Pierce-Arrow - Softcover

Howe, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214109 ISBN 13: 9780811214100

Publisher: New Directions, 1999

Synopsis

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.”

About this title

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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0811214109
• ISBN 13: 9780811214100
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144