Any old Tuesday 3

Dear Void,

Post-grad check-in #25. I’m feeling exhausted and I don’t know why. I worked late yesterday and after stopping off to get groceries, I didn’t get home till after 6pm. So, after working in the text troughs, I'm writing to you a little earlier than usual.

If you like your information quantitative, then please know that I have scrutinised my way through approx 3700 words and still have 65% of Perloff’s ‘Statistical Traffic’ to go.

Desk view

It’s slow work because scrutinising *is* slow work but I’m making it slower by referring to Howe’s text whenever Perloff mentions specifics from it. Such as the little stick figure in Aunt Louie’s copy of the Irish Song Book with Original Irish Airs (pp 59-60) (see yesterday’s blog ON ACTING UPON OTHER THINGS) or perhaps a reference to Pound’s The Cantos and the use of pseudonyms or nicknames such as for Eliot (‘Possum’) or Ford Madox Ford (Fordie). And then I realise I don’t have my copy of The Cantos here, but at home, and I wonder if there’s a digital copy at the library and there was, so I downloaded a copy and now I can search the text. And then I stop and try to recall why I needed The Cantos at all and o, yes, that’s right, Perloff took a sideways step when she was making a case for why the complex world of Howe’s documentary poem (The Midnight) relates to The Cantos in that they both point to other textual references outside of their own text. This is what Howe means when she says there is telepathy of information outside and inside a book. I want to say something about the Reader providing the telepathic capacity but, again, super tired. Will think on this more and address it tomorrow.

I’m up to the section that describes Howe’s consideration of literary cutwork’s relationship to the lace work, ‘opus scissum’. An online Latin translator tells me the two words translate directly as ‘work rent’ or ‘rent work,’ and I like it. To rent work asunder! Let’s! But not this manuscript. Not this time. This time I’m in conversation. Together, the commonplace book and I turn. (I have, in the recent past, rent asunder photocopies of the manuscript and I’m likely to do that again).

I am interested in the way Howe’s The Midnight builds a portrait or a profile of her mother (for whom the work is an elegy) and of herself out of associations and connections. A portrait is a relational space. A space carved out by text and image. 

I took some time to analyse the first page of text in The Midnight since Perloff described three shifts occurring there (underlined):

Moves from informational statement (description of practice) to a statement of debatable truth (sign and thing consubstantial), poetics (word and image rivalry), another debatable statement, a personal expression (perhaps to do with the reader and the writer having to separate over meaning?), another statement, a description, a sentence about unfinished sentences (from left field), obliqueness, and finally performed strangeness (abstraction of sheet=border). 

Note to self: a sheet and a piece of tissue paper are planes, more than dividing lines, dividing planes. 3-dimensional.

And now I’ve got to a point where I can’t see words anymore. Time to go home. And because we are out of isolation and back to business, the kid and I have yoga tonight which we have missed. And which we need.

And here we must separate again, Void. 

Jx

Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York: New Directions Books, 2003.

Perloff, Marjorie. “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight.” Boundary 2 36, no. 3 (2009): 205–228.