Library of America, 1998), 355. Stein repeated this sentence frequently: see, for example,
“Geographical History of America,” Writings, 424.
- David Levi Strauss, “Aporia and Amnesia” (review of Michael Palmer’s At
Passages), The Nation, 23 December 1996, 27. - Silliman, letter to the author, 10 January 1998; my emphasis.
- Ron Silliman, “Under Albany” (Detroit: Gale Research Center, 1997, in Con-
temporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 29, ed. Joyce Nakamura, Gale Research,
Detroit, MI, 1998, 309–52). It would be interesting to compare Silliman’s to a num-
ber of other Language poets’ autobiographical memoirs written for the Gale series,
especially Charles Bernstein’s “An Autobiographical Interview conducted by Loss
Pequeño Glazier,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 24 (Detroit: Gale Re-
search, 1997), 31–50. For Bernstein, “autobiography” and “poetry” remain separate en-
tities, his métier being the hybridization of the poetic/theoretical rather than of the
poetic/autobiographical. Cf. Rae Armantrout’s autobiography, True (Berkeley, CA:
Atelos, 1998), which, like Bernstein’s, does not introduce “poetry” into autobiography. - See Marjorie Perloff, “The Portrait of the Language Poet as Autobiographer:
The Case of Ron Silliman,” Quarry West 34, Special issue, “Ron Silliman and the Al-
phabet,” ed. Tom Vogler (1998): 167–81. The present discussion of “Albany” is a recast-
ing of this earlier discussion. - William Blake, “London,” Songs of Experience [1794], The Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), ll. 3–4, 26. - Mark DeWolfe Howe, Touched with Fire: The Civil War Letters and Diary of
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 1861–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1947). Howe’s transformations of particular historical sources have been explored by
many critics, before and after my essay appeared in 1999, ranging from Hank Lazer’s
early “Singing into the Draft: Susan Howe’s Textual Frontiers,” American Book Review
13, no. 4 (October–November 1991), rpt. in Lazer, Opposing Poetries, vol. 2, Readings
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 60–69, to Peter Nicholls, “Un-
settling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History,” Contemporary Litera-
ture 37.4 (1996): 586–601, to Rachel Bach’s full-length study The Poetry and Poetics of
Susan Howe (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). Such extensive com-
mentary suggests in itself that Howe’s mode is by no means merely classi¤able as
“Language” writing. - Robert Lowell, “91 Revere Street,” Life Studies, in Life Studies and For the
Union Dead (1964; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 46. - Susan Howe, Cabbage Gardens, in Frame Structures, 74.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §115. - Frame Structures, 13. Cf. Joan Retallack’s Afterrimages (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1995), where poetry itself is treated as complex afterimage. - In his excellent “shuffle off to buffalo: Susan Howe’s Frame Structures,”
The Germ 1 (fall 1997): 211, Thomas A. Vogler points out that “Flinders” is “an archaic
Notes to Pages 142–148 287