In this chapter, I explore the possibilities for and implications of an emergent poetics in the photographically inflected poetics of Susan Howe’s long poem Frolic Architecture (2010). This long poem, published as a single volume and collected in That This (2010), features several photograms by James Welling. A photogram, or cameraless photograph, is a kind of shadowy contact print made using an object rather than a photographic negative. I ask what Howe’s remediation of the method of the photogram, a nineteenth-century medium, offers twenty-first-century poetry. I suggest that Howe sees these photograms as analogous to the accompanying poems in terms of methodology; she employs a kind of photogram-poetics. Howe’s photogram-poetics, the cutting and collaging of facsimiles of archival documents to foreground the visual and material qualities of print, echoes Kabbalistic anagrams and Dadaist collages in the way it attributes agency to the collaged print fragments themselves. By foregrounding the printed medium, rather than its “content,” Howe resists the conventional hermeneutic impulse toward textual interpretation, instead attempting to conjure the “ghosts” of the texts’ authors (which, as I will argue, is one of the limitations of Howe’s project). That is, rather than simply pointing to the artifice of the medium—its illusion of transparency—as a way of critiquing printed texts as social constructions, Howe attempts to present a methodological alternative to negative (or “paranoid,” in Sedgwick’s (2003) phrase) critique. But Howe’s method is limited in that it exchanges one hierarchy for another in her subordination of the printed texts to the ghosts of their authors in her career-long preoccupation with telepathy. Despite the limitations of Howe’s own reading of this method, I argue that Howe’s photogram-poetics ultimately appropriate the non-prosthetic mediation of the photogram into the medium of print.

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Photogram as Poetic Method: Susan Howe’s Materialist Telepathy

  • Travis W. Matteson

摘要

In this chapter, I explore the possibilities for and implications of an emergent poetics in the photographically inflected poetics of Susan Howe’s long poem Frolic Architecture (2010). This long poem, published as a single volume and collected in That This (2010), features several photograms by James Welling. A photogram, or cameraless photograph, is a kind of shadowy contact print made using an object rather than a photographic negative. I ask what Howe’s remediation of the method of the photogram, a nineteenth-century medium, offers twenty-first-century poetry. I suggest that Howe sees these photograms as analogous to the accompanying poems in terms of methodology; she employs a kind of photogram-poetics. Howe’s photogram-poetics, the cutting and collaging of facsimiles of archival documents to foreground the visual and material qualities of print, echoes Kabbalistic anagrams and Dadaist collages in the way it attributes agency to the collaged print fragments themselves. By foregrounding the printed medium, rather than its “content,” Howe resists the conventional hermeneutic impulse toward textual interpretation, instead attempting to conjure the “ghosts” of the texts’ authors (which, as I will argue, is one of the limitations of Howe’s project). That is, rather than simply pointing to the artifice of the medium—its illusion of transparency—as a way of critiquing printed texts as social constructions, Howe attempts to present a methodological alternative to negative (or “paranoid,” in Sedgwick’s (2003) phrase) critique. But Howe’s method is limited in that it exchanges one hierarchy for another in her subordination of the printed texts to the ghosts of their authors in her career-long preoccupation with telepathy. Despite the limitations of Howe’s own reading of this method, I argue that Howe’s photogram-poetics ultimately appropriate the non-prosthetic mediation of the photogram into the medium of print.