“That Book's Been Read ”: Surface and Depth, Reading with Susan Howe

“That Book's been Read,” the Poet Susan Howe said this about a copy—my copy—of her book, that this, it has been mauled, spine not quite broken but on the verge, phrases scored under and over, words circled, passages marked with vertical lines, gnarled questions to myself from myself in handwriting only I can read. Program leaflets scrawled with notes are tucked between the endpaper and the back cover and transparent sticky tabs peak up over the top and out from the sides. The only thing I won't do is turn down the corner of a page. Everything else is fair game and the more I care about a book, the more abuse it gets. Fortunately Howe understands.

Experimental poetics and materialities in the works of Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland and Caitlin Fisher

Αυτή η διδακτορική διατριβή διερευνά την πειραματική ποιητική των Βόρειων Αμερικανίδων ποιητριών Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland και Caitlin Fisher, εστιάζοντας στην υλική υπόσταση των έργων τους η οποία διαφοροποιείται μέσω των διαφορετικών μέσων που έχουν χρησιμοποιηθεί για τη δημιουργία τους όπως είναι το έντυπο βιβλίο, ο υπολογιστής, το iPad, και η επαυξημένη πραγματικότητα. Συγκεκριμένα, η διατριβή επικεντρώνεται στις δυνατότητες καθώς και στα όρια των έντυπων και ψηφιακών εργαλείων όταν τίθενται στη διάθεση της λογοτεχνικής και ιδιαίτερα της ποιητικής παραγωγής. Η παρούσα διατριβή διερευνά πώς οι έννοιες της ανατροφοδότησης, ανάγνωσης από τον υπολογιστή, εμβύθισης αλλά και συσχετισμούς της φυσικής μας γλώσσας με τις γλώσσες προγραμματισμού εμπλουτίζουν τον ορισμό της ποίησης. Αυτή η διδακτορική διατριβή βασίζεται στις θεωρίες των Johanna Drucker, Ν. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich και Marie Laure Ryan σε σχέση με την υλικότητα, την οπτικότητα, τον προγραμματισμό και τις φυσικές γλώσσες, τη βάση δεδομένων, την αφήγηση, την εμβύθιση και ανατροφοδότηση. Το βασικό ερώτημα που επιχειρεί να διατυπώσει αυτή η διατριβή είναι πώς μπορούν να ερμηνευτούν τέτοιες πειραματικές ποιητικές πρακτικές, γεγονός που επιτυγχάνεται υιοθετώντας μια ευέλικτη προσέγγιση της ποιητικής πρακτικής, υπογραμμίζοντας ταυτόχρονα τα λογοτεχνικά και ποιητικά στοιχεία των έργων που η διατριβή αυτή διερευνά. Το πρώτο κεφάλαιο επιχειρεί έναν θεωρητικό διάλογο μεταξύ της ποιητικής παραγωγής των τριών ποιητριών υπό μελέτη και συγκεκριμένων θεωρητικών τάσεων που έχουν αναπτυχθεί κατά τη διάρκεια της Αμερικανικής ποιητικής παραγωγής τον εικοστό και εικοστό πρώτο αιώνα, ενώ στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο συζητείται η ποιητική του έντυπου μέσου της Susan Howe στα βιβλία της The Midnight (2003), That This (2010), Spontaneous Particular: The Telepathy of Archives (2014) και Debths (2017). Το τρίτο κεφάλαιο επικεντρώνεται στο μεταβατικό στάδιο από το έντυπο στο ψηφιακό μέσο στην έντυπη ποιητική συλλογή Dragon Logic (2013) της Stephanie Strickland και στο πολυμεσικό της έργο Vniverse (2002, 2014). Το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο διερευνά την ποίηση σε επαυξημένη πραγματικότητα όπως αποτυπώνεται στα έργα Circle (2010) και 200 ​​Castles (2012) της Caitlin Fisher. Αυτή η διατριβή επιχειρεί να προσεγγίσει αλλά και να καταγράψει μία σειρά σύγχρονων πειραματικών έργων ποίησης σε μια προσπάθεια να επισημανθεί ο αντίκτυπος των τεχνολογιών γραφής, έντυπης και ψηφιακής, ως προς τη σύνθεση και ανάγνωση της ποίησης.

What a Performance

From the late seventies until her death, british-born writer and artist anna mendelssohn (1948–2009) authored fifteen poetry collections and at least two dozen short fictions and dramas, often publishing under the name Grace Lake. A consummate autodidact, Mendelssohn's passion was international vanguardism, a truth exemplified by the writers she translated: in Turkey in 1969, the poetry of political exile Nâzim Hikmet; from the late nineties, the work of Gisèle Prassinos, the surrealist child prodigy celebrated by André Breton. Mendelssohn's devotion to a modernist legacy situates her within the British Poetry Revival, a label applied to a wave of avant-garde poets that surfaced in the sixties and seventies. Given that she spent her last three decades in Cambridge, Mendelssohn can be further located on the margins of “that most underground of poetic brotherhoods, the Cambridge Poets” (Leslie 28). Mendelssohn's poems appeared in journals receptive to experimentalism, among them Parataxis, Jacket, Critical Quarterly, and Comparative Criticism. In the 1990s, Mendelssohn was anthologized in collections released by Virago, Macmillan, and Reality Street. Iain Sinclair included her in his influential Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996); in 2004, she featured in Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points (Salt Publishing, 2004) alongside John Ashbery and Susan Howe. Her most readily available text remains Implacable Art (Salt Publishing, 2000). Increasingly recognized in her later years, Mendelssohn gave poetry readings at the University of Cambridge, London's Southbank Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many other venues.

Rhythms, Networks: Caroline Levine Meets Susan Howe and Marina Tsvetaeva

whoosh, hum. Imagine that sound, like an air vent cycling on. It circulates fresh air, the fresh air of poems that breathe into our lungs, whether we are standing in the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or reading the poems on a porch, looking out on a summer day. You will not find a description of that sound in the pages of Susan Howe's book Debths, only the phrase “Titian Air Vent.” Its rush of phonemes energizes the whole. he verbal rhythms and the visual patterns respond to its acoustic energy, pulsating across the different parts of the book, creating not so much a hierarchy of theories or subtexts as an interlocking and interwoven set of patterns that spread out on every page—in irregular or fragmentary form, in neat prose paragraphs, and in blocks of verse. In Debths, where so much depends on sound orchestration, verbal transformations, and visual arrangements, the networks connecting sight and sound are always being tightened, loosened, playfully intensified. Whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. These are Caroline Levine's terms, here embedded in my account of Debths. What might a book like Howe's, drawing on many aesthetic modes but built on the foundation of poetry, ask of Levine's Forms, a remarkable theoretical intervention whose many examples are nearly all narrative?

Difficult poetry processing: Reading times and the narrativity hypothesis

This study presents an experiment that uses reading times as a measure of the processing effort demanded by ‘difficult’ poems, where difficulty is defined as a text-driven response phenomenon associated with resistance to reading fluency. Reading times have been used before to explore the processing of literature, but seldom with the aim of shedding light on difficulty. There is then scope to redress this research gap, also in light of Shklovsky’s claim that the technique of art is ‘to increase the difficulty and length of perception’. In the current experiment, a group of participants read six poems on-screen. The poems are by Mark Strand, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Jeremy Prynne, and have been selected based on critics’ remarks on their difficulty or lack thereof. An extract from a novel by JG Ballard was also included to find out how its narrativity would compare, in processing terms, to the more elliptical narrativity of Strand’s and Pound’s poems. The time spent on each line was recorded by software E-Prime, commonly used in psycholinguistics. The results indicate that three of these texts – Ballard’s, Strand’s and Pound’s – were read at a much higher speed than non-narrative poems by Stevens, Hill, Prynne and Howe. The proposed explanation was that it is sufficient for readers to recognize traces of a narrative schema to read the text fluently, even if such text is low in coherence. By contrast, when prototypical narrative features cannot be mapped onto a text, the processing effort as measured by reading times remarkably increases. Overall, the results refine our understanding of the relationship between difficulty and the stylistic strategies associated with it.