SINGULAR POETRIES: THE WRITINGS OF SUSAN HOWE AND LYN HEJINIAN

This course will be devoted to the poetry and poetics of Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Lyn Hejinian (b. 1941), with collateral readings of some of their older and younger contemporaries (Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, Rosmarie Waldrop, Rae Armantrout). Howe and Hejinian are often associated with the movement known as "Language Writing," which is frequently characterized in terms of its "break" with the forms and conventions of the romantic lyric and its modernist versions in which an "expressive" self presides over the materials of formal construction. For the language poets, these materials are not reducible to the forms of mediation that the term "expression" implies. Mediation is what language poetry aims to disrupt--hence the terms that (perhaps prematurely) came to define its poetics during the 1980s: disjunction, fragmentation, indeterminacy.

No doubt Howe and Hejinian exemplify a "disjunctive poetics," but the point needs additional inquiry because they do so in ways that are always changing. What is interesting about these poets is that their writing is grounded less in a break with certain kinds of lyric traditions than in a critical appropriation of a wide range of literary and philosophical antecedents. Appropriation means understanding another--a text, a law, a foreign language--by making it one's own (Howe's My Emily Dickinson and Hejinian's essays on Gertrude Stein are showcase examples of this).

But there is more. Appropriation as these poets practice it appears to be a process of self-creation in something like the Emersonian sense of self-individuation through reading. Howe and Hejinian are irreducible to the "art contexts" that they nevertheless help to constitute, and this means irreducibility to any general characterization of their work as "women's writing." "My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else," Howe writes. What we will want to study is the process by which this "singularity" is formed. Singularity is also a crucial concept in Hejinian's work. She writes: "The phrase 'there are no opposites' appears more than once in my poetry." Poetry, she says, is an "art of linkages" unconstrained by a logic of exclusion or of identity and difference. (Not disjunction, in other words, but combination.) It will be interesting to read her celebrated My Life in the context of this conception of poetry.

Students will be asked to write a paper of about twenty pages and to contribute enthusiastically to class discussion. Perhaps brief reports from each of us will prove useful.

I. Susan Howe
Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Awede, 1987)
Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993)
Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-79 (New Directions, 1996)
Pierce-Arrow. (New Directions, 1999)
The Midnight (New Directions, 2003
My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic, 1985)
The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

II. Lyn Hejinian
My Life (Burning Deck, 1980; expanded version, Sun & Moon, 1987)
The Guard (Tuumba Press, 1984)
Oxata: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991)
The Cell (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)
The Cold of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994)
A Border Comedy (New York: Granary Books, 2001)
The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)