the stars are eating: 2007

A Net For (S)Words :
The Grid and Susan Howe’s Poetics

Please Note: When I posted this essay the format changed slightly, but enough, however, to perhaps change the reading. The examples of Howe's word grids are really just that. In this essay they appear in normal lines, but in their original form they are words evenly distributed in grid like formats that extend to the margins. I apologize for this uncontrollable blog feature.

With this essay I will discuss the grid in Susan Howe’s work and its connection with modern visual practices of art. Beyond location and variable linguistic and visual uses of the grid in Howe’s work, I will discuss a certain Modern spiritual /material split that the doubling nature of the grid, together with a doubling poetics of destruction, loss, and eternal return, might have previously implied when connected to ideas circulating around Rosalind Krauss’ notion of the grid as a “repressive” modernist emblem. Where Krauss deems the grid anti-mimetic, anti-historical, anti-narrative, and anti-real, I will discuss how, with the fusion of poetics, Susan Howe turns this visual artifact of apparent irreconcilable difference on its side, either “upside” or “sideup.”[1] It would then seem that the apparent modern avante garde paradox of building with lack and opposition does not necessarily have to be the servant to a tautology filling that tall single column of the capitol I with substance, but with Howe’s poetry can become as Linda Reinfeld shows us, a narrative of connective force and an allegory of multiple modes of individuation:

Thought dissolves into the medium of thought so that the word alone, like Hope in the destructive element immersed, generates the zero degree of meaning that makes possible a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.[2]

Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s The Intertwining—The Chiasm, will prove useful to discuss one way that this notion of a ‘Zero degree of meaning’ produces an ‘X’ marking the spot of visual/textual connectivity, sounding out, while maintaining highly individual modes of perceptual difference to make possible “…a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.” The phenomenological engagement of Howe’s poetics shows the potentiating nature of post-linear work like hers to connect with the differences of individual experience, offering new ways of seeing and reading image-text complexes, which activate the passive reader into the process of making meaning, challenging classical modes of perspective.

Questions may still remain: doesn’t the continual use of the grid, and a reliance on it and its “mathematical continua,” imply or even assign a certain linear truth value to it? To this I would answer yes; but I would like to suggest that it has been centripetal, closed, clinical and “repressive” analysis of the grid that appears to be symptomatic of the very modernist myths they try to diagnose. And so, from the renewal of possibility emerges a renewal of connectivity, not connected in any way consciously, as fascist regimes, talking cures or organized religions require, but connected through the individuation of new inventions of sight developing through modes of vision itself . And as text is an integral written code of our view, the connective tissue of one aspect of phenomenology, Susan Howe’s “zero degree of meaning” can act as a connective force among women and men reading into the “side-up” square of the grid, which when slightly tilted “Side-down[3]”( either by loss of reason or refracted by the water of Hope Atherton’s river crossing ) shifts into an ‘X’: a “zero degree of meaning,” which marks the spot for a connection through independent modes of salience and solidarity. And previous polarities which can be associated with the grid, such as the relationship between author and reader, subject and object, and privacy and publicity, with the work of Howe’s grids, cave in on themselves -- “It thus makes it possible for a single person to be both.”[4]

Susan Howe writes with a poetics of doubling. She builds with negation and the drama of loss.[5] Her projections of “mathematic continua” and the tension she creates against such rationality come together with such force that dialectical discourse itself systematically implodes, and often we are left with no more than chunks of word, barely strung to a grid, whose open spaces dominate the page reverberating the sound of words that are both separated and relational as they emerge -- isolated and vibrating from their fall-- into the boxes of a word square:

S
2, only fury cleave most air

lovely asymmetry incline light

lean imagery altus x soar 6

arc hue heraldic puzzle midhe

paradigm bolt motivic prebendery

moor breach weir tactile spinster

herd polyphonic mathematic madhouse

skip cottage easter snow homine

L laracor aye yew medb heron

will stirring 1668 bound purely

( ) aye estersnowe enclosure
Prism
Pennant ‘nature of the future’ [6]

Susan Howe’s poetics are a function of the eye and functions of vision are poetic forms. The way sound resonates from her words depends on the scopic space of the margins and implied fields that surround them. Much of their power comes from their visuality, their appearance on the page and just as a grid contains itself, both in form and content, so too does Howe’s poetics.

Howe’s grids, either as the subject or structure of her poetics, are modes through which to rupture syntax and dialectical synthesis. Even when Howe recalls the mythical and romantic figures of Tristram and Iseult, they are brought to the surface of her sleet- whipped page as devices of literary construction and not to extend the syntactical orderings of their myths. Or are they?

Iseult seaward gazing Iseult stands at Tintangel
( pale secret fair) on the mid stairs between
Allegorical Tristram or light and dark symbolism
His knights are at war
Sleet whips the page.[7]

When Iseult and Tristram are taken off the syntactical grids of Arthurian romance (or Hope Atherton off the Puritanical grid of their written testimony) and stripped bare of their mythical significance by slicing through their original context with the materiality of Howe’s own sleet- whipped page, does it create an irreconcilable split between the materiality of literary construction and the tumultuous spirit of myth? “When you slice into the past and the future, what abrupt violence may open under you? The stories of Pandora and Psyche must have been told before the flood.”[8] Does the opposition between “empty” and “full” become the reigning factor for readings of Howe? Are we left with the empty surfaces of the emblematic grid of 20th Century art, that even when painted in attempts to unify the spirit/ material split, are subject to unchangeability? Or when Howe reduces the richness of Swinburnian descriptive illusion to the stark recognition of a single figure’s location on a “mid stair between / light and dark symbolism,” has the illusion of the myth lost its significance with the drastic reduction to what Brian Reed calls “stick figures”? Is meaning’s source in the sparse armature of its linguistic surface- in its materiality as language? This is certainly true, but sparse, unchangeable, irreconcilable and permanently divided it is not. And a sign that has gone through the process of becoming an “empty” signifier is not “empty” at all; it is as “full” as any other sign carrying its history of meaning. The so called “empty” literary device carries with it the process of its becoming a literary device, and this shift is as full as any other myth (its strategy is meaning) contained in the representation of circulation itself. There is no mark written in the context of other marks which can remain extra-lexical[9] “Words are like swords. “S” makes word a sword.”[10] Howe’s ruptures are exactly counter to the modern contention that the grid is rigidly ant-mimetic. In fact, they are an exact mimesis of the functions of the modern grid itself—failing-- and through its use, Howe breaks down literary constructedness to suggest something else.
: X: Perhaps, with the case of Tristram and Iseult, Howe relocates the lovers to a place safe from the resentful lance of Mark, who can be seen as the symbol for a forced synthesis of an age old triad— the undoing of two adulterous lovers for the sake of the social contract of chivalry and marriage that eliminates the lovers autonomy. And as much as this division of the two lovers is for the sake of the synthesis of a social contract, it also ruptures the illusion of the synthesis itself which, while usurping the couple, eliminates their autonomy. This is the doubling work of the grid. It is Mark, who has splintered his Arthurian lance with his (S) word pulled from the lines of the emblematic modern grid of spatial division, who threatens distance and autonomy on an open field. Susan Howe takes the diachronic verticality of stacked myth and legend and changes the once representative distance of time and duration into a chiasmic surface.

: X: In his essay: “Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word
Squares,” Brian Reed suggests that this is only half the story. Depending on one’s
reading of the Tristram/ Iseult myths, through Howe’s syntactical ruptures, these figures can become either “empty stick figures” or “full” explications “trailing” the “clouds of glory” of the myth.[11] As Reed points out, if we consider Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, within which Iseult’s soliloquy illuminates itself through countless descriptions of light and dark and a failure to create a distinction between the two, then the figure on “the mid stairs/ between light and dark symbolism,” becomes a full one, recalling “a precursor poet writing magnificent verse at the height of his career.”[12] But if we consider the nearly tragic abridgement of the illustrious Swinburnian reference to the literal materiality of the statement: “between light and dark symbolism,” then readers less familiar with the Tristram/ Iseult myths, or overly familiar with it and ready to re-imagine the stories, are given the chance to reify the myths with both the materiality of its language devices and their relationship to previous circulations of the stories. The reader becomes an active participant in the meaning making process in a dynamic way previously absent from linear structural themes. This works for Howe in two ways. On one level authorial intent shifts to the reader, inevitably challenging ideology which holds that the spectator or reader must remain a passive participant. And on another level Howe’s Tristram and Iseult can both maintain their materiality as literary devices while “ trailing” the “ clouds of glory” of their precedents. And just as interpretations of Agnes Martin painting’s ( paintings Howe looked at with intrigue) shift drastically depending on the viewer’s location, so too does the interpretation of Howe’s poetics depend upon the location and point of view of the reader.

To fully engage the uses of the grid in Howe’s work we must face the dilemma set forth by W.J.T. Mitchell concerning Post-Linear poets or Language Poetry:

“The image text…that is the whole ensemble of relations between the visual and the verbal… the study of image-text relations is far from straightforward…there is no “Metalanguage” available or possible that would enable critics to speak confidently, synoptically and transhistorically about the interface between the verbal and the visual.”[13]

This ‘dilemma’ has perhaps been a refreshing aspect of Language or Postlinear Poetry. It has forced critics to insist on “literalness and materiality” in their analyses, rather than too-abstract and falsely generalizing statements.”[14]Only by mapping the idiosyncratic specificity of the poet’s vocation, history, and of course her words, can one begin to make productive analysis that can aid in the creation and circulation of such poetry. This can bring readers a fraction closer to understanding the limits and potentials of the subtle workings within the relationship of sounding/seeing/ reading and writing sight.

To begin to understand the “literalness and materiality” of the grid work in Howe’s poetry turning briefly to Howe’s vocation as an installation artist in the New York art world of the 1960’s and 1970’s will be helpful. Before Susan Howe chose poetry she had already chosen installation art after studying painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. She began working in New York during the linguistic turn of conceptualism and the rise of minimalism. So her work was influenced by many experimentally and conceptually minded artists working at the time such as Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and John Cage.

Again, revisiting Reeds reading of Howe; he points out that her early installations looked like her later “Word Squares.” In keeping with the early conceptualism of which she was surrounded, Susan Howe utilized unframed photocopies of seemingly boring or mundane images snatched from magazines and journals. She also incorporated her own written text. Appropriated imagery and text were brought together and displayed in gallery spaces in hyper- rectilinear formats. The texts of her early aesthetic investigations were kept small and placed within the sea of the white wall- as to interrupt the field of open space. These text bits and squares interspersed with similarly sized images formed geometrical orderings all placed on implied grids.[15]

Surmounting the peripheral effect of the early conceptualists was the work of Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhart, whose work brings the emblematic modern grid directly to the surface for consideration. Susan Howe was also fascinated early on by the writing of Charles Olsen and Robert Smithson for their “interest in archaeology and mapping. Space. North American space—how it’s connected to memory, war, and history.”[16] It was at the Greene Gallery in the late sixties while looking at Agnes Martin paintings that Howe made a notable transition from installation artist to poet. She had been writing “word lists” and was “scared to begin writing sentences.” At the time she wasn’t sure why: “But it just gradually happened that I was more interested in the problems of those words on the page than in the photographs I used or the watercolor washes.”[17] Howe’s early aesthetic investigations were concerned with the effect text could have on one’s reading of an image or as was the case with one of her most noted aesthetic contemporary, Agnes Martin, how words could effect one’s reading of chromatic grids:

“I remember a show Agnes Martin had at the Greene gallery – small minimalist paintings, but each one had a title; it fascinated me how the title affected my reading of the lines and colors.”[18]

Agnes Martin is most noted for painting grids: muted color fields with delicate, often times hand drawn, grid structures superimposed over them. The titles of Martin paintings are generally drawn from nature with titles like: Water Flower, Leaves, The Beach, Desert, Wheat, and Milk River. It can be argued that the poesis of Martin paintings and what Susan Howe saw in them was in the poetic relationship between the ‘apparent’ anti-natural structure of her grids and the effect words have on their readings.
Writing about the history of the grid in modern art Rosalind Krauss states:

“In the spatial sense, the grid states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art, flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the over-all regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.”[19]

If one accepts the notion that the emblematic grid of 20th century art is anti-mimetic, anti-natural, and anti-real, as if something could be anti-real, then one overlooks how Howe’s work, with the addition of words on the visual field turns this notion against itself.

Grids
So Meta No Meta, So meta Some.
No meta no meta no meta none.

Grids serve a double function. They connect as they produce fissures; they represent Western logic while maintaining its extreme limits. Grids structure our architectural, geographical and communicative realities while they serve as a tool for realizing our larger ambitions. They extend the sequential texture of the coast over the un-scouted vastness of the ocean. They create temporality. They network our computational lives. For some they move toward transcendence and a kinship with the divine, while for others they are the elimination of faith and Hope slayed by the razored inscriptions of reason.

The Centrifugal Grid
The centrifugal grid is an open system. It is the metaphysical marker of everywhere. It has no borders. It carries its extent outward and with its extension, marks the organizational coordinates of itself ad infinitum. From the Latin centrum (center) and fugere ( to flee), the centrifugal grid is the continuum of fleeing. Centrifugal grids react to the centripetal negations of Howe’s coupled ballads written at the “Barriers”: “Temper and order/The leashed stars kindle thin” and from the collapse of these clashing couplets, the centrifugal grid gains its velocity with its protraction: “ Pure knowledge freed from willing/ fixed in fleeting.”

Centripetal Grids : “ Epitaphs young in a box told as you fly”
In stark contrast to the centrifugal, the centripetal grid is a closed structure and bound by its own extent. It cannot denote an exterior, hence directing its extent inward. It is an implosive force – it is discrete, logocentric and emblematic.
The centripetal grid is Agnes Martins Water Flower removed from its field and separated from its natural genesis. It becomes the centered-petal, flower- hood, lost. The centripetal grid is an isolated fragment; alone, alienated, it posits an outside, though because of this isolation any greater spatial field remains foreign and disconnected from its own interior. And the floating petal, the centered- petal, the centripetal grid, in its tautological form repeating its closure, eliminates the potential for transcendent expansion. It has a border and a barrier—Susan Howe gives speeches at these barriers—“ ballads within ballads.” The lines of these speeches bind themselves as they speak to themselves and reverberate with their clashing ‘ known extent’; they collapse at the barriers of their apparent isolated sense and seem to erase exteriority at times:

Banks of wild bees in story
Sing in wood soon
****************** Say say that a ballad
wrapped in a ballad

******************
Each days last purpose
Each days firm progress

********************
Schoolgirls sleeping
Schoolboys sleeping and stemmed
*********************
Temper and order
The leashed stars kindle
*********************
Perpendicular
Clear space of blackness

These isolated, often contradictory centripetal couplets, double as resonators of sound, verving from the implosion of their fixed meaning. As the title suggests, Howe is neither content nor willing to accept these barriers, which she methodically ruins with romantic valor. And the transcendent expansion of the centrifugal structure, the exteriority of the closed centripetal couplets and their once alienated interiors, begin to change their extent. It is a change toward outwardness, exteriority—the expansion into an open field. Though they remain contained by the speeches themselves, their motivation becomes clear:

Possession
Hide and seek border region
******************
Possibility done
Crossway turn
****************
Pure knowledge freed from willing
Fixed in fleeting

Where some may have seen Krauss’ discourse of the grid in 20th Century Modernism as a critical measure of the ‘repressive’ tendencies of an unchangeable tautology, is exactly where the post-linear poetics of Susan Howe gain their importance.

Hope Atherton’s Step From The Grid

A Diver F a l l
Building I N G
w/ fall w/ building
I n g A Diver

“ Posit gaze level diminish lamp and asleep (selv) cannot see

Is notion most open apparition past Halo view border redden

possess remote so abstract life are lost spatio-temporal hum

Maoris empirical Kantian a little lesson concatenation up

tree fifty shower see step shot immanence force to Mohegan

blue glare( essence)cow bed leg extinct draw scribe upside
even blue(A)ash-tree fleece comfort(B)draw scribe sideup”[20]

As Hope Atherton steps off the ‘ repressive’ grid of Western logic, and enters the water where the intersecting lines of Western reason previously marked time, sequenced and ordered, the vertical and the horizontal barriers of the grid, in the eyes of Hope, are seen sideways or “side-up.” And the closed centripetal squares, seen in the magnified representations of the ‘transcendent’ structure of the protracting centrifugal, the centered- figural extensions of the Modernist grid, become X’s seen sideways through the reflecting water of Hope Atherton’s crossing. Within the tilted grid, at this X, is a chiasmic opening, a “recess” for the reader and writer, the subject and object, the inventor of one’s own way beyond static, emblematic modernist divisions, which become at their worst, “told as [we] fly”:

“Body perception thought of perceiving ( half-thought

chaotic architect repudiate line Q confine lie link realm

circle a euclidean curtail theme theme toll function coda

severity whey crayon so distant grain scalp gnat carol

omen Cur cornice zed primitive shad sac stone fur bray

tub epoch too tall fum alter rude recess emblem sixty key

Epitaphs young in box told as you fly”[21]

This process, through which Howe subordinates higher orders of meaning and perspective in general, changes the grid into a hyper-mimetic field. In writing's performative mode laid bare, it narrates the way in which modern illusions of depth, duration and mythical syntactical connection can break down and fail. Her generation was continually affected psychically by the realities of war. So it was in war-- in the peripheral aftermath of war-- that modernist myths and illusions of history, power, and structure were reduced to their barren and empty surfaces. Howe’s poetry can be much like the bombarded walls of a war- stricken city, where exposed re-barbed grids bend over ruins of mostly disintegrated concrete barriers and walls. The western word hangs clinging to steel grids. Howe’s word and fragment involutions, then, become an answer to Krauss’ assertions that the modern grid is emblematic of anti-mimetic, anti-historical, and anti-natural ‘repression’. With the addition of words, either dealing with the grid as subject matter or using the grid as a syntactical structure , Howe shows us an exact mimesis of that repressive and dogmatic modern emblem – Failing.

But this failure made so apparent at the surface of Susan Howe’s poetics only remains so for those interested in maintaining the polarities of unified and linear syntactical structures. The questioning of the distinctions between polar structures, and their inability to remain clear, can become an endgame for certain modes of classical perspective which circulate between transmissions of authorial authority and its subjects. This failure is only the failure of the simulacra of authority to maintain its illusion. And in fact this is no failure at all, but a fusion of the subject and the object. So, through Susan Howe’s use of the grid, the anti-narrative and anti-mimetic notion of the grid changes into a narrative of modernism’s emblematic failure,“ prey to destroy in dark theme/ Emblem offictitious narrative .”

“Body Perception Thought of Perceiving”

While Krauss’ discourse of grids provides much insight into the importance of Howe’s poetics, so too does Krauss’ careful reading of Kasha Linville’s phenomenological interpretations of Agnes Martin paintings. Krauss accepts Linville’s account that there are essentially three viewing distances for Martin paintings.

The first “ up-close reading” is involved with the materiality of the support or canvas. It is at this level that we are made aware of the material devices of drawing. The hand dragged splinterings of the micro-illusions that make the whole of the inscribed simulacra of visuality, of the illusion, of the grid, are brought into close focus. Similarly, it is in the “up-close” reading of Howe’s language devices, in her word grids and imploding centripetal couplets, that their sonorous materiality is laid bare.

The second viewing distance for Linville is in the “moving back” or second “moment.” It is here where the ambiguities of the illusion take over. As the illusion takes place, the raw materiality of the language of lines begin to extend into an illusion- the simulacra of transcendental extension. The many micro-centripetal structures of the field extend outward and imply a protraction. It is at this second illusionistic distance, in Howe’s work, where one begins to notice the changing extent of her involutive couplets moving toward an outward extension, on the open field of a syntactically connected larger poem with it its histories and myths. And the “seclusion in symbol sovereign” becomes “ Epitaphs young in a box/ told as you fly.”

It is at the third moment, or completely distant and objective vantage point, that the illusion of the second moment, where the signifier morphs into the sign, that the grids of Agnes Martin close down on themselves, returning them to their centripetal structures. The whole system closes in on itself again—the interpretation is handed over. Its meaning is in its relationship to the other, to the receiver, whose perceptual experiences are connected through what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘reversibility’, the reversibility of ‘the seeing’ and ‘the visible’ .As these paintings depend solely on one’s position, so too do Howe’s poetics. The passive viewer is made active by the seemingly anti-absorptive techniques of the grid, which when permeated produce an experience where…the subject and the object are lost within each other moving only to the music of the writing’s performability:

“ We do not possess the musical or sensible ideas, precisely because they are negativity or absence circumscribed; they possess us. The performer is no longer producing or reproducing the sonata: he feels himself, and the others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata sings through him or cries out so suddenly that he must ‘dash on his bow’ to follow it.”[ Maurice Meleau-Ponty, The Intertwining- The Chiasm]

The grid in Howe’s post-linear poetics is not simply negation, or division, or absence of explication in favor of the idea, pure and moving without, into transcendental protraction. Nor is this her grid the visible artifact of the armature of the sensible world, left to its “ bare values substituted for the mysterious entity …perceived.” The grid in Susan Howe’s work is both.

Perhaps, Howe’s poetics can be seen as the place where the visible ‘reverses’ or becomes the ‘ the seer’, where the divisions between what has been described as the language under utterance and inscription itself, rise to visibility in their inherent tensions, the grid emphasizing the inability to possess a language which is no ones, but already holds all ideas at once, as it seeps through places that have not yet been traced and connects others’ experiences through modes of vision itself which stand “without equivalent.” Just as Howe says herself: “ She must be traced through many dark paths as a boy.”

It is at the X’s in the grid turned sideways through independent experience that distinctions between idea and explication, subject and object, language and writing and author and reader break down. Susan Howe, through the use of the grid, makes signification overtly visible so that the reader might enter the entire process of signification itself. Merlau-Ponty discusses the reversibility of ‘the seeing’ and ‘the visible’ as a means to show the aesthesiological relationship of others, and just as that which is visible is taken up by the seer that has unveiled it, there is also a reversibility of speech, a reversibility which is the ultimate goal of Howe’s visual poetics:

“ And, as the visible takes hold of the look which has unveiled it and which forms a part of it, the signification rebounds upon its own means, it annexes to itself the speech that becomes an object of science, it antedates itself by a retrograde movement which is never completely belied—because already, in opening the horizon of the nameable and of the sayable, the speech acknowledged that it has its place in that horizon; because no locator speaks without making himself in advance allocutary, be it only for himself, because with one sole gesture he closes the circuit of his relation to himself and that of his relation to others and, with the same stroke, also sets himself up as delocutary, speech of which one speaks: he offers himself and offers every word to a universal Word.” [ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Intertwining- The Chiasm]

This universal Word set into motion through the act of speaking, emerges at the barriers of Susan Howe’s poetics , either before her involutive couplets or word grids are inscribed into the visibility of her page, or after, when they reverberate out, into her writing’s performability as phenomenological sound. This is not a metaphysical move. The universal Word which emerges at the edges of the grid in Howe’s work is not a generality of being or a connection to the transcendental, but a universal of idiosyncratic interpretation and experience. We can all agree we are different without disappearing. Her poetics conflate the notion of the separatist I. The separatist I in Howe’s work is not the formation of a stable and independent ego; it does not further conceal the authority of the author from the passive reader, it incorporates the reader into the process of individuation. The place of the separatist I where Howe takes us is in language, separate from its previous linear notions of duration and perspective, carved with its own (s)word into ‘that which is without equivalent”

Formation of a Separatist, I
Crops
His horse
Drew his sword
Swung his sword
Said he would slash and slay

1. only air most lovely meath
longside lean soaring in mist
matin sky breathing longside weir
herd naming yew colt cottage
lesson laracor aye midhe heron
stirring inlaid ( ) enclosure
Stellar
breach boyne churn surley blade
pierce side clearly meadow my
here foam pen still yew 1.

1] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987.
[2] Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992. pp. 140
[3] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation Of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987
[4] See, Rorty, Richard, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp.198. Rorty’s discussion about cruelty and solidarity and how it is possible to maintain liberal hope and private irony at the same time, is parallel with the functions of the grid in Susan Howe’s poetics which makes visible the possibility for a single person to be both.
[5] See, Reinfeld, Linda, Language Poetry Writing As Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
[6] Howe, Susan, The Europe Of Trusts, From The Difficulties, Sun and Moon Press, 1990
[7] See, Howe, Susan From Defenestration of Prague

[8] Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/howe/autobio.htm, 2006.
[9] See Bernstein’s discussion about Impermeability and Absorption in, Bernstein, Charles, A Poetics, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1992…
[10] See, Howe, Susan, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Modern American Poetry, http//:www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g-l/howe/autobio.htm, 2006.
In this interview Howe recalls that she was interested in “ bringing from words what they were able to bring” stating: “ “S” makes a word sword.”
[11] See, Reed, Brian, Eden or Ebb of the Sea: Susan Howe’s Word Squares and Postlinear Poetics, from Postmodern Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v014/14.2reed.html Brian Reeds article has been tremendously influential on the conception of this essay, in fact I would consider this essay an extension of many of Reed’s points.

[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Howe, Susan, Modern American Poetry, Fragments Toward Autobiography, Form The Difficulties 1989, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/howe/autobio.htm
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Krauss, Rosalind, Grids, You Say, October #9, 1979
[20] See, Howe, Susan, Articulation of Sound Forms, Awede, 1987. Unpaginated.
[21] Ibid.