Pierce-Arrow [Paperback]

Susan Howe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1999

Pierce-Arrow takes as its shooting off point the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishments yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing.

Through Peirce and his wife Juliette, a lady of shadowy antecedents, Howe creates an intriguing nexus that explores the darker, melancholy sides of the fin de siècle Anglo-American intelligentsia. Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rückenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With her first book of new poems in six years, Howe further solidifies her reputation as one of North Americas foremost experimental writers. Pierce-Arrow engages many of the elements and themes that have consistently appeared in both her poetry (The Europe of Trusts, etc.) and prose (My Emily Dickinson and The Birth Mark). Here, as in previous work, the manuscripts and marginalia of marginal and anti-institutional authors (with an emphasis on women writers) are seamlessly brought together with historiography and lyricand the results continue to be arresting. The focal points of this book are the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his wife Juliette, whose full birth name and ancestry remain to this day somewhat of a mystery. For Howe, this mystery becomes a subtle metaphor for the frequently secondary quality the lives of women can take on in male-dominated milieux, literary or otherwise. The books first section, Arisbe, consists of a biographical essay and poems that touch on various aspects of Peirces life and work. The second, The Leisure of the Theory Class, is a long series of poems that tightly interweave references to Peirce, Juliette, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Charles Dickens, Edmund Husserls manuscripts, Alexander Popes translation of the Iliad and George Santayana, to name only the most prominent and explicit references. Reading and writing between the lines of history, Howe blurs the boundaries between individuals, texts and historical events. Though some of these relations may not appear obvious at first, they strengthenwhile continuing to proliferateas the poems unfold. The concluding Rckenfigur, a series of ghostly love poems, centers around the tragic myth of Tristram and Isolde. More overtly lyrical than the poems in the rest of the book, they provide a strong conclusion to one of Howes most significant works.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Sometimes monomania has its rewards. Howe, an academic (English / SUNY Buffalo) and poet (Frame Structures, 1996, etc.), somehow developed a kind of passion for the 19th century American philosopher Charles S. Peirce and ended up writing a book about him. Or maybe, by him. Its hard to be sure, just as one feels somewhat doubtful in declaring this a book of poetry rather than prose. A good chunk of it, after all, is an outline of Peirces life and an account of how and where Howe began her research on him. Incorporating reproductions of Peirces manuscript notes and drawings, the volume can be infuriatingly hip in its resistance to genre or categorybut the verse has an incantatory power that shines through all the pomo excess framing it. Although Howe starts out sounding for all the world like a linguistics major who has read too much Derrida (Mortality is a sign for humanity our / barbarous ancestors my passion-self / Each assertion must maintain its icon / Faith in proof drives him downward), she quickly inhabits the voice shes settled onbe it hers, Peirces, or someone elses altogetherand allows it to unravel its narrative at its own rate, by turns pedantic (Peacock had no followers / he lived through nearly / thirty years of the Victorians) and lyrical (Day binds the wide Sound / Bitter sound as truth is / silent as silent tomorrow). Howes images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed-in, giving the collection a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (June 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214109
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214100
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,093,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking purity of linguistic vision, February 17, 2001

By 

Robert E. Lloyd (Deerfield Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pierce-Arrow (Paperback)

The author relies on her astonishing sense of sight and sound to produce a work of genius. At once transcending the notion of manuscript and propelling words beyond the limitations of poetic form, this book is as compelling as a narrative of the enigmatic Peirce as it is an experiment in the luxury of license. Her view of the poem as a visual object finds clear expression here amid the startling contrasts and congruencies of words. And she saves the best for last: the poem Ruckenfigur can't fail to impress, its angularity and perception bringing forth analogies to Alice Fulton. This book's beauty cannot fail to captivate.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Romancing the Microfilm, February 15, 2005

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pierce-Arrow (Paperback)

"Pierce-Arrow" has a reach and ambition few books of history (or poetry for that matter) can match. Howe makes fascinating use of biographical fragments from the lives of American philosopher Charles S. Pierce and his 'gypsy' wife Juliette, George Meredith, A.C. Swinburne, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander Pope, and Theodore Watts-Dunton, with dollops of Husserl, the Iliad, and the Tristan & Isolde story thrown in for good measure. All these figures turn out to be connected in a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and the incidents Howe picks from their lives conform to a similar pattern: undisputed brilliance, Establishment rejection, long-suffering wives or caretakers, dangerous loves, ignominious deaths.

Howe's out to bring the archives to life in a way that recovers one of the poet's most ancient roles: to give a voice to the dead. But the connections she makes can seem so eccentric, so much like facts pulled out of a hat, that the work risks becoming a celebration of her own enthusiasm rather than an insight into her subjects' lives. In the end, I learned a lot more about Susan Howe's obsessions than I did about Charles Pierce's. That's certainly Howe's right as an author, but it tends to unfairly reduce Pierce's life and work to a pre-text for her own poetic concerns. Then again, I can't think of a poet since Pound or Olson doing anything this audacious with the archives. Her book is an absorbing, sometimes maddening attempt to transform neglected microfilm into myth.