Fanny Howe’s observation, in her “Scattered Light,” that “Some patios won’t
allow the shadow of a maid / It’s where I want to go with my tray / See heat
unbearably white / Each book must fall, a scholar’s mind” (51).
Here, pun (“Sea heat unbearably white”) and burlesque, as in the last line’s
play on “Into each life, a little rain must fall,” complicate the story of this
“shadow of a maid” carrying her tray on the forbidden patio. Through-
out Temblor 4 (which contains the complete Conduit by Barrett Watten and
Demo by Ron Silliman), the Language program is operative even if—and here
we come to Hickman’s own predilection—emotion, if by no means personal
confession, is brought back into the equation. Further along in Fanny Howe’s
“Scattered Light” (#4) we read the following ten-line poem:
It was a night to be left alone
To dig out ¤fteen pounds of pumpkin guts
Stick in a candle and water the curtains
I phoned a friend with What do you want
Money and luck they said
When I asked the angel in the bottle
She ®uttered and cried
I want to die!
Sex, too, squeezes out a lot of pleasure
Till nothing is left but the neck (52)Failed domesticity probably looms as large here as it did in “Hollandaise,”
but the relationship between the pumpkin carving of the opening, the allu-
sion to the Cumean Sybil trapped eternally in her bottle, and the image of
the sex act hollowing out the body like an empty pumpkin cannot be trans-
formed into any sort of coherent narrative. “Till nothing is lef t but the neck”
is especially graphic. The neck of the bottle? The neck of the woman as ex-
ternal to the emptied-out body? The neck as all one has without money or
luck? Oddly, my own image—if I am to follow McCaffery and become a co-
constructor of the poem’s meaning—is that of a chicken neck, the hard ugly
piece of ®esh (rather like a distorted penis or “stick in a candle”) that re-
mains when one has hollowed out the chicken, as opposed to the pumpkin,
guts—the liver, heart, and other giblets, the fat along the inside chicken wall.
Phonemically, in any case, the monosyllabic “neck” in ¤nal position connotes
an unpleasant cut of some sort.
Fanny Howe’s “Scattered Light” happens to be followed, a few pages later,
by Nathaniel Mackey’s “Uninhabited Angel,” which begins
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 165