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.”
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