This is not the most profound insight, nothing incredibly new here. However, it’s worth noting if not repeating: to read Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives is to discover a key to Howe’s poetic method and intuition. The text not only reveals, but also enacts the mystic flash generated through concrete encounter. “…[W]e need to see and touch objects and documents…”(9). The scraps of broad-cloth, embroidery, notebook covers, annotated manuscript pages, envelopes, prescription slips, linen folios—all of these, which animate the pages of S P, speak to Howe’s essay, which is composed substantially out of quotation, not through transcription (or even translation), but through a charged intuitive process of “stitching.”

 

After listening to Susan Howe give this lecture with the slide accompaniment at Harvard last fall, I was talking with another poet in the audience, and he remarked that he’d been reading Howe for the last fifteen years and would have read her work completely differently had he known that her practice looked and sounded like what we’d just heard. I felt equally demystified, and yet I first encountered Howe’s work with That This, and so this radical method, or the apparent “trust, or granting of grace in an ordinary room” (63) with which Howe uses to illuminate a “deep” text or the deeper realms of human experience seemed to me closer to the Howe I knew. I also felt empowered, because what I’d just witnessed was a clear argument for artistic practice, the role of intuition in that practice, and how to justify the appropriation of material, and it made sense that (though seemed almost secondary) this work took place in the context of archives.

 

In the “collaged swan song to the old ways” (9), a premise that echoes the romance of Farge and tactility of Steedman, Howe traces the immaterial currents that flow from material encounters to poetic artifice. “What if words posses a ‘spirit’ potential to their nature as words?” Her question tracks a proportional charge: graphemes and phonemes like atomic particles designed to collide. “Then things of experience in their passage between languages might materialize in posthumous vowel notes whipped up with shifting consonantal impact until by a side-step or little jump, the embroidered manifestation of an earlier vernacular reflects authority (edenic justice) through ciphered wilderness and pang” (40).

 

Maybe what I find most appealing in both S P and That This is the relationship between the surfacing of objects, notes, fragments within the archives, and the initial submersion of that material in to the collections, boxes, folders, databases, code of the archives. The potential or “spontaneity” that Howe links to archival material seems related directly to an act of re-discovery. “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular “deep” text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy” (18). Howe points to an equal and opposing action—like a Newtonian documentary second law, since the “instant of archivization” according to Derrida in Archive Fever “is not…live or spontaneous memory” (25). The setting-down, the deliberate act of impression, stores and preserves some potential force, and in the case of words creates for Howe “mimetic spirit sparks” (26).

 

Bound up in this process, which is a a process of contradiction, is loss and disappearance: the instant of archivization is also the removing from view—from the mind’s eye as well as the physical. And so, through a similar set of encounters with the dead, in a home suddenly transformed into an archive of one’s life Howe remembers her late husband in “The Disappearance Approach.” The title suggests that process of losing and finding, surfacing through disappearance. It’s the awareness that Howe calls forth at the beginning of “Frolic Architecture”:

 

That this book is a history of

a shadow that is a shadow of

me mystically one in another

Another another to subserve (39)