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)

I especially like the word Susan Howe used in the title- “telepathy”, which makes me think of the intimate bond between the archives and people. According to Susan Howe, “this visionary spirit, a deposit from a future yet to come, is gathered and guarded in the domain of research libraries and special collections”. Though we have to admit the fact that some items are destined to be forgotten in this age, the archives that present a vision into the future make themselves come to life. Beyond the words, it seems like a romantic idea that the archives have already corresponded with each other before people get to them. I think to some extent Susan Howe’s experience of being a poetic helps building up this sense of romance in the domain of archive and collection. She also points out that “in research libraries and collections, we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and texiles”. In this sense, I think the archival items and documents with small pieces, like some fragments presented in Spontaneous Particulars The Telepathy of Archives, are associated by complex human emotions and thoughts, which is another method to scrutinize the past history in a detailed way. Some of the fragments can’t even provide a complete context for viewers to read through. But once they are put together within a certain logic by the author, a relation of affinity is formed and the “historical-existential trace” is to be tracked by the sense of romance among the archives. Rather than considering the archives as objects lying in the archive or library, waiting to be explored, readers are able to get a glimpse of the link between the past and future the archives and let the archives take charge of leading the way into a more profound research. For me, this idea is way more intriguing than the serious and professional archival approaches I’ve seen before.

In the chapter The Disappearance Approach, Susan talks about “relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it”. It makes me think about the disorder and distortion generated by the fragments. When I was making my audio appropriation I also came across the similar problem that though the original sources remain the untouched, but once I make intervention and appropriate the clips by my idea, the audio fragments became totally different. I can’t help thinking that how does the disorder affect the intimate relation and our thoughts in terms of understanding and analyzing the fragments? How does it change the way we view the “historical-existential trace”?

The second section of Howe’s This That, called “Frolic Architecture”, was, I’ll admit, mysterious to me. It consists of copied passages from Hannah Edwards’ diary that have been fragmented and stitched together, separated from their initial context. Often, the words overlap and confound meaning. “Frolic Architecture” refuses interpretation unless the reader can make meaning of the spliced, severed, and hidden words on each page. If the reader is to draw any meaning from this (in itself, rather than from its surrounding texts), it must be from the arrangement of certain words and sounds, or, perhaps, from extrapolating the surrounding words from the fragment. What is most frustrating, is that any way that this work is interpreted becomes entirely subjective. Howe has fragmented the archival document to the point of illegibility, further fragmenting what is already a fragment of history.

This, I think, is the point. Howe is playing with our interpretation of archival documents and our desire to craft a narrative to make the archival fragment whole. Yet, she is also showing how these fragments (a metonym of a metonym) relate to one another when she splices passages—after the splicing we no longer see these fragments as separate, they are related if only in the sounds the words convey. I see Howe referring to this practice in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives when she quotes Henry James from a preface to one of his collections:

… Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so….All of which will perhaps pass but for a supersubtle way of pointing the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, of the figure, involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brace enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practice positively a thousand lures and deceits (22).

This metaphor seems to perfectly define the archival fragment, the gap in the archive, and the homogenizing narrative that forces meaning. It’s impossible to gain recordings or documents that could fully and truthfully depict a historical event (Baron, 110). Thus, those who create history from the archive, must “cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes”, yet the “careful selection among them” inevitably leads to the possibility of “a thousand lures and deceits”.

The archive, in “Frolic Architecture” is thus laid bare as a collection of fragments that intersect and relate, but that are meaningless without intervention from the viewer. Indeed, Howe’s practice provides more possibilities for deceit—a document that is fragmented from its meaning can serve whatever purpose that the viewer can imagine.

This is certainly an exaggeration of the appropriation of the archival fragment/gap, but in revealing our need to contextualize and create narrative around these broken passages, I think Howe is also emphasizing our desire to contextualize language itself—and asks us to explore language as the metonym rather than the archival document. I’m drawn to this passage from “The Disappearance Approach”: “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly” (13). Much like the archival document is only a fragment of a historical narrative, language is itself a fragment of archival documents, referring to the object, yet never fully describing it. These broken passages indicate Hannah Edwards’s words, but they cannot fully indicate her meaning. Much like an archival document, words cannot provide a comprehensive and final meaning for her object.

I took the farewell address that Nixon gave to his aids at the white house after Watergate and tried to create a dialogue between Nixon and Nixon (from the same speech) in which he appears to be answering his own questions or responding to his own statements. I cut out sections of audio from the speech that could relate to each other and placed them in a sequence that, perhaps, sounds like Nixon attempting to justify and forgive his actions despite his assertion that he has never “ducked” responsibility. The sound clips overlap at points to show a certain loss of control indicative of the days before his resignation.

Enjoy!

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 18^th-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.

I took a Librivox recording of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” which is a very introspective stream-of-consciousness narrative of sorts (which at least one of you have had to read recently with me in ENGL 644) and started playing around with it to try to make a found poem out of it. Inspired by the fact that the original story has amazing dazzling lines amidst the only thing I’ve ever read by Woolf that bored me (possibly in part because it was so inward-facing and wandering) and also by rereading her letter to Vita Sackville-West, it starts, or perhaps the title is, In Such Queer Places. There’s a place or two I didn’t get the overlap quite right — I seem to have accidentally deleted one of the clips around :17, and there’s a clipped half-syllable or two in places where I probably should have faded and paused. I also couldn’t quite get the automatic leveling to work out, although it sounds better the worse your headphones are, I think.

I first wanted to do this with a remix of the Gawain-poet’s Pearl, but I couldn’t quite decide what pronouns to use to make a love poem out of a 21st-c. male volunteer’s reading of a 19th-c. unmarried female professor’s translation of a 14th-c. male poet. (And the pronouns mattered because, well, maybe it was originally going to be a queer elegy entirely to yank the posthumous chain of my favorite medieval sometimes-homophobic poet.)

For my audio experiment I stretched 10 seconds of audio into 100 seconds. To be honest, I can’t find (remember) the original source of the audio file from which I cut the initial ten seconds, but it doesn’t really matter. What I’m interested in is the flattening of the audio, which to me immediately reveals its materiality.

This clip combines different parts of a 1981 interview of Professor Charles R. Magel with audio clips from a video titled “Animals in the Service of Man” from the 1940s.

This audio is made up  of 6 tracks that are extracted from three pieces of news reports. The short piece of music in the beginning sounds like an intro of a news program and it corresponds to the big booming noise in the end.   The speech by a NASA leader and the applauding sound are intervened between the news reported by anchors. I rearrange the six clips with a new order, which presents a connection among the tracks that are originally unrelated.

Having seen Susan Howe deliver Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives as a lecture at Harvard University, I could not help but contemplate the effects of technology that are present in the composition and presentation of this project. Circling and dissecting the ideas of materiality, expression, knowledge, and experience, the content of Howe’s project directly addresses the issue of media translation in the introduction: “As they evolve, electronic technologies are radically transforming the way we read, write, and remember” (9). Spontaneous Particulars takes up the issue of what’s lost, recovered, degraded, and enhanced by moving from analog to digital collections, both in terms of our of-the-body experiences and our of-the-mind knowledge in relation to our interactions with archival objects. However, the ways that these issues are taken up in Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture and as a book seem distinctly different to me.

As a book, Spontaneous Particulars juxtaposes reprinted digital scans of archival selections with poetry, quotes from various thinkers, and Howe’s reflections on the processes of collecting, confronting, and interpreting archival materials. We encounter text and image side-by-side, each symbols of either aural or physical material (the text a symbol of speakable language and the image a symbol of a touchable object). The process of printing the text and images in facing pages has essentially flattened the tactile and sonic presences of the original materials on a single, symbolic plane.

In contrast, the “reading” experience of Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture is not so singular. An audience member listens to Howe—hears the sonic elements of her voice—while encountering projections of the digital images of archival materials. It’s possible to experience what would be the textual or language-based portion of the lecture as mere aural material—to encounter the sounds-in-themselves, if you will. The simultaneity of processing Howe’s reflection on names (sonic stimuli) and a visual projection of a prescription written by William Carlos Williams (visual stimuli) has a much different effect on the way one reads and remembers Spontaneous Particulars. It feels bodily, now.

In this way, Howe’s project reenacts the very issue that it addresses. While listening to Howe recite the lecture is a performance and not the initial thoughts that she captured through language, experiencing Spontaneous Particulars in person does remind me of the experience of touching an archived object. There’s a now-ness to hearing Howe speak that’s similar to the now-ness of touching WCW’s prescription pad. Howe’s voice and WCW’s handwritten notes are material objects that no longer exist in their original context, but remain present for us—the listener, reader, researcher—in a sensory way that interpreting text on a page does not. In the same manner that the archive effect may fool us into deeming an image or clip historical or “real,” I can see Howe’s voice as fooling us with its ephemeral yet salient presence in material validity. Thus, I view Howe’s intentions for Spontaneous Particulars the book to be “a collaged swan song to the old ways” as a celebration in the book’s relationship to the process through which it was created (rather than in the product itself). Like Farge, Howe’s fervor for digging within the physical archives seems to place value in the act of seeking, not the products that seeking creates.