Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 3: Susan Howe

In my previous post about Wallace Stevens I mentioned that one great admirer of Steven’s richly complex later poems is the (experimental? avant-garde? interesting?) poet Susan Howe.

And like Stevens, she has some of the most delightful titles for her poems and books of poems. One of my favorites is her relatively early book, Defenestration of Prague, which was published by The Kulchur Foundation in 1983. I wish I still had that small-run first edition, with it’s lovely cover.

Susan Howe owns her deep Yankee roots and has focused on such topics in her writing as Emily Dickinson, the Indian Wars in New England, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity tale, the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Pierce, and the attempts at utopia by the Labadists. It’s a wide-ranging and interlaced map of references, and Howe’s poetry, on top of that, is a sometimes elated play with pure language.

In fact, she’s usually associated with the LANGUAGE poets, the loose group of post-structuralist writers who rose to prominence in the late-70s and 80s, who broke many literary conventions and rebelled against the ego-centered emotive lyrical poetry embodied by the Beats and the Confessional poets.

I think Steven Paul Martin gives an insightful description of Howe’s poetic practice:

“by asking us to focus on the tangible presence of language itself—on the morphemes, phonemes and graphemes that words are made of—Howe moves us away from our tendency to think in abstractions, easing us into the motion and fabric of a verbal space that has not been reduced to a mere zone of representation. We are asked to see and hear the shapes and sounds of the words instead of reading through them to what they supposedly refer to. Our sense of discursive or narrative continuity shatters, replaced with the endless Protean linkages that give language its living power.”

The implications, to my mind, for photography are deep and broad. Reading Susan Howe is like completely refreshing one’s understanding of how meaning is made. She is sincerely inventive, in that she’s not just trying to be novel or obscure or difficult. She’s trying to return to a place where language most fundamentally starts to mean something. And that might not be a bad practice for a photographer to engage.

As with any “challenging” poet, the trick is to not try to rationally understand everything you’re reading, but to move through it, getting what you can from each pass you take at her work. It’s just like reading Shakespeare. If you stop and turn to a dictionary every time you hit something you don’t know, you lose the flow and the potential experience bound into the language. You can always go back later and Google a reference or a word, and then maybe read it again.

You can find out more about Howe, and read some of her poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-howe.

As for a first book, I’d recommend The Europe of Trusts, a collection of three of her earlier books: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. Published by New Directions, 2002.

Poetry for Photographers & Other Artists 2: Wallace Stevens

Two of the 20th century’s greatest poets had very traditional careers and wrote in their spare time. One was William Carlos Williams, who delivered over 3,000 babies in the Rutherford, New Jersey area as a doctor. The other was an attorney who rose through the ranks to become a vice-president at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company: Wallace Stevens.

Despite his conservative lifestyle in Hartford, he created in the mid-20th century some of the most innovative poetry ever written, even by today’s standards. I’m thinking in particular of his later poems, from 1950 onwards, which are deeply admired by the “experimental” poet Susan Howe. And appropriately so. They bear reading and rereading for their rich language, intellectual delicacy, and compelling ambiguities. Here’s the opening stanza from “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street

Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Of men growing small in the distance of space,

Singing, with smaller and smaller sound,

Unintelligible absolution, and an end–

In contrast, Steven’s earlier poetry, particularly his famous book Harmonium (1923), is a lush, overgrown jungle of language at times, with great musicality and striking imagery. For instance, these opening lines from the poem “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws:”

Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life among a mort of tails.

You will also notice, as you read him, that Stevens has the best poem titles of any poet you’ll find. In fact, he often began his poems by coming up with a title first, and then finding where it took him. (I do the same with my photographic works, without knowing this was Steven’s approach.)

The most quoted poem of Stevens’ has to be “The Snow Man,” of which the final stanza reads:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

There is one photographer, at least, who has paid great attention to Wallace Stevens, and that is Tim Carpenter in his book-length essay, To Photograph is to Learn How to Die. Carpenter sees Stevens as a materialist, but I see him in a slightly different light. I think it’s interesting to note that he converted to Catholicism on his death bed.

However his spirituality might be measured, Stevens could inspire a great amount of photographic work if he lands on your bookshelf. Fortunately for all of us, all his poetry and and prose is to be found in one convenient book: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, published by The Library of America (1997).

You can learn more about Stevens, and read several of his poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 1: Intro

I’m fascinated by the rather small group of poets that seem to influence many photographers. In essence, it comes down to four names: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, and Richard Hugo. I can understand why the first three names come up so often, given how famous they are. But I’m a bit puzzled by Richard Hugo. And overall, I’m concerned enough at the puddle-size of this poetic pool to launch a series of suggestions of poets which photographers and other artists might want to add to their shelves.

My background is poetry. I was a creative writing major as an undergrad and attended the New College of California Graduate Program in Poetics in San Francisco in the early 80s. For around 15 years I was seriously writing poetry and publishing in various literary journals, before abandoning art for career in order to support my family. Later, aghast at having ignored my muse, I committed to photography as my art form, which has been deeply informed by my engagement with poetry.

I’lll try to focus each post on one poet, and keep it short and concise—just enough to point you in a poet’s direction and give you some links to their poetry. The great thing is, should you decide to buy one of these poet’s books, such books are positively cheap compared to photobooks and art books. So your investment, even in a decent-sized library of poetry, will be relatively small.

For those of you who will be shopping for these books online and who might be looking for used copies or alternatives to Amazon, you should know about AddAll.com, a great collection of offerings by a multitude of book dealers. https://www.addall.com/used is the url. For rarer out-of-proint poetry you might want to check out my friend David Abel’s lovely offerings at Passages Bookshop: https://www.passagesbookshop.com.

I think I’ll launch this series, which will occur in no particular order, with the next post focusing on Wallace Stevens.