Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

The ¤rst sentence of Howe’s “afterimage,” under the heading Flanders,

with its allusion to World War I, is: “On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I went

with my father to the zoo in Delaware Park even now so many years after

there is always for me the fact of this treasured memory of togetherness be-

fore he enlisted in the army and went away to Europe” (3). December 7, 1941

is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, but this fact is not mentioned, the focus being

on the “usually docile polar bears rov[ing] restlessly back and forth around

the simulated rocks caves and waterfall designed to keep brute force fenced

off even by menace of embrace so many zoo animals are accounted ¤erce”

(3). The ¤nal clause here trails off, “so many” not anticipated by what comes

before. The three polar bears are framed both literally and ¤guratively—

literally behind the “iron railing” of their cage, ¤guratively by “the north

wind of the fairy story” [“Goldilocks”] “ringing in my ears as well as direct

perception” (3). From the opening image of (unstated) war malaise, through

the accounts of King Philip’s War, the Revolutionary War, World War I, and

World War II, the text’s war space is crisscrossed by “life-lines,” lines of de-

scent, connection, and association that, as the poet puts it, “I transmit to you

from the point of impact throughout every snowing dif¤culty,” lines “certi-

¤ed by surveyors chain-bearers artists and authors walking the world keep-

ing Field Notes:” from “Flanders” to “Flinders”;^37 from Nigeria, to Niger, to

Fig. 4. Frontispiece from Susan Howe’s Frame Structures (Courtesy of Susan Howe)

148 Chapter 7