books I'm taking

to Los Angeles:

George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays.
Henry James, The Bostonians (this is taking me way too long).
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition.
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language.

susan howe

Poetry you may do the
map of Hell softly one
voice with viol in green
habit or consort twelve

Maniacs and Fantastics
in measured epic dactyl
Far back thinner coranto
one Labadist one Cynic.

Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007)

currently

Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (University of California Press, 2005).

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Henry James, The Bostonians (1886).

(more).

"Velocity, mechanics, heat, thermodynamics, light, chaos of formulae, electromagnetic induction must be called back into the Sublime, found and forgotten. Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror. Adopted parataxis and rupture to tell the feverish haste, the loss, to warn of storm approaching--Brute force, mechanism. Cassandra was a woman. All power, including the power of love, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable." (Howe, 116)

"Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun than an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame." (138)

Susan Howe & Joan Richardson on the work of writing as encoding the precedent and the Other, DNA and ventriloquizing, genetic code and inspired vocalization. But: poetry beyond gender?

my susan

Ammunition from Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

"My and me. In this unsettling New England lexical landscape nothing is sure. In a shorter space (woman's quick voice) Dickinson went further than Browning, coding and erasing--deciphering the idea of herself, dissimulation in revelation. Really alone at a real frontier, dwelling in Possibility was what she had brilliantly learned to do." (76)

"Inside the highly formalized rhetoric of Poetry's reason, stalks unreason of perverted sexuality." (90)

"What light smiles in this unsurveyed valley of great memory? Materialistic light from the man-made Gun's forged yellow barrel merely mincing Nature's pure Idea of light as power, as fire mimics the sun? What revelation waiting to be born must be shot violently into leering flame? Now all aspects of the poet's self are homeless. Mistress of suspicion, what is there, who? Simpering smile of layer on layer. Who or what smiler? The Vesuvian face, a mask, veils fire, chaos, original will, vapor. Will that is searing lava and sulfurous power." (100)

(Toward a reading of gender and the volcanic: Alcott/Jo March's linguistic eruptions, the ground trembling under the domicile; Yezierska, immigrant conversion and overflow)