Song of a Reformed Headhunter

That This , about the death of Howe's husband, the philosopher Peter Hare, is an odd and sometimes beautiful book. The three parts that make up the book are very different, one might even say, at odds. Or so they seem. The first part titled "The Disappearance Approach" is a rather conventional arrangement of diary-like prose entries. Beginning with the discovery of Hare dead in his bed, it proceeds by weaving fragments of memories with reflections on Jonathan Edwards and his family, Milton, W.H. Auden, Nicolas Poussin, and Ovid. The literary and artistic references give a sense of the couple's shared life, the Edwards reinforcing the New England connection, but they are also a rather familiar device to raise the tone and deepen the significance of one's loss. Nothing particularly memorable is said about the writers. After quoting from a letter by Sara Edwards telling her daughter of Jonathan's death, Howe comments, "I love to read her husband's an...

According to  Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts , by Georges Jean, when medieval scribes overlooked a line of writing, they would write it in the margin or at the bottom of the manuscript, and draw an arrow from it to the place where it should have appeared. The artist would even decorate the arrow with drawings of plants and animals climbing up the line of reparation. This wonderful detail coalesced with my reading of Susan Howe's That This , a book of poems about her husband's death. The book is made up of three parts. The third part, also the title sequence, "delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal" (back cover). Most of the poems there consist of two couplets separated by stanza break. I follow that pattern in my poem "Copy" and include a missing line at the bottom of the poem, a line which should be re-inserted into the stanza break, where it belongs, with an arrow. The epigraph is from the first part ...

From the point of view of this skeptical non-reader of avant-garde poetry, Perloff's book is an excellent introduction to the New Poetics of the twenty-first century. The new poetry, according to Perloff, is the poetry of citation and appropriation, a poetry that confronts the present-day challenge of managing, presenting and reframing the information so readily and abundantly available through the new technologies such as the Internet. Older poetry cited and appropriated too, but, Perloff argues, the new poetry does so to such an extent that it becomes a different kind. The inspiration for it is not so much Eliot's "The Waste Land" as Pound's Cantos , where citation becomes structural. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project , which Perloff discusses in her first chapter, is also a source of inspiration. In its organization into folders, its juxtaposition of quotations, its non-linear index, and its use of symbols to link one quotation to another on a different p...