Spectral Telepathy: the Late Style of Susan Howe

Susan Howe’s late style marks a departure from her earlier work. Two books recently published—The Quarry (New Directions, 2015) and Tom Tit Tot (Museum of Modern Art, 2015) illustrate this point. Whereas Howe’s earlier books of critical prose—for example, My Emily Dickinson (1985)—used scholarship to buttress Howe’s critical positions and arguments, her new “essays” in The Quarry are more properly understood as poems. When we analyze Howe’s meditations on Wallace Stevens, we learn that she identifies with Stevens to create a new poetic hybrid. And the language and rhythm of these new essays is that of a poetic construct. In the same vein, her long poetic sequence, Tom Tit Tot, made up of fragments of other people’s writings, the underlying thread being the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin (Tom Tit Tot), is a conceptual work that appropriates fragments of other texts so as to create an entirely new angle on the fairy tale and its cognates. Both of these new books show how contemporary technique—facsimile, xerography, overprint, digital processing—can reanimate literary texts and make them new. Howe’s austere later writing is perhaps her very finest.Le style tardif de Susan Howe s’écarte sensiblement de son travail antérieur. Deux livres récemment publiés, The Quarry (New Directions, 2015) et Tom Tit Tot (Museum of Modern Art, 2015), suffisent à illustrer mon propos. Tandis que ses précédents ouvrages de prose critique, notamment My Emily Dickinson (1985), se fondaient sur la recherche pour étayer ses arguments et ses positions critiques, les nouveaux « essais » parus dans The Quarry sont mieux appréhendés s’ils sont lus comme des poèmes. Lorsqu’on analyse les méditations de Howe sur Wallace Stevens, on apprend qu’elle s’identifie à Stevens pour créer un nouvel objet poétique hybride. La langue et le rythme de ces nouveaux textes participent de la construction d’un monde poétique. Dans la même veine, Tom Tit Tot, sa longue séquence poétique inspirée du conte de fée Rumpelstiltskin, composée de fragments empruntés à d’autres auteurs, est une œuvre conceptuelle qui désintègre et s’approprie d’autres textes afin d’ouvrir une perspective radicalement nouvelle sur le conte et ses ramifications. Ces deux ouvrages montrent comment la technologie contemporaine, du facsimile à la xérographie, de la surimpression au traitement numérique, permet de ranimer les textes littéraires et d’en renouveler les enjeux. Le style tardif de Susan Howe, pour austère qu’il soit, est peut-être son plus achevé

What Really Happened? Kenneth Goldsmith’s “7+ Deaths and Disasters,” Sophie Calle’s, Take Care of Yourself

In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), Kenneth Goldsmith recounted a set of tragic and unanticipated events in recent American history by using transcriptions of radio and TV broadcasts, usually from minor networks. Designed to be an “eighthAmerican disaster,” Goldsmith presented The Body of Michael Brown, a performance based on the St. Louis autopsy report at the “Interrupt 3” conference at Brown University(13 March 2015), eliciting widespread criticism and controversy. Seemingly very different from Goldsmith—Sophie Calle’s projects, for the past few decades, set up particularprocedural processes that raise pressing epistemological questions, especially about the nature of relationships, personal and political. One of her recent projects, Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself) that was based on her installation for the Venice Biennale in 2007, comprises comments by 107 women on an email that Calle received from her then lover. In this project, Calle uses the “real” words of others to create a montage of possible interpretations of the discourse that confronts us in our daily lives. For Calle, as for Goldsmith, the most troubling gap is that between information and knowledge, while the issue, that a conceptual poetics can take as a premise, is that the body most difficult to getinside of turns out to be one’s own

‘The Quarrel with Ourselves’. An Interview with Marjorie Perloff

Intervie

Surfaces, depths and hypercubes: Meyerholdian scenography and the fourth dimension

An appreciation of Meyerhold’s engagement with theatrical space is fundamental to understanding his directorial and pedagogic practice. This article begins by establishing Meyerhold’s theoretical and practical engagement with theatre as a fundamentally scenographic process, arguing for a reconceptualisation of the director as ‘director-scenographer’. Focusing on the construction of depth and surface in Meyerholdian theatre, the article goes on to identify trends in the director’s approach to space, with an emphasis on the de-naturalisation of depth on stage. This denaturalisation is seen as taking three forms: the rejection of depth as a prerequisite in theatrical space, the acknowledgement of the two-dimensional surface as surface, and the restructuring of depth space into a series of restricted planes. The combination of these trends indicates a consistent and systematic process of experimentation in Meyerhold’s work. In addition, this emphasis on depth and surface, and the interaction between the two, also highlights the contextualisation of Meyerhold’s practice within the visual, philosophical and scientific culture of the early twentieth century, echoing the innovations in n-dimensional geometry and particularly, the model of the fourth spatial dimension seen in the work of Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky

“PROSA CONCRETA”: AS GALÁXIAS DE HAROLDO DE CAMPOS E DEPOIS

“PROSA CONCRETA”: AS GALÁXIAS DE HAROLDO DE CAMPOS E DEPOIS - TRADUÇÃO POR Marjorie Perloff, da Sorbonne Nouvelle