Fanny Howe is not afraid

A new feature on the BOMBLOG is Elsbeth Pancrazi on Fanny Howe’s Come and See (Graywolf 2011), a book published in May that is also, as Pancrazi writes, an "argument for a kind of art that teaches us to contain a large amount of uncertainty." More on that:

(In Howe’s own words: “While a painting takes time and gives headaches,/A digital camera doesn’t blink and this produces a lack of analogies./It is not an open eye but an impure certainty.”) Howe’s proclamatory statements, aimed at truth, come out cryptic, their meanings warped by strange choices of grammar and tense. Truth is fugitive—although whether Howe is pursuing it or trying to outrun it, the reader, following her traces, cannot be sure.

Dwelling in this book, one has the sense of being very close to another person, barely discernible, as in a dark theater. The poems, radically different from one another, form a system requiring total immersion, a suspension in the poetry, until the self, everything it knew and expected to encounter, has been forgotten.

The long poem titled “After Watching Klimov’s Agonia" concludes "Absolutely nothing happened except recognition that left an ache.” For me, it was recognition that, beneath the garbled, unequivocal proclamations of truth that provided my initial points of entry, there was a contradictory force at work, a quiet attention to surreal detail that revealed nothing less than the stated truth’s opposite. In “The Grotto,” where

The sky wears no bells, no paper hats.
but shawls crawl up the mountain rocks
piece by piece, and even under
night’s weight
we still are not afraid.

we trust that “The shawls are dragging themselves across the slate/that will soon cover our feet” far more readily than we believe “we are still not afraid.” Our uncertainty is confirmed when the location of the poem seems to shift to a white-washed cottage where we must, “Pretend we stamp the sand onto the floor,/then sweep away the crumbs and ticks.” The poem reveals that this is an illusion in the last line of the final stanza, which strives to normalize the world of the poem with rhythm, but succeeds only by admitting a falter, a misspeak, a break in the spell:

You sip cold water from a silver glass.
I climb back upstairs with a hot water bag.
Tomorrow I get everything I need.
I mean today. I did.

Read the full piece here.