Envelope Poems

Product Information

Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versificati (...) Etymology tells us that “secret” also has to do with lines, since it comes from an Indo-European root word meaning “separate, cut off,” also to be found in “harvest” amongst others. One of Susan Howe’s earliest poetry sequences is entitled Secret History of the Dividing Line (Howe, 1996 87-122).

I’d love to. I tell this story in my essay “Itineraries of Escape,” and, I have to warn you, it sounds like a fairy tale from the archives! Montgomery , Will. The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority . London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. I called the manuscript “reportless.” The poem I drew that word from reads: “In many and reportless | places | We feel a Joy – | Reportless, also, but | sincere as Nature | Or Deity - Agamben , Giorgio. The End of the Poem . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better—I’ve spent almost 20 years helping thousands of successful artists of all disciplines and working to make the arts more accessible. (One friend likes to call me “the arts enabler.”) I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –” (J657, Fr466, M233). In a less optimistic perspective, they might also be seen as coffin builders.

The Gorgeous Nothings] opens up an aspect of her craft that suggests she was, in the so-called late ecstatic period of her career, experimenting with creating texts in relation to the visual, spatial, and technological possibilities of her medium—composing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it." — Jessica Michalofsky, Quarterly Conversation What draws you to her work? And particularly her manuscripts? What’s it like to handle her manuscripts? To see her handwriting? Conjunctions of the Literary and the Philosophical in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Writing tender’ is given with the variant “sovereign” but written in the margin up the side of the paper is “unsuspecting carpenters”. La busta postale è quella che contiene la lettera, è una sorta di scrigno, qualcosa che avviluppa, contiene, include qualche altra cosa.A study of the line breaks in this corpus of texts should therefore take into consideration the interaction of several issues. Firstly, line breaks can no longer be a mere matter of poetics, more specifically of metrics, but are crucially determined by material constraints out of which a poetics of the line may emerge , a poetics that calls into question the role measured lines play in defining poetry; a poetics which particularly challenges the pivotal role of the line break as the primary mode of distinguishing verse from prose. In “The End of the Poem,” Giorgio Agamben has proposed a definition of poetry contra prose according to the line break as a superstructural characteristic:

Fourth, there’s the mysterious presence on A 821 of other sets of pinholes. Was this document pinned to other documents we haven’t yet identified?These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark. We could read the text like this: “Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds - [ turn MSS 90 degrees to the right] Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [ pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment” Loved this publication, the juxtaposition of the original letters and how they looked was marvellous and interesting especially as a historian and (aspiring) palaeographer, though I imagine even non-historians find it fascinating.

The next year—to my great delight and terror—Howe came to Buffalo to teach a course. She was then about the age I am now, which is rather strange to think about! The course she taught focused on early American literature, and at its center were documents—17th-century captivity narratives and conversion narratives—most composed by women, most composed in extremis. It was riveting. Howe was always prepared. I think she must have spent hours and hours, probably days or weeks, writing her lectures. And when she spoke, she was moved by a kind of intensity and nervousness and conviction all at once that was profoundly compelling. She was—she is—fierce and fragile. She’s always at the very edge of thought. And if you care about poetry at all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance for that kind of intimacy? Billy Collins and Archibald MacLeish
certainly would. I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –” (J657, Fr466, M233). In a less optimistic pe (...)

Ebook

First, there is the question of how it was composed: all at once, at different times, in fragments. The handwriting differs depending on which sector of the document you are looking at, suggesting perhaps that it wasn’t composed in one sitting, although it could have been…. And the boundary lines in the manuscript also create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity. I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. —