I think what interests me about That This is the push between providing context — almost a surfeit of context — around the central moment in the tripartite book division, the very place where it seems like the entire point is to refuse meaning, to refuse conventional language: “The Disappearance Approach” (the first section) not only contextualizes but outright names “Frolic Architecture” as the thing she is composing with scotch tape and high-tech copiers.

The enumeration of technological detail to the digital photography studio at the Beinecke Library reaches an almost fetishistic level: “each light is packed with 900 watts of ceramic discharge lamps […] doubly fan-cooled, with one chamber for the hot (lamp) side and one fan for the electronic side […] one or two stuffed oblong cloth containers, known in the trade as snakes” (30) In some ways, this is just the same attention to detail that a writer might bring to all of their observations of the world, or the artisan’s pride in their craft – Anne Carson discussed the composition of Nox in similar craftmanlike detail during interviews about the book, though I think it’s telling it was in interviews rather than the text itself (and I promise I will only mention Nox about a dozen more times or so before the class ends). But I think it’s particularly relevant that Howe chooses to explain her collage/text-shaping before we are presented with it: it is a text that reflects on its own (unusual) principles and methods of composition.

I think it’s telling, too, that on either side this technological explanation is bracketed by quotes from the Hannah Edwards diaries: one numbered with archival specificity (though the page break makes an interesting cut away from that) as GEN MSS 151, Box 24, and so on, and the next quoted with a “…&” to begin the quote (from a different letter) and only cited afterwards as Edwards’ words. These are presented as fragmented; they are presented without as much context as we normally expect, even after we’ve grown used to the paragraph-level snippets of prose Howe is presenting us, and even after we’ve been contextualized by the information about the Edwards family on pg. 20 (and with the occasional reference to Jonathan Edwards throughout; it occurs to me only now that Howe did not pick his letters or materials but a female writer, much of “all that remains of this 18th-century family’s impressive tradition of female learning” (20) – is this an implicit, if vague, critique of the archive she takes as her source?)

But the fragments we get of Edwards’ diary during “The Disappearance Approach” are still legible fragments; we can still read them, for the most part, and are used to situating coherent quotes of that length within a context. In that way it almost feels like they’re a rehearsal or shadow of the type of distortion and disruption that will occur during the second (and to some extent third) section(s), where the text will often become distorted beyond recognition. I’m interested in that movement; if within modernist and contemporary poetry the move toward incompletion, fragmentation, and refusal of concrete meaning is often an anti-elegiac or anti-consolatory tactic, then what of That This? It seems so carefully to situate and scaffold itself in the first section before the intense and bold gestures of the second section, and it seems deeply interested in the functions of archival in a way that “found” poetry/appropriation art often times is not (certainly, in a way that is less present in Nox.)

This is a bit of a close reading and doesn’t nearly begin to cover all of the rest of what’s going on in That This – all of the more explicit musings on memory, reproduction, echoes and loss; not to mention the playing with color and visual imagery throughout (the black and white conditions and machines of reproduction, the snow or absence of snow, the almost-too-perfect motif of the “paperwhite” flowers blossoming) – but I think it’s worth paying attention to the exact conditions of a text’s divergence from the narrative norm.