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Susan Howe

Pierce-Arrow Paperback – June 17, 1999

by Susan Howe (Author)

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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.

Pierce-Arrow, Susan Howe’s newest book of poems, takes as its point of departure the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishment 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-siecle Anglo-American intelligentsia. 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 long poem-sequences that comprise the book. 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.”

Print length

144 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

June 17, 1999
Dimensions

6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0811214109
ISBN-13

978-0811214100
Lexile measure

1830L
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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.

Review

"Susan Howe’s imaginative and irresistible re-creation of’ the hidden life of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, his relationship with the mysterious ‘gypsy’ wife Juliette, his worldly failures and spiritual triumphs, has the intensity of a Jamesian novel in which the figure in the carpet―in this case a figure comprised of Peirce’s astonishing visual texts, scenes from the Iliad, from the poems of Swinburne and Meredith, and finally the Tristan and Iseult legend―crystallize in an overarching vision of the poet’s own desire―and failure―to achieve oneness, union with another self. Part narrative, part lyric, this profound memory poem conveys, as do few poems of our time, what Howe refers to as ‘Mind's trajected light.’"
― Marjorie Perloff

"In Pierce-Arrow Susan Howe breaches the distance between symbol and history. She does this by means of the recursive motion of lyric time. It has been her continuing vocation in much of her poetry to inscribe the tragic coincidence of coincidence and loss. Yet this book, her masterpiece, is as beautiful as a myth made visible in the ever-receding intervals between what is gone and what arrives."
― Susan Stewart

"Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow is a true and living poem―more philosophical then history, without ceasing to be history―and more lyric than philosophical in its visiting of the buried life of the most passionate American philosopher. Howe's Peirce is a successor to her Emily Dickinson and, as such, a further chapter in her own right, and her book―Pierce-Arrow―is also a fast car with a fantasmatic shift―the mind as it desires to know―the body which by its nature holds the road―and carries the heart elsewhere―beyond destination. Peace thereafter/Rest fathom over."
― Allen Grossman

About the Author

Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, ThatThis, TheMidnight, MyEmilyDickinson, TheQuarry, and TheBirthmark.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (June 17, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811214109
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811214100
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1830L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,406,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,705 in Poetry by Women
- #10,746 in American Poetry (Books)

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Arch Llewellyn

Romancing the Microfilm

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 15, 2005

"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.

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Robert E. Lloyd

Breathtaking purity of linguistic vision

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 18, 2001

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.

5 people found this helpful

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