Tom Roberge on Siri Hustvedt on Susan Howe on Emily Dickinson

New Directions has a gorgeous new website, and shiny new blog, too. Today, they've posted a piece reproduced from introductory remarks by Siri Hustvedt (she who makes French readers happy) about Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, which Hustvedt read from at Community Bookstore's 40th anniversary in September. Tom Roberge writes of the event: "I'm told 900 people were in attendance, and judging by the pictures here, I'm inclined to believe them. I was there, sitting near a column, my view of the stage almost entirely blocked, but I could see the podium." An excerpt of Hustvedt's remarks:

My Emily Dickinson is a critical, scholarly, poetic, subversive, mordant, brilliant book written by the poet Susan Howe. It is by far the best work about our greatest poet I have ever read, and I have read many.

It is not easy to read from this book, as Howe's sentences are sometimes dense. She plays with the poet's play. Dickinson's poems come and go unannounced. Howe is so deeply immersed in Dickinson's language and in the multiple sources of that inimitable language that the reader must be attuned to Howe's particular kind of erudition, a form of knowing that refuses to bow to the conventions of literary criticism, but more importantly, she resists the very idea of binary oppositions, hot and cold, high and low, man and woman. Meanings are not fixed. They slide.

The book's epigraph is from William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, a work that foreshadows My Emily Dickinson.

I will read the epigraph, Howe's first sentence, and then part of a section called "Identity and Memory." I would like to stress that Howe's insights about the lot of a woman writing are relevant now. The cheap platitudes and truisms of our culture, which proclaim that although women writers may once have suffered from condescension by the patriarchal powers-that-be, they no longer do, is utter bunk. Things have changed, and they have stayed the same.

To read the epigraph and first sentence, visit the full blog post here. There's also a good essay by poet and editor Susan Schultz that digs into Howe, Williams, and Dickinson here at How2 (btw, come back, How2!). And if you've got 30 one-dollar bills and live in New York, you can hear Susan Howe talk at the Poets Forum today about poetry and telepathy (!).