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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
at the supernova not directly, but to one side of it, as a way of apprehend–
ing the blast. Thus, her gleaning of things from the archives. Charles
Bernstein in
A Poetics
addresses the effects of the Second World War on
several poetic styles, accounting for them as delayed reactions to collective
trauma. Howe's poetry, however narrow and tensile its range, amplifies
those reactions. Her work excites interest among those who know that
recent hermeneutic talk is a graveyard euphemism-that phrases such as
"the play of the signifier" shroud cold crimes, one of which is an inade–
quate relation of feeling to collective trauma. Though she is as smart as the
hermeneuts, Howe is also no stranger to stammers and ghostly visitations,
working with them from the outset and recovering their tremors in one
great antecedent, Dickinson with her "words grown odd" (in Winters'
phrase). While I often do not follow Howe, always [ sense her aim and her
blends of civic with feminine feeling, and of strength with fragility.
"Frame Structures," the memoir-essay that introduces Howe's collect–
ed early poems
(Hinge Picture, Chanting at the Crystal Sea, CabbaJze Gardens,
and
Secret History oj the Dividing Line),
weaves together family histories, ear–
lier national and northeastern regional histories, gritty economic practices,
and literary affiliations. Cannily constructed, and associative in method, it
touches on collective destiny, as in the linked treatments of fire through–
out the piece, climaxed by her description of Fanny Longfellow's death.
But the sections also allude to Duchamp's sense of design ("Delay in
Glass," "Mirror Axis"). Howe came to poetry through the visual arts, and
her construction is both archi tectonic and associative. [n this respect
"Frame Structures" distills her poetics. It also stands out as one of those
few memoirs that quicken one's sense of historical mystery (much as do
Marguerite Yourcenar's).
As preface to the early books this piece has a shorter antecedent in
"There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover,"
which prefaces
The Europe oJTrusts
(1990), a collection of three books
(The
Liberties, Pythagorean Silence,
and
Difenestration oj PraL<!ue).
Both essays
acknowledge the indirect effects of Word War II on her poetry. [n 1990
Howe wrote: "fright is formed by what we see not by what they say." She
guesses that this omitted but witnessable realm "dictates," in her own
work, "the sound of what is thought." This claim is her most important
one. Even her resonant epigrams only point
to
what whole poems or
books sound out. From a later volume: "Voracious coinage at the confines
/ / political acres of prey and chirrup / Confusion / / of lines bisecting
shred / after shred
of feeling."
The gaps in that epigram function as stutter (Howe's own term in an
interview). I suspect that Howe's intensity and her non-doctrinaire femi–
nism are only two motives for gapping. A deeper motive is her complex
