Caroline's Response to Howe

Susan Howe's The Midnight offers something completely unique to the world of poetry. To put it most plainly, it is a collage of written and visual art that works to challenge the reader's mind and redefine traditional poetics. It is divided up into five sections, three that appear to be poetry, and two that lean more towards prose. This overall structure as well as the structures of each section seem to be purposeful, as there are repetitions to the aesthetics. The poetry sections, for example, are uniform in appearance, each page containing a very short poem right in the center of the page, with sizeable margins on every side. Stylistically, Howe is rather mysterious. Particularly as we encounter a poetic section first, it is very hard to get to know Howe in this work. Through the prose sections, we start to get much more background information and learn a bit about Howe and her family, but still she is very much a mystery to us. She writes about family, books, insomnia, sleep, bed hangings, images, and so on to the point that the reader starts to feel as though some sense is being formed around these themes, as though they are the support beams to this wildly shaky and unstable piece.

Howe seems to have incredibly clear and focused intentions with this collection, intentions that, although obviously present, aren't the easiest to articulate. First and foremost, she is challenging everything, the reader, other writers, art, poetry, literary conventions, etc. She establishes her credibility by alluding to a number of her literary predecessors, such as Shakespeare and Emerson. By calling to these universally recognizable names, Howe is placing herself among them, inherently drawing comparisons between her work and theirs. Once she "proves" herself in this way, Howe's genius is able to really shine through. One way in which she challenges tradition is by the collage arrangement of this book. By mixing medias, from prose to poetry, and photos to drawings, she opens our minds and asks us to question that which we previously considered poetry. The fact that photos that are in completely different sections of the book relate to each other, that themes span across the piece, forces us to open our minds and change how we read. In this book, things aren't necessarily sequential, they don't form one constant timeline, but rather Howe ask that we take note of connecting themes and events over the entire collection. As readers, we must adjust to this and work to connect all of the pieces in order to find meaning. Another, perhaps more basic way that she challenges poetry is by ignoring basic traditions and rules about punctuation. Not only does she leave her poetry sections pretty much completely without punctuation but she also chooses not to title the poems in any obvious ways. There are places where italics and spaces seem to suggest the beginning of a new thought but for the most part the reader has to formulate some way of deciding where one thing ends and the next begins.

Upon completing the whole collection, I think Howe is quite successful in this piece. More than anything else, I felt that she wasn't necessarily asking us to completely understand her or this book. I think more than understanding, she was looking to appeal to our curiosity, to make us question, search, and make connections between different forms of art all occurring in one text. Most apparent to m is that she must have worked extremely hard to achieve this level of "weird," that she put an immense amount of effort into deconstructing traditional poetry and creating something totally unique. In these ways, I think her successes are obvious. Howe has managed to intrigue us perhaps even when we aren't quite sure what we are being intrigued by. She held my attention even in parts where I felt frustrated and lost because somehow I knew that the pay off would be well worth the struggle. And for me, it certainly was.