The Small Space of a Pause Susan Howe's Poetry and the Space Between

by Joyce, Elisabeth W.

• ISBN13: 9781611483499
• ISBN10: 1611483492
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-01
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Summary

This book is about Susan Howe's poetry from the perspective of space. Howe reshapes cultural configurations of space through her drive to infiltrate interstitial areas of 'third' spaces: the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and the uncharted lands. Nuances, frontiers, thresholds, edges, fuzzinesses, ambiguities, pauses, singularities, margins: these are the spaces where her poetry occurs, places that lie between two states. Rather than absences, therefore, the space of this poetry is a place of being, of what Gilles Deleuze and FZlix Guattari refer to as becoming. Third space is contested because it must also call itself into question in reimagining itself; in questioning its condition and rethinking itself, it contradicts itself repeatedly, setting up the form of an ever-present yet ever-shifting paradox of self-presencing. This site is also, however, the place of no frames or boundaries, a place that is all margins and singularities, that site of displacement, where migration is eternal and violence is perennial. Nomadism becomes an emblem in Howe's poetry for the twentieth-century condition as it represents the continual movement through space of the body, that never-ending, always-perpetuated sense of loss of place, but that equally charged coming into being regardless of the space within which that loss/becoming occurs.

Author Biography

Elisabeth W. Joyce is a professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and has received graduate degrees from Temple University, the University of Delaware, and Carnegie Mellon University. Her previous work, Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (BUP, 1999), explored relations between Marianne Moore's poetry and the visual arts. Dr. Joyce also studies online communities in terms of how relationships and commitments form and how policies develop and adapt to context.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. 7
List of Abbreviations	p. 11
Introduction: "Space Is a Frame We Map Ourselves In": Susan Howe's Poetry and the Spaces Between	p. 15
Contextures: Susan Howe's "voices stuttering out of the wilderness"	p. 26
"Thorowly" American: Susan Howe's Guide to Orienteering in the Adirondacks	p. 35
Perspective's Space and Time: Susan Howe's Secret History of the Dividing Line and "Rückenfigur"	p. 51
"Maneuvering Between Points Between Any Two Points": Geometry, the Fourth Dimension, and Fractals in Pythagorean Silence	p. 73
When Text Becomes Images	p. 101
Hinged, Contingent, Joined: Susan Howe's Hinge Picture	p. 128
Force Fields: Susan Howe's Cabbage Gardens as Third Space	p. 150
"Pain Is Nailed to the Landscape in Time": Landscape and Memory	p. 166
Between or on the Edges: Margins and Parentheses as Taskscapes in Susan Howe's Melville's Marginalia	p. 197
Displacement: "Territorialism Is Our Exile"	p. 212
Notes	p. 235
Bibliography	p. 279
Index	p. 293
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