william watkin's blog (since 2003)

The Midnight, Parerga It almost doesn't get started, like the inertia of inception, invention and inauguration is an almost lazy pleasure. We are, after all, in bed. It is midnight, more it is The Midnight, the meridian of meridians, absolute midpoint of total transition between the transparent daylight of prose and the obfuscation of nightly poetry. That each night when we go to bed we not only step into blank sheets but also into the blank sheet of the pre-poetic moment. The minute before midnight, the moment before the event of the momentary and momentous happening of the material word within the medium of the "page." We are in bed and we don't really want to get up but we have been lying there for hours now and it is simply not getting us anywhere, however Freudian it is to be held between the waking and sleeping state, susceptible to a daydreaming where our defences are down and the Id can walk amongst us with its growl and grizzle. Like the endless delay of the ...

In reading and teaching Howe’s work I always commence from an appreciation of the semiotic and graphematic elements of her work and find this invariably opens up the text to further understanding. The Midnight is no exception. From the very start of the poem with a fake frontispiece blurred by a false tissue paper interleaf, a frontispiece whose reverse or tain is also visible, the text rendered in mirror image, it is apparent that the visual is of equal importance to the verbal here. A simple technique I often use when teaching Howe, indeed much postmodern poetry, is ask my students to first look at the poem without reading it. For example in “Thorow”, perhaps her best work and one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, the simple exercise of looking leads one from the visual icon which opens the poem, through two types of prose, into recognisable poetry, ending with the remarkable three pages of palimpsest, anti-linear poetics. The midnight is similarly a book to look at. Th...

An introduction and guide to reading Susan Howe The Midnight. On the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture which I run at Brunel University, West London (UK) we try to study the most recent work by postmodern poets. This year I ran a seminar on Susan Howe’s The Midnight, specifically “Bed Hangings I”. we were using the excerpt from Vanishing Points (Salt 2004) in fact although a number of students had read the whole “collection.” As is the case with all of Howe’s work this is an initially confounding, slowly emerging and finally irrevocable, uncanny and sublime work and I expect I will be adding commentary to this for years to come but for now here are some very basic inroads into the work. The Midnight, some general themes Wider Context: The Midnight like many of Howe’s books sits somewhere between collection and unified work. “Bed Hangings I” for example worked exceptionally well as a unified piece in the class room, but perhaps only because some of us knew the whole book. In many ...