, but can be found later on. This forces the reader to make connections and treat the book as a whole piece of work and not separate poems. At first, this may cause confusion for the readers because they may be used to reading poetry that flows smoothly, whereas Howe’s poems and proses seem somewhat jagged and random. By the end of the book, the reader may be able to understand the book as a whole better because they were able to go back and make the necessary connections.

I felt complete confusion when I first read the book, but by the end I started to make connections and have a clearer understanding of what Howe wanted me to see. I feel as though if the reader is willing to make the effort and work through the confusion, he or she can get a lot out of it. Although the structure of the book is a little out of the ordinary, especially when you are asked to think of poetry, I could not picture Howe writing in any other way. I don’t think that I as a reader would have a gotten the same out of the book if it was written in a traditional style.