The Quarry

by Susan Howe

Overview

The Quarry presents new and pivotal Susan Howe prose pieces.

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays of The Quarry map the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224543
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/03/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.

Editorial Reviews

The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement.

Dustin Illingworth - 3:AM

09/14/2015
Acclaimed poet Howe (That This) touches on literary criticism, film, her personal history, and other wide-ranging topics in these 10 essays, five previously unpublished. The first selection centers on Wallace Stevens, whom Howe uses as a jumping-off point for her own ruminations on reality. She also draws in philosophers Baruch Spinoza and George Santayana and painter Nicolas Poussin. The subsequent essays have a similar give-and-take structure, beginning with the nominal topic before segueing into reflections on art, history, philosophy, and human nature. They also reflect a remarkable breadth of reference, as in Howe’s essay on her family history, which seamlessly ranges from Boston to Nigeria, and from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to jurist Felix Frankfurter. Howe is often in rarified intellectual waters, and her writing can be demanding. She manages, however, to balance the most cerebral passages with a sharp eye for just the right detail. For example, in an essay on literary critic Charles Olson, she explains that bikinis were named after the atomic testing ground Bikini Island “because they were supposed to produce an equivalent explosive effect on the libido.” Howe is not for casual readers, but serious ones will be amply rewarded. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement."

3:AM - Dustin Illingworth

"Universally recognized as a major poet, Susan Howe should also be known as the most innovative, the most thrilling essayist writing today."

Eliot Weinberger

"Howe's words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another room—except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable."

The Village Voice - Geoffrey O'Brien

"Susan Howe is a kind of poststructuralist visionary."

Bruce Campbell

"Howe's brilliant, idiosyncratic essay is—like much of her work—a combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks."

Ben Lerner

"An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality."

Artforum

"Reaching back through Hawthorne, Dickinson and beyond, Susan Howe taps a stream of American thinking that is as as clear and fresh as a draught of well water. She is our conscience, our voice, our song."

John Ashbery

"As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America's uneasy commerce with the word."

The Times Literary Supplement - Richard Sieburth

"Marvelous with a visionary apprehension of what is to come, telepathic communication with past poetries, histories, lives, material and spiritual realities."

The Los Angeles Review of Books - Jonathan Creasey

"No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention."

Marjorie Perloff

2015-09-01
Accomplished New England poet Howe (Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, 2013, etc.) channels her personal story through a series of singular creative sources. A meandering excursus on the work and correspondence of Wallace Stevens marks the first essay in this hodgepodge collection. From her perch in Guilford, Connecticut, Howe found that Stevens' depiction of the icy Hartford landscape in "The Snow Man" resonated perfectly with the February chill at the quarry where she walked. In his correspondence of the 1940s and '50s, Stevens recalled the fondness he held for his early Harvard philosophy professor (and former poet) George Santayana, who in turn cherished the thinking of Spinoza for the "courage, firmness and sincerity with which he reconciled his heart to the truth." As the nonchronological essays unfold, Howe peppers them with extracts from the writings of early Connecticut observers such as Henry David Thoreau and the ten "unusually tall" sisters of Jonathan Edwards, as well as his widow, Sarah, which brought the author solace at the time of the abrupt death of her husband, Peter Hare, in 2008. Earlier access to Yale's Sterling Library yielded rich research in the work of the Rev. Hope Atherton and meteorologist Charles Sanders Peirce, among other deceased local souls, allowing Howe to "take my life as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath." In the long, tedious essay "Sorting Facts," Howe examines the work of French documentary filmmaker and photographer Chris Marker, while "Frame Structures" returns to the history of Buffalo, where the author (b. 1937) lived early on as a child. Ultimately, this collection is a kind of working notebook for the poet to explore her research—e.g., on Melville or Ad Reinhardt—and it provides a window to her sources and inspiration. For fans of Howe's poetry and readers fascinated by artistic process.

Kirkus Reviews