Frame Structures
Early Poems 1974-1979
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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In Frame Structures, Susan Howe brings together those of her earliest poems she wishes to remain in print, and in the forms in which she cares to have them last.
Gathered here are versions of Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) that differ in some respects from their original small-press editions. In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.
Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).
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This eagerly awaited edition brings back into print four of five long-poem chapbooks with which Howe moved from the visual arts into poetry. The interplay is readily apparent. Howe compresses her lines into "fields" of text, where rhymes and the ghost of the pentameter convincingly illustrate her preoccupation: how history lives through us, and vice versa, as we become "a pure past that returns to itself unattackable in the framework" of a poem. Though the details of her part-Anglo patrician, part-Irish immigrant heritage discussed in the long preface may seem like pedigree posturing, we slowly realize that for her, every historical figure is fascinating as a "cinder of the lexical drift," a person who now lives only through our reading of them. The genius of poems like "Hinge Picture," entering the terror and eros that created the Bible, and "Secret History of the Dividing Line," which explores the beginnings of exile and nationhood, is in the impulsive and authentic voices (unlike those of Pound's Cantos) given these generative speakers. No nostalgia, wonder or prefab interpretations cloud the immediacy or exquisite lyricism of the better works here. We are struck by "the war-whoop in each dusty narrative."
