SCALES #55: concordance
Hello!
Brain is still ringing from seeing poet Susan Howe speak last night. The title of the evening was CONCORDANCE, the title of a new poem and book she has been working on. The format was a hybrid lecture/reading, situated in the same Divinity Chapel where Emerson gave his Divinity School Address—a fact that made Howe exclaim in disbelief several times. (“I’m not just being cute,” she said, it really did delight her.) It was a powerful scene: half my vision blinded at first by sun pouring through a small, upper window, the other half Howe leaning on the wooden lectern in front, grasping on the top so you could see the wood lean. She said at 81, she thought this was the last time she would try to give a public lecture. One thread being a steely-eyed taking stock.
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In the spirit of her work, maybe, some archival scraps I took away:
Describing the joys of digging into archives. Being given boxes that provide a thin link to the past, otherwise forgotten for centuries.
Noah Webster’s dictionary entry for “meteor” being a poem itself, in a way. Emerson’s Divinity School Address: “the beautiful meteor of the snow”.
A life’s work engaging with a certain New England lineage. Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, but also Charles Ives: a similar strategy of assembling quotations. Concordances as devotional works, often labor performed by women, but also inseparable in her mind from the town of Concord.
What is she reading? Listening to audiobooks. Henry James, George Eliot, the unabridged Clarissa.
After holding forth on the rich women’s history centered around Amherst, many of which women have been silenced or forgotten. “I’m too old to go to the archives… now the archives come to me.” The irony of Emily Dickinson being the one who has been remembered despite isolating herself from the world. Learning after a long time, you have to be in isolation to be original. You have to go alone. Like Dickinson, slightly agoraphobic. “She did the right thing—she just stayed home. ‘Tumultuous privacy of storm.’”
Milton not her favorite person, but powerful lines. Cutting up xeroxed pages of a Milton concordance, she realized—alphabetized lines of Milton might be the best Milton?
The publisher’s expectation that she write a foreword to her cut-up poems. She pours a lot into these forewords, they become as important as the poem. Struggling with the one for “Concordances”: the challenge of becoming too personal.
On making her cut-up poems: “Hair-cutting scissors are the sharpest.”
Jonathan Edwards pinning scraps to his coat to remember thoughts as he rode between towns surrounding Northampton. Fragments from an Edwards sister (Elisabeth?) recounting a serious illness and brush with death, read in a low stuttering voice.
Being resolutely analog in a digital world. The importance of constantly carrying her heavy concordance of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence between her bookshelf and her table. The fact that despite all the information now available, the most important works for her being the two shelves of books whose constellations of marginalia she finds as comforting as a starry night. These books have become best friends.
Her work in poetry started with being struck by Emily Dickinson’s brilliance and to understand what was going on, she found she had to go back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Earliest conflicts revolving around women and speech, Anne Hutchinson.
Discovering the book for a whole seminar on bed hangings, setting her off on an entire line of work. An interest in language associated with sewing, embroidery: how were stories shared without literacy?
Beating her chest: “I. Am. A. Romantic. Modernist.” (Or was it a modernist romantic?)
A closing image of snow reflecting moonlight into her room, up thinking late at night, leaving the door unlocked.
A surprise post-Q&A reading of a cut-up Margaret Fuller poem, taken from fragments of Thoreau’s notes on searching through Fuller's tragic shipwreck.
Afterward, seeing her come out of the building, laughing about confusion over whether she was departing on a lift or Lyft.
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[See also SCALES #36.]
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Springtime! At the Most Photographed Tree Outside Lab.
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—Adam