726 The American Century: Literature since 1945“the discourses of power by undermining assumptions about meaning and
univocality.” He may be more interested in story than, say, Bernstein is. However,
as Palmer himself has pointed out, story, as well as autobiography, always involves a
measure of concealment. “What is taken as a sign of openness – conventional
narrative order – may stand for concealment.” Conversely, “what are understood
generally as signs of withholding or evasion – ellipsis, periphrases, etc. – may from
another point of view stand for disclosure.” So, in a work like Notes for Echo Lake
(1981), he uses devices of concealment, like writing about himself in the third
person, in order to disclose. But, even while disclosing, there is a gnomic, hermetic
quality to his writing that issues from a radical skepticism, a fundamental uncertainty
about, as he has it, “whether I know whatever I know.” Palmer is a prolific poet.
His many collections include Plan of the City O (1971), First Figure (1984), At Passage
(1995), and Company of Moths (2005). Nearly all of his work is marked by a
search for an evidence of order in the sound and structure of language and proof of
life, love, in the steadiness of companionship. As the third of his “Six Hermetic
Songs” dedicated to Robert Duncan expresses it: “Send me my dictionary / Write
how you are.”
Structurally, the poetry of Susan Howe often registers her early training in the
visual arts. Some of her work treats words like fragments in a collage. Others
experiment with the significations that emerge from the irregular distribution of
letters on the page. The lines “Do not come down the ladder / iforI / have eaten / ita /
way,” from “White Foolscap: Book of Cordelia” (1983), distribute sense, a layer of
potential meaning, on a specifically visual level. Howe grew up during World War II,
however, and, as a young woman, came under the influence of Charles Olson.
Both experiences ignited her interest in an often silenced, often slighted history.
“The deaths of millions of people in Europe and Asia,” Howe has said, “prevented
me from ever being able to believe history is only a series of justifications, or that
tragedy and savagery can be theorized away.” Her many books of poetry include
The Western Borders (1976), Defenestration of Prague (1983), Articulation of Sound
Forms in Time (1987), The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts
(2000), and The Midnight (2003). And many of her poems, gathered here and
elsewhere, show her extraordinary ability to transform historical documents,
the archive and the chronicle, into an elusive, elliptical, yet deeply personal drama in
which, say, the ancient Britain of Lear, the New England of the Indian Wars, or the
New England of Thoreau enters the consciousness of a woman living and working
at the end of the American century, and beyond. Unlike Olson, Howe has never
constructed a central persona. Instead, her poems contain lines and phrases that just
will not come together in a unifying speech, form, or episode. Lines may pass with
one or two others, then typically drift off by themselves or into new, temporary
arrangements. A charged lyricism fuses with a critical examination of authorial
voice as, using pun and wordplay, Howe calls meaning itself into question. Figures
hover at the edge of memory and history in her work and on the borderlines of
speech. They seize our attention momentarily, then they are gone. “For we are
language Lost / in language,” one poem, “Speeches at the Barriers,” declares,GGray_c05.indd 726ray_c 05 .indd 726 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM