Slant / SUSAN HOWE

ABOVE:
Untitled page, Susan Howe




““At times,” Goethe continued, “the experience I had with my poems was quite different. I had no impression of them in advance and no presentiment. They came over me suddenly and demanded to be made then and there, and I felt compelled to write them down on the spot, in an instinctive and dreamlike fashion. When I was in such a somnambulistic state, it often happened that the paper before me lay all aslant and that I noticed this only when everything was written, or when I found no room to go on writing”” (Goethe, in Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe). Suddenly, when poetry seems to come from elsewhere and composition just happens, the poet looks at what s/he’s done, surely shocked and bewildered, becoming aware of the materials (paper) and the skewed angle of the writing on the page. The line of writing has yielded to the more bewildering space or field. Conventional coordinates shift; clearly to write aslant means that at some deep level of mental processing conventional perspectives on reality have shifted too.

ABOVE
Untitled page, Susan Howe




Emily Dickinson’s famous “Tell the truth but tell it slant” means that the truth is too blinding to be told without some mediation; like Plato’s cave shadows and imitations of it are what we can tolerate. “Success in Circuit lies.” And yet for Dickinson “slant,” as with Goethe, calls attention to the visual, to a disorientation of telling or reading expectation. Don’t think and write in a straight line but in a circuit. For the visionary Dickinson, her dashes and her alternate word choices at the bottom of the page, marked with a +, show her commitment to the page in which the mind of the reader roves in its possible formations and directives; linear communication is dislodged; the slant opens everything, including “enchantment.”

Dickinson’s spatializing of lyric reappears in a distinctly modernist fashion in the verbal collage work of her greatest recent interpreter, Susan Howe, whose poetry characteristically departs from linearity in slant-wise juxtapositions of historical quotation and reference material (dictionary, concordance, bibliography). These deposits return at angles, often with shaved down words, stimulating inference where statement or information grows hazy. History and language from the (usually early American) past return at once disembodied and also anchored in the present as newly material realities; their often repressive origins are “forgiven”—that is, acknowledged but not judged--as visual objects. Other domains of extra-normal consciousness can also come to the page slanted, such as the archaic atemporality of myth. 

Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)




BELOW:

Untitled page as above, with photographer's shadow & traces of underlying text