Redell Olsen

Book-Parks and Non-sites:

Susan Howe’s Scripted Enclosures

“If I now apply the word “park” to what animates a rural place and gives voice to the world of shadowy vistas in which his being able to take the air exists, will the conditional fall back into paradoxes of the material conditional along with that piercing AMTRAK whistle, Bottom’s dream, and Buffalo weather jokes; why not?” (The Midnight, 84).

In The Birth-Mark (Birthmark, 44), Susan Howe cites Webster’s definition of enclose, a synonym for Inclose merges distinctions between property, boundary, containment and concealment. The repercussions and potential of containment feature extensively in Howe’s work extending from the consideration of domestic spaces (“I am an insomniac who goes to bed in a closet” (Midnight, 43 ) into territories of landscape, wilderness, parks and of course books. These territories are not exclusive but merge in multiple and simultaneous mappings, as in her description of “Field beds” which “have canopies at the top resembling tents” (Midnight, 43). Such locations might be taken to allude variously to Charles Olson’s composition by field, beds for soldiers on a battlefield and the planted beds of a garden or park. Howe’s poetics of reference encourage a scholarship of historical contextualisation exploring such allusive fields, but the burden of this essay suggests rather that her poetry offers a poetics of site and non-site, among whose non-sites is the imaginative play of artistic practices such as minimalism. Situating Howe’s work through modernist art practices suggests a less historical argument and something more resembling a poetics of the book as a modernist parkland reconfigured through devices of the Picturesque.

Books are themselves the objects of enclosure for words, ideas and Howe seems to suggest that lives and books themselves are subject to enclosure in libraries. Libraries are Howe’s bookparks; “I wished to speak a word for libraries as places of freedom and wildness” (Souls of The Labadie Tract, 16). poems mark typographical forays into the wilderness and parklands of existing enclosure even as they draw up new boundaries and gateways into these spaces. Each foray, like each ‘parkland’, is only temporarily contained before slipping on its way towards other points of reference as the wilderness reasserts itself. As she notes in Souls of The Labadie Tract, “True Wilderness is like true gold; it will bear the trial of Dewey Decimal” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 19).

The book as an enclosure or provisional park for an already existing wilderness that cannot definitively be contained is an important structural and metaphorical ‘enclosure’ that defines The Midnight and aligns Howe’s writing practice with that of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903). Olmsted designed urban parks such as Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City and most importantly, for Howe the Buffalo, New York system of parks and parkways. Throughout The Midnight, Howe uses the writings of Olmsted and his biography as a means to explore her own concerns. “Park:” defines Howe, ventriloquising Olmsted, is “originally in England a portion of forest enclosed for keeping deer, trapped or otherwise caught in the open forest, and their increase” (The Midnight, 48). Olmsted’s words resonate as a description of her own poems in which fragmentary contexts proliferate and are synonymous with what she refers to in The Midnight as a “relational space… the thing that’s alive with something from somewhere else” (The Midnight, 58). For Howe, poems are often “alive with something from somewhere else” and so function metaphorically like parks or enclosures in a landscape of existing texts: “They [the books] have made this relation by gathering — — airs, reveries, threads, mythologies, nets, oilskins, briars, branches, wishes and needs, intact — -into a sort of tent” (The Midnight, 60).

In The Midnight, Howe makes a statement of intention to “confine myself / beneath disguises a catalogue / of categories relative” (The Midnight, 23) and in doing so highlights enclosure as subterfuge, disappearance and the remaking of identity. She fuses notions of landscape enclosure with the library cataloguing ‘enclosures’ that confine words and meanings. Howe’s strategy is to move “incloser” to the enclosures of words (physically: libraries, conceptually: dictionaries) and free them or at least regard them so closely that their boundaries and apparently known reference points begin to disappear in the “Stage snow. Pantomime” with which The Midnight begins (The Midnight). This pantomime play is at once dramatic and methodological as it foregrounds the interrelationship between artifice, performance and illusion in ways which are echoed in the formulation of the Picturesque, a term adopted from the language of painting into landscape design in the eighteenth century. As Humphrey Repton understood it a hundred years later “one of the fundamental principles of landscape gardening is to disguise the real boundary” a park should “give the appearance of extent and freedom by carefully disguising or hiding the real boundary” (MacArthur,180).

Howe is not only playing with boundaries, view points or language in her own work but is also subject to “the appearance of extent and freedom” of the book parks that she attempts to enter. This is demonstrated for her by her denial of access to the Emily Dickinson manuscripts: “What is forbidden is the wild. The stacks of Widener library and of all great libraries in the world are still the wild to me” (The Birth Mark, 18). If in her search for manuscripts Howe falls victim to the illusory openness of the Picturesesque then in her writing she cultivates a wildness within its textual landscapes that blurs real and imagined boundaries.

Howe’s poetry offers a landscape that is self-consciously American, rather than eighteenth century or English, in the way that it reworks and continues Olson’s “I take space to be the central fact to man born in America” (Olson, 1). Nevertheless, The Midnight negotiates a transposition of Olson’s dictum via Olmsted and the influence on him of European ideas of landscape such as the Picturesque. The politics of the Picturesque are different in America than in England where enclosure meant a landholder expunging common rights and taking exclusive ownership of the land. In Britain, aesthetic appreciation of the landscape by its owners seems to have been predicated on the erasure of the inhabitants of that landscape. Howe’s books, or bookparks, do not engage with this British history of enclosure but signal their relationship to landscape through the American minimalist and sculptural traditions; as realised in the work of Robert Smithson and in more abstract terms by the painter Agnes Martin.

Smithson was a near contemporary of Howe and he also reworked Olmsted’s conception of an American Picturesque in his own writings and figurations of sculpture and land art. Howe’s own treatment of the book as a form of sculptural object is informed by her training in the visual arts; “I suppose the real answer to your question ‘Did you stop doing any visual art?’ is ‘No. I’m still doing it, but I’m doing it on pages with words” she replied to Susan Keller in an interview in 199 (Susan Howe quoted in Keller “Interview” 9). Howe’s poetic work evolved out of her training in drawing and painting. She gradually moved towards poetry through a consideration of the visual possibilities of the book and of the page itself. She moved to New York in 1964 and was inspired by the exciting art community that was developing around the Paula Cooper Gallery, which included artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Jonas, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin and her then husband, the sculptor David von Schlegell (Keller “Interview” 4). Howe’s transition from painting to writing occurred when she began to explore the relationships within lists and series of words in the space of installations (Keller “Interview” 5). The poet Ted Greenwald saw one of her exhibitions and suggested that she transfer what she was doing on a wall into a book. At this time, Marcia Hafif, another artist and friend, was working on making books that explored the seriality of marks across pages. Howe explains:

At that time, Marcia, whose work I have always admired, was filling small sketch books with repetitive pencil strokes. She would start one at the top left corner, page 1 and continue until the end, so there were no actual words but the page was filled with a different kind of stroke or mark. (Keller “Interview” 6)

Interested by what Hafif was doing, Howe bought a blank sketch book that was so plain that it had no obvious marker to denote the front or back of the book. Howe recalls the way in which this allowed her to “impose a direction by beginning” her writing rather than having one imposed upon her (Keller 6). Howe began to make horizontal lists of words across its pages. This was a way of “writing physically”; instead of using a mechanical type-writer, Howe resorted to writing by hand, a practice that followed from her very physical concern with “gesture, the mark of the hand and the pen or pencil, the connection between eye and hand” (Keller 6). Howe claims “the mimeo version I did with Maureen of The Liberties had a cover that for me was definitely part of the poem. I like the later covers, especially the one Sun & Moon has done for The Europe of Trusts, but the earlier one was truly an extension of the poem itself. In those days I was still thinking of the book as an object” (Keller “Interview” 18). is the exploration and investigation of the potential relationship between language and drawing — both as a series of visual markers — that is central to Howe’s practice.

Throughout her career the book form has been an important consideration in the construction of each poem sequence. On the cover of Frame Structures the photograph shows her husband David von Schlegell’s “India Wharf Sculpture,” a large metal sculpture sited on a quay and resembling a large gridded hinge or open book. Since Howe’s earliest writings the book has been considered in varying degrees as a sculptural object made up of a series of double-sided, hinged leaves that confound sequential and typographical expectations. In Eikon Basilike, she reproduces the title page of Almack’s book as her own, but with the original author’s name crossed out and her own name inserted. [1] The original has been rescripted by Howe; the name of the park and ownership changed. Howe calls the cover of The Liberties “an extension of the poem” (Keller “Interview” 18). It has both personal and general significance as it depicts a boat above which is a stamp, and the handwritten author’s name. Both are taken from the last letter the poet received from her 83 year old Irish grandmother, Susan Manning. The author’s name is thus inflected with its own familial history. The image on the stamp is of the intermediary figure of an angel carrying a banner that reads Vox Hibernia e (Ireland’s voice). Through the use of the emblem, Howe raises the question of the ownership of the voice (“Where is the patron of the stamp?” (The Birth Mark, 4) and extends it by asking who and what is being authored or voiced. This device prefigures Howe’s more recent use of a postage stamp featuring her Aunt Louie Bennett in The Midnight (72). Louie Bennett campaigned for Irish Women’s Suffrageand is also the previous owner of Howe’s copy of The Irish Song Book with Original Irish Airs(The Midnight, ). Howe includes in her poem the “admonition on the flyleaf” that Bennett wrote assserting that her ownership of the book: “To all who read. This book has a value for Louie Bennett that it cannot have for any other human being. Therefore let no other human being keep it in their possession” (The Midnight, ). The inclusion of these pages in Howe’s poem emphasises connections which are both familial and political in this dense network of relations that make up the landscape of the poem and alert the reader to tensions surrounding the ownership of voices, land, bodies and material possessions. Meanwhile the postage stamp of Louie Bennett travels on between sites; freed from its original context.

Landscapes of both a pastoral and textual nature occur throughout Howe’s poetry; for example in The Liberties the poem enacts the “retracing steps” and a “crawling” between the “thwarts” as woods and the words coalesce into one. In The Midnight Howe remembers how Olmstead “took long solitary walks as a remedy for sadness”. Like Howe “he particularly enjoyed the edges of woods” (The Midnight, 48). These woods have developed out of her attention to the “thwarts” in The Liberties and out of her forages into the thickets of etymology. It is a “a strapwork trellis sentence / Strapwork trellis sentence” (The Midnight, 105); a structure found in a garden or a park which holds up her recent work.

The Midnight and Souls of The Labadie Tract foreground an approach to landscape which takes in the different meanings of the word tract which is both a short treatise in pamphlet form and a large area of land. Terms and images from the park also find their way into The Midnight where definitions of lodges proliferate (The Midnight, 54). Words are lodges; handholds in the bookparks. “While I lie in you for refuge / it is sanctuary it is refuge” implies a textual space of solace. Lodge is also literally there in the ‘New Lodge’ which is the name of Uncle John’s care home facility which opens “out onto a lawn with some trees” (The Midnight, 54). Howe draws together a network of related images: sleeping, resting, the body (itself another form of tract) and delays or rests in parklands. She questions what or who gets lodged in memory in terms which link the cultivation of a garden or parkland: “Something made to sleep on; lodgings; marriage; bank of earth raised in the garden” (51). The lodge is both a place to rest and a delay and a stop that is textual.

For John Macarthur the Picturesque inhabits a tension between its relationship to nature and the fact that a garden designed in the picturesque style deliberately foregrounds its artificiality:

While the matter and material of the English garden could be plants and topography in forms familiar from nature, the garden would have a formal character like landscape painting, which was already an abstraction and analysis of the visible order of the world. The picturesque is thus a compromise term or a space of delay and compromise (John Macarthur, 5).

There is a similar tension in Howe’s work between her use of existing texts; as if she had drawn them directly in from the natural wilderness of the libraries and their formal arrangement which renders them as temporary lodges and “space[s] of delay and compromise”. Lodges which are spaces of delay and compromise further develop Howe’s interest in hinges and intermediary spaces. At the beginning of Hinge Picture she includes an image of a sailing boat at sea with the caption “Fig. 78. VIGILANT” . The yacht’s name, “Vigilant”, articulates a command to the reader to avoid complacency. The boat itself sails on a hinge between the sea and the horizon, and, the caption hinges the image to another context. Hinge Picture begins with the figures of angels which by their nature are hinge figures between the spiritual and the earthly:

invisible    angel   confined
to a point  simpler than
a soul   a lunar sphere   a
demon darkened intelle
ct   mirror clear   receiv
ing  the mute   vocables
of   God   that    rained
a demon daring down in h
ieroglyph   and stuttering  (33)

This passage explores the link between written and spoken language by creating visual “hinges” within words (“receiv / ing… h / ieroglyph”) and extending spacing between words (“the mute     vocables”) the text self-reflexively notates a nearly aphaisic form of language. Hinge Picture (collected in Frame Structures) includes an epigraph from Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box: “Perhaps make a HINGE PICTURE (folding yard stick, book……) / develop in space the PRINCIPLE OF THE HINGE in the displacements 1st in the plane 2nd in space” (Frame 32).Duchamp’s The Green Box consists of notes for his major work The bride stripped bare by her bachelors even. Duchamp gave the piece the subtitle “Delay in Glass” (26):

Use “delay” instead of picture or painting on glass becomes delay in glass — but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass — It’s merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture — to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but rather in their indecisive reunion “delay” — / a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver. (26)

Howe also subtitles a section of her preface to Frame Structures “Delay In Glass.” The passage describes an “elaborately carved ivory pagoda under glass” at her family home. Howe uses this description as a metaphor for the relationship between present and past. Like the past the pagoda is separated from “our side of being” but is easily disturbed by the slightest vibrations in the room which cause tiny bells to ring (26).

Each fantastically carved stage or floor of the pagoda consists of a miniature room with a door but even the walls are open as a sieve is. A tiny ivory bell hangs in each entrance. If there is a sudden vibration in the dining room on our side of being, if someone speaks too suddenly, even a draft from the window is enough, all the skeletal bells shake as if the present can coexist in thin paper dress (FS, 26)

This is an image typical of the domestication of the Picturesque; of the exotic brought indoors. It would seem easy to bypass the Picturesque in favour of the sublime but Howe could also be seen to be rejecting the sublime for the more problematic compromise that the Picturesque offers. Howe seems more interested in the materialities of matter and landscape in which she finds herself lodged: “I have not known visions trances” she quips in (The Midnight, 32).

As in traditions of minimalism and Concrete Poetry this attention to matter finds abstract rather than figurative manifestation in the work. When Howe was asked what her writing would look like if it was painted, she replied that “it would be blank. It would be a white canvas. White” (Keller 7). This white on white writing intersects Howe’s affinity with American minimalist traditions in painting, notably in the work of Agnes Martin, and Howe’s historical interest in whitework which is the sewing of white on white practiced by early America settlers.

Martin’s paintings are recognisable for their repetitive grid-like structure. The grid’s regularity is often undercut by the effect of the build-up of hand-drawn lines. These lines create a range of tones and colours that challenge the grid’s inherent formality and austerity; the marks on the canvas exceed and deviate from the apparent structure which at first glance they uphold. As the lines are drawn by hand rather than with a ruler there is often a certain amount of error involved in what appear from a distance to be perfect grids. In fact, any slight faults or deviations in one line of the grid are amplified in its surrounding, parallel lines.

Howe’s interest in Martin’s paintings and her minimalist aesthetics resonates with her own attention to the space of the page as it offers alternative patterns through which to mediate the visual and conceptual frameworks of her source materials. Minimalism, and the questions it poses with regards to the potential limits of representation, is for Howe, an alternative grid through which to return to earlier tracts of writing not considered as such. Howe’s poems redefine the boundaries of the tracts — the parkland — of both contemporary and historical writing. So traditions of whitework; the “white on white coverlet” (The Midnight, 101); are reworked by Howe in the tradition of Martin’s paintings and Duchamp’s ready-mades as: “savage pattern[s] / on surface material” (The Midnight, 8).This savage pattern is a statement of her own poetics that is an alignment with the savage of the wilderness outside the parklands of poetry and also the “savage” art practice of female makers of lace who have been left in the wilderness of art history. This invocation of the wilderness reflects the strongly gendered division between female workers on the “savage” patterns of whitework and male ownership:

1746 (fig. 39) A figured
head cloth worked by
Polly Wright of Hatfield
Massachusetts in 1765
(privately owned) This
curtain fabric of “moreen”
by a donor born in 1836
A swatch and swatches
described as “harateen”
Owner John Holker 1850
(The Midnight, 6)

The lacemaker is also the writer who proceeds by cut work “opus scissum” : “I cut these two extracts from / The Muses ELIZIUM” (The Midnight, 45). Howe’s description of “the construction by hand — error / the “unfinished drawnwork” of lace (The Midnight, 111) resonates with Martin’s practice who described her process of composition as pretending “was looking at the blank page”:

I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page
if my mind was empty enough I could see it
I didn’t paint the plane
I just drew this horizontal line
then I found out about all the other lines (38)

The horizon line also appears visually in the frontispiece for Secret History of the Dividing Line. Howe uses images taken from a manual for making perspectival drawings that illustrate how to make the features of the landscape recede as if they were in three dimensional space. The pictures show two different types of representation. The realistically drawn trees are in contrast with the abstract formalism of the gridded structures, which demonstrate how the distance between the trees decreases as they get further away. By means of an artificial grid, a wood of naturally rendered trees can be produced that appears to recede effortlessly into space. The diagram shows how to make a drawing in two dimensions look as if it is in three. Where Martin uses hand-drawn lines to complicate the abstract regularity of the grid’s form, Howe uses the indeterminacies, associative meanings, and acoustical repetitions of language to complicate the clear and abstract representation of historical events and in doing so redraws the assumed maps and borders of the conceptual tracts she inhabits.

The Picturesque refigured as a Duchampian delay, or a Martin-like return to the hand-drawn grid can be linked to the temporal suspension implied by the title of Howe’s The Midnight. Her title evokes the period of time between night and day: a fulcrum between past and future, a space for dreaming, waking and walking. This suspension and delay is also analagous to one of the main structuring devices of the poem: the interleave. To interleave is to insert leaves, usually blank, between the ordinary leaves of a book, the interleave is often the place of the annotation of the note. “Give me a sheet” announces Howe and there is a deliberate ambiguity as to the function of this sheet; it might be for writing on, sleeping under, dressing up in, or perhaps constructing as a shroud.

Howe’s pages are interrupted with images of interleaves made up of pages from other books that belonged to various members of Howe’s family. The books include, amongst others: Alice in Wonderland, At The Back of the North Wind by George Macdonald, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, Yeats, and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

The first page of The Midnight is a representation of the frontispiece to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as obscured by the interleaf. Then on the reverse of this page a mirror image of the same, as if seen through a tissue interleave from the other side. Howe’s interleaves are sites of compression and delay as infinitely suggestive as a painting by Martin, each have the quality of “Tissue paper for wrapping or folding can also be used for tracing. Mist-like transience” (The Midnight, preface to bedhangings).

Robert Smithson, like Howe, returned to the writings of Frederick Olmstead to redefine an American Picturesque. Howe’s use of other books within her work has much in common with Robert Smithson’s conceptualisation of non-sites. In 1972 Smithson made a series of distinctions between site and non-site. He characterised the “site” as having “open limits,” of providing “scattered information,” as being an “edge,” a “series of points” and of “indeterminate certainty.” In contrast, he defined the “non-site” as having “closed limits,” “contained information,” “a center,” “an array of matter” and being of “determinate uncertainty.” He further defined the “site” as “some place (physical),” and the “non-site” as “no place (abstract)” (152–3).

For his exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in 1969 Smithson presented a series of steel container bins in a trapezoidal shape. These were filled with material collected at sites directly referenced by aerial photographs of a similar shape which hung above the bins. A notice on the wall informed the visitors of the following: “Tours of the site possible. The five outdoor sites are not contained by any limiting parts ­– therefore they are chaotic sites, regions of dispersal, places without Room ­– elusive order prevails” (Ratcliff 53). The terms “sites” and “non-sites” were used by Smithson to open a dialogue between “the indoor and the outdoor’” (178). Material from the outdoor (site) such as stone, steel, and earth was transferred to what he called an “abstract container,” usually a metal or steel bin, within the gallery. The space of the gallery, including the objects and material within it, then became designated as a “non-site.” Smithson links the concepts of site and non-site to metaphor, a linguistic model of representation:

The non-site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pines Barrens Plains). It is by this three dimensional metaphorthat one site can represent another site which does not resemble it — thus The Non-Site (364).

Smithson describes the non-site in terms of language, as a “three dimensional metaphor,” an object (rather than a word) that stands for a place. The non-site is “abstract” in the sense of being apart (physically removed) from its original context. Rather than imposing something onto the landscape, Smithson’s site and non-site works transfer the landscape indoors. The non-sites explored the limits, origins and scale of perception by negotiating the boundaries of exterior and interior spaces through “a dematerialization of refined matter” (192). For Smithson, the art object was a site of loss and depletion; a fact which is highlighted by the way in which he described how the making of his work had more to do with “unmaking; taking apart and reassembling” (364) than with the creation of art works as additions to objects and forms already present.

Howe’s The Midnight is, like Smithson’s non-site, a “relational space” “that’s alive with something from somewhere else” (The Midnight, 58). A book that is also a network of familial relations containing “so many different incompatible intrinsic relations?” (The Midnight, 59). For Smithson the non-site functioned as a kind of “absence of site” (193), an absence that is magnified by the further level of metaphorical displacement from raw matter to words and lines on a page in his non-site maps. movement between site and non-site is also a feature of work by Howe. Language is itself used as a raw material that, like the stones and earth of Smithson’s work, are already in the world; it is raw matter to be transported and re-sited. Like Smithson, Howe attempts to renegotiate the boundaries between outside and inside, between the space of art and the world beyond.

Smithson’s “A Heap of Language” is made up of synonyms for language itself, and, although these synonyms draw attention to the materiality of language by foregrounding words as visual text in a drawing, they do not take this idea further than a self-reflexive comment on the various meanings of the word “language.”

Howe makes a similar gesture in her reproduction of the “Curtain Page” from Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London: R. Ware, 1753) The Midnight, 47) but placed as an interleave in the context of the rest of Howe’s poem the page resist the self-referring nature of Smithson’s idea. Despite the fact that Smithson’s heap draws attention to the materiality of language it is sealed and can do no more than refer to itself. Howe’s pages however pull in multiple directions and foreground the site of her poem as a nexus of dispersed fields of reference and textual materiality.

The oscillation between an abstract representation of a thing and its real physical manifestation is reminiscent of Michel De Certeau’s description of space as being “composed of intersections and mobile elements” (Practice of Everyday Life, 117). This space between the two worlds that the non-site offers is found in both Smithson and Howe. Both Smithson’s non-sites / sites and Howe’s poem strongly resist fixity because of the way in which the dialectic between site and non-site sets up a fluctuating relationship between outside and inside that is never resolved into a static moment. This fluctuation is demonstrated by the way in which the contained stones in the gallery point towards an unseen site; Howe’s poem similarly points towards a number of books, spaces and memories: landscapes that are elsewhere. On the page, the non-site is a dynamic field of reference and engagement with other systems of signification that intersect and lie beyond it.

Smithson, like Howe was drawn to Olmsted and wrote “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” in 1973 after he saw an exhibition by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers at the Whitney Museum entitled “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York”. Smithson described Olmsted’s vision for central park “as like having an orchid garden in a steel mill, or a factory where palm trees would be lit by the fire of blast furnaces” (Smithson, 118). Olmstead’s ideas were influenced by the eighteenth century ideas of landscape architects, Uvedale Price and William Gilpin who were both exploring the ideas of Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautifu l (1757). Like Howe, Smithson read his contemporary concerns back into the eighteenth century. His description of Olmsted’s parks could be applied to Howe’s writing:

In another sense Olmsted’s parks exist before they are finished, which means in fact that they are never finished; they remain carriers of the unexpected and of contradiction on all levels of human activity, be it social, pollitical or natural (Smithson, 119).

Howe’s use of found material also exists before it is finished. In the essay Smithson claims Olmsted as America’s first “Earthwork artist” (Smithson, 123). Smithson takes issue with Alan Gussow’s assertion that painters and “lyric poets” are needed to celebrate the landscape and not be like “the earth works artists who cut and gouge the land like Army engineers. What’s needed are lyric poets to celebrate it” (quoted by Smithson, 122). For Smithson such sentiments are an avoidance of the possibility of creating “a concrete dialectic between nature and people” (123). Smithson is also astute concerning the failure of the Picturesque as it moved historically from a hybrid site of potentiality and flux to be replaced by a more idealised version free of the earlier contradictions enabled by it (Smithson, 124). There is a similarity between Olmsted’s search for a park that is already there and both Smithson’s and Howe’s preference for the site of the work to begin in a place that is already “disrupted”. In Smithson’s case this disruption is usually industrial and Howe’s poems the site of the poem is often already disrupted by the industries of history:

My own experience is that the best sites for “earth-art” are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation. For instance The Spiral Jetty is built in a dead sea and The Broken Circle and Spiral Hill is a working sand quarry. Such land is cultivated or recycled or recycled as art (Smithson, 124).

Smithson’s essay on Olmsted ends with his own reading and walking through of Olmstead’s park which Smithson documents with photographs of his own. Howe is engaged in a similar documentation of her walk works the book parks of the library and Olmsted is one of the ghostly figures who appear in The Midnight. seems to be using his writings on park design to comment on her own system in producing the book of the poem:

A municipal system in the form of small open spaces and squares connected by wide roads and driveways already encircled the city; he didn’t see anything suitable for a larger public gathering place until they came to a rise crossed by a creek three and a half miles from City Hall in what was then rolling farmland. “Here is your park almost ready-made” the landscape architect is rumored to have said looking back at the view of the downtown area (The Midnight, 63).

Howe’s foregrounding of Olmsted’s park as a ready-made connects her poem to the traditions of European modernism as well as to Olmsted’s more literal use of the phrase. For Howe, to “look back at the view” is also to look back at memory; the view of self as a landscape, or to reread the past as a book. Books in The Midnight are rabbit holes to disappear down and take you to the memory of a person / landscape: “I [Howe] think I remember her [Mary Manning, Howe’s mother] casting and staging Comus in the English garden of a wealthy Buffalonian” (The Midnight, 63). In Howe’s poem memory is based as much in representations of itself as it is actually available. Olmstead is blocked in his memory of his mother, there are objects in the way of memory:

My mother died while I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her. While I was a small school boy if I was asked if I remembered her I could say “Yes; I remember playing on the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree.” I now only remember that I did so remember her, but it has always been a delight to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing and minding a child (The Midnight, 67).

This has resonance with Howe’s interest in the bibliographer of the King’s Book in Eikon Basilike which is similarly a text without definitive origin. The detours through Olmsted’s biography casts the poet as an architect of ready-mades full of holes, or if we are to follow Olmstead the nearly ready-made. Olmsted, like the poem itself, suffers from his own contradictions of identity; he is hired because he is literary man but this also makes him suspicious to others. He acts in Sheridan’s The Rivals “an anti-sentimental comedy of impersonation or mistaken identity” and he is also a sufferer of insomnia; a man possessed (128).

Further holes emerge in the poem in the shape of pages from John Manning’s copy of Alice In Wonderland(The Midnight, , 64) and there are two illustrators both named Hole; W. Hole R.S.A. who is responsible for the Ballantrae(The Midnight, 73) frontispiece and William Hole the illustrator for Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (The Midnight, ). The frontispiece engraving is from the same novel that appears later embedded in a page of prose:

The frontispiece engraving for The Master of Ballantrae by W. Hole RSA. illustrates the important first episode of the story told by the land steward Ephraim Mackellar, a dry as dust bachelor who claims to have an authentic memoir of the remarkable year 1745 when the foundations of the tragedy were laid. It isn’t about reading forward: no, the interleaf beckons you back… (73)

Howe seems to be drawing attention playfully, by drawing back the curtain of the interleave, to the fact that, via the frontispiece by the somewhat dubiously, aporetically titled W. Hole, we have an illustration of a story before the story begins, a story which is itself illustrative of the fact that the narrative is a frame for another discovery of an “authentic memoir” which of course it is not.

Olmsted is also a foil for Michael Drayton the writer of Polyolbion (1622); a literary cartographer of Renaissance England. The titling of the image of an “Unknown man formerly known as Michael Drayton by an unknown artist” (The Midnight, 117) alerts us to the instability of and the holes in the evidence presented to us: “Names are only a map we use for navigating” (The Midnight, 59). He and Mrs. Bury Palliser who fronts Bedhangings have ruffs which act as frames for their faces but which are also holes — empty sites that don’t reveal anything to us but act as windows onto new spaces. Portraits are not so much assertions of identlty as further holes in identity: “Example reveals pierced interval / eyelet holes” (The Midnight, 19).

Poly-Olbion is accompanied with engravings by the enigmatic William Hole of “enchanted” gardens, landscapes and parks. These parks and landscapes are described by Howe as places in which “Good” women balance cities on their heads, some wear plain crowns, some carry bows and arrows. Here are groves, wealds, vales, isles, forests, reliques, inscriptions, secret walks” (The Midnight, 81). Drayton’s preface to Poly-Olbion begins with a warning of the dangers of poetic enclosures:

In publishing this Essay of my Poem, there is this great disadvantage against me; that it cometh out at a time when Verses are wholly deduced to chambers, and nothing esteemed in this lunatic age, but what is kept in cabinets and must only be passed by transcription (Drayton, xxxiv).

Drayton’s and Hole’s landscapes create poetic enclosures with a different kind of possession in mind, theirs is a landscape that takes over the cabinet, the closet, the body rather than being contained within it. Howe playfully attempts to subsume Drayton’s interiorisation of landscape into her own closet or enclosure that is The Midnight:

Of leaves of Roses white and red,
Shall be the covering of her bed:
The Curtaines, Valence, Tester all,
Shall be the flower Imperiall,
And for the fringe, it all along
With azure harebells shall be hung
of Lillies shall the pillowes be,
With downe stuft of the butterflee (The Midnight, 45)

Drayton’s lines become sheets of textual interleave in Howe’s poem or, a type of Olmsted’s sighting of the nearly ready-made, a landscape to be incorporated into her new bookpark. Howe creates a parkland that both makes up and extends from sites beyond itself and alongside Smithson she refigures the shape of the Picturesque. Smithson, like Olmsted recognised that the Picturesque is a “word in its own [that] has been struck by lightening over the centuries” (Smithson, 118). He is justly famous for his wry and ironic turning on its head of such an iconic motif of the Picturesque as the tree blasted by lightening which he re-presented as a series of upside down trees. Read through the analogies assembled here, Howe’s poetics of the book can be read as inversions of the Pictureseque that throw these analogies and perspectives into new relief. One of Howe’s guiding motifs in Souls of the Labadie Tract is the last lappaddee poplar, “the one tree singled out on the entire map of the state” (Souls Labadie Tract, 24). For Howe this is a fitting landmark of the Picturesque as it makes its way back into the wilds of possibility.

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Works Cited

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984.

Drayton, Michael. The Complete Works of Michael Drayton. Vol. 1. PolyOlbion. Elibron Classics, 2005.

Duchamp, Marcel. The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975.

Howe, Susan. A Bibliography of The King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike. , RI: Paradigm Press, 1989.

Howe, Susan. Frame Structures: early poems, 1974–1979. York: New Directions, 1996.

Howe, Susan. Souls of The Labadie Tract. New York: New Directions, 2007.

Howe, Susan. The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the wilderness in American Literary History. : Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York: New Directions, 2003.

Keller, Lynn. “An interview with Susan Howe.” Contemporary Literature 36.1 (1995): 1–34.

Macarthur, John. The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities. : Routledge, 1997.

Martin, Agnes. Writings. Ed. Dieter Schwarz. 1991.

Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael: a study of Melville. : J. Cape, 1967.

Ratcliff, Carter. Out of the Box: the reinvention of art 1965–1975. New York: Allworth Press, 2000.

Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

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Note

[1] As DuPlessis points out: “She is inside the book writing almost outside the book” (130).