Howe

So I'm hoping that I read the right book for this week.... The Nonconformist's Memorial by Susan Howe. We read the Howe sisters in the Jenkins/Goldstein iteration of this course. They're both pretty interesting, particularly as explorations of the intersection between poetry and faith. I find Susan Howe more difficult to grasp than Fanny Howe, especially in this book. On the back cover of my copy, a reviewer calls the book "verbal static", which is a fairly good description, I think, of the reading experience. Occasionally a phrase or line or set of lines speaks clearly through the accretion of verbal material. Throughout the book, she pursues the theme of writing, what it does, how it interacts with that which cannot be said/written--the "Ghostly", both in the old Puritan sense (i.e., Holy Spirit) and the spirit-walking-from-the-grave sense. So that also interacts with the theme of the body, both the human (and, for Howe, feminine) body and the body of work or the body of the book--how the body houses the "ghost", or fails to do so, and what happens when body and spirit are separated.