Envelope Poems

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Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versificati (...) Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different element (...)

False impression” could easily be read as a pun here. Without detracting from its substance, it mu (...) Passeurs de la littérature des États-Unis en France(1)/ L’héritage de Michel Foucault aux États-Unis 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.Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments." — Marjorie Perloff, Times Literary Supplement The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century / Exploiting Exploitation Cinema 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— Montgomery , Will. The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority . London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

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: Etymology tells us that “secret” also has to do with lines, since it comes from an Indo-European ro (...) Published by New Directions, the book has the large format of an art book and the different elements of its composition keep a fine balance between the visible and the legible, including for instance a “Visual index” classifying the envelopes according to their shapes. Poised on the limit between the two modes, Marta Werner’s transcripts of the facsimile manuscripts suggest how delicate their interactions can be, particularly by giving prominent visibility to the creases, folds and lines dividing the surfaces of the envelopes. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-24 06:01:21 Associated-names Werner, Marta L., 1964- transcriber; Bervin, Jen, transcriber Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40750502 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierFirst, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOS (...)

The manuscript doesn’t necessarily encourage a teleological reading, either. For me, at least, the manuscript promotes a reading that wanders—and wonders. It compels us to attend to the minutest and most unrepeatable gestures of writing—to writing losing its thread sometimes in liberated strokes, sometimes in scribbles and erasures. For me, anyway, the draft tends to disturb the very idea of the still, absolute text, revealing it as only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes and sometimes follows it. Its interest lies in the uniqueness of its itinerary and its awareness of contingency. For Proust,” Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings,“a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present.” 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” I have no idea! But then again, I don’t really believe in a textual practice that seeks out authorial intentions. Perhaps I’m enough of an old formalist to imagine that these intentions are beside the point. Or perhaps—and this seems more likely to me—my long apprenticeship as a textual scholar has made me circumspect about such a project of recovery. Fifth, there’s the message it records and that flashes by us: a message about how day falls into night; a message about the moment when the world is overtaken by—engulfed in—birdsong. It’s a message—I’d call it a poem—about the instantaneous translation from one condition into another, an essentially ecstatic experience.

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Although the quote was perhaps not widely noticed until it was highlighted by the viral tweet, it appeared in academic publications as early as 1996. ‘… And Historians Thought They Were Just Friends’ By abandoning the idea of the manuscript as mirror and, with it, our search for depth, we may begin to traverse its surface and decipher the traces inscribed upon it. When we do this, we encounter what the textual scholar Louis Hay has called the “third dimension” of the text, the passage of writing traced through time, the multiple, contradictory decisions made during the process of composition and registered in part in the spatial play of the hand across the paper.