“We have so little time in the distant present,” writes Susan Howe, but then there is the vastness of the past, which is her poetic territory. Now, in “our God-forsaken 21st century”, she keeps listening to the otherworldly echo signals from writers like Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau, and many others close to her heart. Folk tales, magic and lost languages, as well as the nursery stories – the Pied Piper, Tom Tit Tot – speak to her with the undiminished intensity of a childhood spell. Also calling out to her are facsimile editions of poets whose manuscripts – like her own – have a strong visual component. With words scattered over the page to cusp on illegibility, they embody the close connections Howe weaves with the finest threads to her literary predecessors, now so far from our “nuclear-hearted sun”. As her beloved Wallace Stevens once wrote: “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” Practising a kind of “mystical accidentalism”, the author and artist draws from the “telepathy of archives” – also the title of one of her books – as well as on the “secret connection among artefacts, visible and yet hidden until you take a leap!”

Claudia Steinberg  Your house in Guilford, Connecticut, close to Long Island Sound is near a former quarry, which inspired the title of one of your recent books. You speak of a landscape that puts you in touch with your agrarian ancestors. Can you talk about mining this particular place, with its own lore, in the context of your interest in the history of America?
Susan Howe These days, the reading of this country’s history is open to question. When I wrote my early essays about the 17th-century colonies, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I found the era’s conversion and captivity narratives were rife with religious enthusiasm and controversy, especially over the issue of women speaking with authority, or speaking publicly at all. This included the brutal treatment of first peoples. “We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance.” That’s Thoreau in the Thursday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He was discussing Cotton Mather’s account of Hannah Dustan’s escape from Abenaki Indians and her subsequent killing and scalping of ten Native Americans during King William’s War, acts for which she was memorialised with a public statue. Then there were the Salem Witch trials. In Rhode Island, stone walls forcibly built by Indians and Black slaves served as barriers for control. So many contradictions: shock, controversy and cruelty, but also spiritual acts of sharing and communion. The emblems and allegories, the mysteries of scriptural vision, and how its communication and performance were involved with the arrival in New England of Europeans for religious or financial or political reasons. They crossed the ocean and began over again in a new world – here. All this survives in the work of 19th- and 20th-century authors I love. And it still being repeated in the cries of, “Lock her up! Lock her up!” directed at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. These cries still go on during elections where women are running for political office.

CS The pre-colonial past is also very present in your experience of the landscape around you. 
SH On the Connecticut shoreline in this particular landscape and in all seasons I remember and feel the spirits of people who lived and thrived here long ago before the Colonists arrived; back then there was a flourishing industry based on harvesting shells valued for their mythic watery origins. Clam shells, oyster reefs, quahogs, other marine molluscs were harvested mainly by women and exchanged, often for furs. The most valuable “wild merchandise” was purple beads called wampum. So what was first valued for divine traces and the power of the sea came to be used as currency in the long-distance trade between Native Americans and New England, New York and southern Canada. Wampum was a value system. The Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett trustingly used beautifully woven beads strung into bracelets as currency in the fur trade and for land sales, but it turned out to be worthless. On my walks, I still find the same kind of shells scattered on the ground. 

CS This history is still acutely present in this landscape, but more and more aggressively sized buildings are colonising your refuge. 
SH I feel our local forest traces vanishing fast. The ecological revolution that began with the arrival of European colonists continues its tactics. In just two years, my standard afternoon walks down to the shore where salt-marsh grass and second-growth trees once formed a dense foliage around what were working stone quarries during the 19th and 20th centuries has been developed. We have had several sudden tornadoes and with seawater rising dramatically tree roots have been damaged by salt in the soil. Chestnuts, pines and now ash trees have become victims of various blights. Most of all what was once farmland is being sold to developers. 

CS But there was a time – the era of your own house – when architects would almost hide their buildings in these woods.
SH The Connecticut River Valley was a fertile breeding ground for abolitionists, suffragettes and gun manufacturers during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the post-war era the state became the epicentre of modernist architecture on the East Coast. Probably due to Guilford being so close to Yale’s architecture school. When we first moved here in 1973, there was a combination of classic late 18th- and early 19th-century houses near the town centre, while further out in rugged granite outcroppings, low buildings hugged the ground in various minimalist shapes and experiments. Those countercurrent modernist suburban houses that huddled in the hilly Connecticut landscape in a loving if eccentric way are now an endangered species; I am shocked at how many of them are considered “tear-down” material by appraisers. I have come to dread the sight of yellow backhoes and forklifts on a driveway. The earlier sense of felt oneness with the landscape with its shells and rocks and failed quarry rubble that was still here during the 1970s and 1980s has gone the way of horseshoe crabs.

CS It might come as a surprise to learn that the forests in upstate New York are all new growth, but then you see these walls snaking through the forests and you realise that they are remnants of farms.
SH Hogs and pigs were brought from Europe for farming in New England. And that’s why there are stone walls – you can’t let the pigs wander. And when they came, the beavers disappeared.

CS So many layers of loss. 
SH Americans were made for years and years to think it was all good for the march of progress: pines for use as Royal Navy masts; beaver fur for hats; private property; boundaries; European wars. Business as usual. For mercantile gain. Commodities. Christian progress was embedded with capitalism. We thought we were moving forward toward the millennium, and then there will be the Second Coming.

Collapse poems from Susan Howe, Concordance, 2020

CS Did you believe any of that?
SH No, but I was born right after the war. The First and Second World Wars, right on top of each other, had revealed that we were barbaric, but I thought America had done the right thing, and the union with Europe seemed a good idea in the 1940s and 1950s, when most of the horror of the Cold War was hidden from us.

CS You write that you were exposed to so much about the war when you were little that the cruelty of the Second World War has remained present in your life. 
SH Being born in 1937, I am a product of the war. My agoraphobia certainly has something to do with that. I’ve travelled almost nowhere. I’ve gone to Ireland often, but almost never to the continent and never to India or Japan. I can’t leave home without being terrified that I’ll never get back. In 1938, I was a year old and my mother took me back to Ireland to her family. We returned to the US at the time when Hitler had just invaded Poland. Our ship was called the Transylvania; it was packed with refugees, and it was a rough crossing. This year while working on an essay I found out that the Transylvania was a passenger ship of the Anchor Line, Glasgow. It was requisitioned by the British Admiralty and converted to an armed merchant cruiser, which was completed on 5 October 1939. On 10 August 1940, the HMS Transylvania was hit by a German torpedo from U-56 about 40 nautical miles north-west of Malin Head, Donegal. The disabled vessel was taken in tow, but later foundered. Nearby trawlers rescued about 300 officers and ratings, but 36 people drowned. I wonder if preverbal memory makes me return over and over in my writing to this early Atlantic crossing. Who knows?

CS We absorb so much even at that age – you feel your parents’ feelings and they become yours, without understanding them.
SH My father never went to Ireland apart from one honeymoon visit in 1936. After Pearl Harbor, he was in the army stationed in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. After 1941, we didn’t see him until 1946. My mother, Mary Manning, was a Dubliner. When she left home at nearly 30 she had been an actor, a playwright, a magazine editor and a filmmaker. My sisters and I knew almost nothing about her filmmaking nor did we know she had been active in trying to set up a venue for European films to be seen uncensored in Dublin. She spoke often about her early days at the Gate when it was so marvellous during the post-Irish Civil War years, but apart from the screenplay for the silent film Guests of the Nation in 1934, not a word about film. A photo of her sitting with the crew for that film out near the Sally Gap recently surfaced and she looks so happy and strong.

CS It seems that she left you with a task. Have any of her films been found?
SH Yes, a group of people in Ireland are working on her legacy and that of other bright women whose work during those years in Ireland was sidelined or ignored. She was also involved with Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, with all this sense of the magic of sound. I grew up with a sense of the theatre as a passion. She wanted me, of course, to be an actress and go straight back to Ireland and do what she had left behind. From the time I was a small child I was imbued with ballads and stories about the beautiful landscape of Ireland from Howth Head to Killiney Bay and the Wicklow Hills, as compared to the ugly landscape around Boston’s North and South Shore as she saw and felt it. This was also tied up with the spoken word.

CS And now you are losing what you considered beautiful about America.
SH I don’t think I believed as a child it was beautiful here. I still need to be perched on the Atlantic Coast; I need to feel Europe is across, because that’s where I should be. That’s where I look; I don’t feel comfortable heading west. My father’s family came from Bristol, Rhode Island; his mother’s were from Quincy, Massachusetts, many of them were sailors. The sense of the magic of sound comes from my feeling that I wasn’t speaking quite right because I pronounced things with a drawl. My mother taught us English pronunciation down to the smallest detail, but this was Irish English. She was also incredibly witty. She adored Oscar Wilde and had that sort of magic touch with words veering between from one syllable to the next.

CS You are interested in seismographic perceptions of sound.
SH Working with the composer David Grubbs introduced me to field recording where you put a microphone into an empty room or in a space you thought was quiet and it turns out to be filled with strange echoes in measureless keys. Every room or hall or hill outside is different. During my residency at the [Isabella Stewart] Gardner Museum, he used a microphone after closing hours in the Titian Room and the echo from a small air conditioning vent I had never noticed before resembled a deep sigh or soughing wind. Recently I discovered the music of pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros and her attention to what she called radical attentiveness. You must listen under, deep down into depths beneath for music beyond intent. Oliveros was another brilliant woman rendered an outsider during most of her working life until outside became inside. I would like to follow to push further if I could. And I would love to pursue relations between letter shapes and punctuation marks. I’ve been working recently with writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs and have gotten into the beauty of Caribbean English, her work and the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, and dub music. I see connections to Ireland, and with Brathwaite, too, you can see the way words are presented on the page. That it is a big deal with him, and they also have an acoustic force.

CS To you, reading has always meant listening. You have written about – and performed – the whispers you pick up telepathically in libraries and archives. And then there is also the visuality of the letters on the page and the collaging of text fragments that are read as small silences and choked words, as if they came from far away in time and space.
SH Poetry to me has always been both sound and image on paper. I’m obsessed about one page of my small poems being the exact mirror of the other. I didn’t start out that way, but it has become increasingly important; they are reflecting upon, or are thinking about, each other, or they have a symmetry.

CS In the acoustic sphere, symmetry is repetition. Do you listen to music?
SH At Christmas and Easter I always find myself listening to Handel’s Messiah. The words and music operate as one force: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.” That’s from Isaiah in the King James version; the one I learned and I have in my head as the ultimate comfort – I need it. When I listen in the cold of winter and in this time of pandemic and isolation and global warming I believe – in God or imagination, in memory of the particular order of words and music together because God and my imagination are one. There’s got to be order out there, among whirling constellations.

CS Artworks are not only capable of transmitting the otherworldly; you say that they also give us the underworldly. Paul Thek was an artist whose work touched on that.
SH I love his work because he is someone for whom the word and the colour on the paper are one. Many visual artists use words of single alphabet letters in their work, but I just see words. In Thek’s case, it’s an instant, “ah, he’s got it”. There is one work in particular, The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, a set of sculptures, paintings and small objects, that affected me deeply. Just the idea of calling the work The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, a fairy tale I grew up on and practically know by heart! It was so brilliant in the old high modernist Marcel Breuer-designed Whitney Museum. How could the Pied Piper have “personal effects” in the form of fake rocks in various rooms? Then another room where all the paintings were arranged at a child’s eye level and in blue or painted water, various washes of blue. There was the sense of going under and drowning – I was overwhelmed.

CS I’m curious about your interest in another Piper, namely, the Boston medium Leonora Piper.
SH Right here I have William James’ Essays in Psychical Research. That book, along with Thoreau’s Journal, never leaves my workroom. The whole thing about the psychic Leonora Piper was that William James wanted to believe in religion and was enthralled by spiritualism and the spiritualist society; he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experiences, his big book and he was the person who recorded it all. I’m fascinated by people who can cross over and be converted. He couldn’t, I can’t, but I can’t read enough about table tipping, planchette writing, Ouija boards, automatic writing. All of this fascinates me. I love reading about Georgie and William Butler Yeats, and H.D., Virginia Woolf heard birds speaking in Greek and H.D. heard messages from dead RAF pilots.

CS Were you ever religious?
SH Not really, but I think I’m religious about words. Possibly due to the classical repertory theatre tradition that my mother fervently believed in, as well as experimental offshoots. I was briefly a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, when it was a method-acting school. I couldn’t bear it. Improvisations where you were encouraged to go off script didn’t work for me; I needed a script to act. After my father’s sudden death in 1967, my mother returned to Dublin to live and during summers we often went over to stay with her. At the time, her old friend Olivia Robertson was living with her brother Lawrence and his wife Pamela Durdin-Robertson in Huntington Castle, only a short drive away. In 1976, they created the Fellowship of Isis on the vernal equinox to assist in reintroducing the religion of the Goddess to the world. Olivia was co-founder, arch-priestess and hierophant of the Fellowship of Isis. One summer we all went for afternoon tea. Afterwards Lawrence told fortunes and read minds; then we visited the underground temple dedicated to Isis in the dungeons. There was a bottomless well under one of the dungeon floors. Olivia claimed to be “clairaudient, clairvoyant, and telepathic”. When I told her I preferred not to learn my fortune or have my palm read, she said: “You are a psychic. When I see one I know one. You mustn’t be afraid.” I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I was truly afraid I might never get out and back to Dublin.

CS You also believe in good spells, though. You write about making a wish every night that all your family members may become very old, and you include those who have died already. 
SH Every night – but only if stars are out. Isn’t it catastrophic to have to keep repeating certain words or names over and over while standing outside in the dark even if you know they don’t work?

CS Would you feel guilty if you were to drop the dead from the list? It is so easy to betray the dead, not thinking enough about them, ignoring them.
SH This is my family. My mother had a thing about the moon. Never look at the new moon through glass – it’s really bad luck, like breaking a mirror. If you do that you must throw the shards into running water, you simply had to find running water somewhere, immediately. Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” starts with this ominous passage from “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms; / And I fear, I fear, my Master Dear! / We shall have a deadly storm.” Just that stanza is enough to inspire one of the most beautiful poems ever.

CS Do you don’t believe in God, but you are superstitious. My mother was an atheist, but she believed in ghosts.
SH I believe in ghosts!

CS What about comfort in black, velvety nothingness? The nothing to worry about.
SH I am an insomniac and sleeping, which is nothing, unless you are dreaming bad dreams, is wonderful. The nothingness of sleep – I agree. “Stop walking over my grave. Leave me alone. Go away and do something else.” That is from the French translation of my work The Europe of Trusts and I must explain why I called it that. In Ireland, there used to be a popular belief that inordinate mourning would pierce a hole in the dead. In a Scottish version, a dead child has to carry around all her mother’s tears – it practically breaks my heart – in a large pitcher, and so gets left behind by the happy group she would have joined if her mother had left her alone. This may be what the grave is saying: you just can’t go away and leave them. So I am with my mother.

CS Who doesn’t leave you alone.
SH So true, but I do love her. My father was like a saint; he was a completely good person – loving, loyal and true. I was the bad daughter personified. I have a lot of guilt.

CS There’s no way around guilt; it is everywhere. Somewhere, on the other hand, you quote Hölderlin, who used this gorgeous word heilignüchtern – something like sacred-sober. It reminded me of the notion that “poetry is transparent, but as hard to see as black ice”.
SH William Gass wrote about that untranslatability of the word “holy” – isn’t “sacred-sober” wonderful? And I wouldn’t have cared about black ice here in coastline Connecticut, but in upper New York state it is very dangerous, because you can’t see the pavement underneath and your car slides out of control.

CS There is something magical or mystical in that treacherous combination of clarity and darkness. “Poetry is love for the felt fact,” you say, “stated in most agile and detailed lyric terms.” At the same time, it should speak of an “American aesthetic of uncertainty”. How do these ideas fit together?
SH Charles Olson once said, referring to Melville’s Billy Bud: “The stutter is the plot.” During the 19th century, American authors whose work I care most about were trying to find their particular voices in relation to European writers they found infinitely superior. They were pioneers. For American literature to be born, “Thus Poe,” as William Carlos Williams wrote, “must suffer by his own originality. Invent that which is new, even if it be made of pine from your own yard, and there’s none to know what you have done. It is because there’s no name.” So to me for American literature to be born is to have a kind of stutter – they were only stuttering, but they managed to make it very interesting.

CS So a new language was born, haltingly.
SH Funnily enough, my American grandfather, whom I adored, had a terrible stutter. It ran in his family. He loved to talk and he couldn’t start to say anything without a sort of explosion of little gags and stops. His children were embarrassed.

CS How did you feel about it?
SH My sister Fanny and I weren’t embarrassed, but it was awful; it was so hard for him to get out a word. He had brothers who stuttered and there seemed to be other New Englanders who stuttered who rented rooms at the top of our house. Maybe they were cousins. People did awful things to kids to make their stutter go away. It’s an inherited thing, and they probably blamed it on the mother. We understood how to deal with the halts and plunges as if they were ordinary.

CS In your readings, where you seem to channel the voices of the dead, you sometimes speak in fragmented, tattered words – very near a stutter.
SH That is the idea around my visual pieces, that there are whispering voices outside wanting to be let in. Voices like flutters, a heart flutter. The idea of stuttering is not something I pass over quickly. I think it’s just interesting.

CS You have written about the ominous silence before you discovered, one winter morning in 2008, that your husband had died in in his sleep. At the same time you were surrounded by the voices of people in books who had become very close to you. Is this ability to hear the written word a comfort to you? When your husband died, you were thinking of the letter Sarah Edwards wrote to her daughter in 1758 about a death. It seems as if across centuries you can summon the company of fellow sufferers.
SH I don’t believe Sarah Edwards suffered; she was truly converted. She crossed over and was with her God and there she loved to be. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James calls this sense of inexpressible love “saintliness”. More and more I have turned to the English metaphysical poets and the energy of the form of their words as a shield. The most terrifying thing to me is that when we die the shield is gone. Let’s take the late fragments of Emily Dickinson that I’m so obsessed with. It doesn’t matter what her intentions were. What matters is what’s left. What matters is that image on that piece of paper, and that image is acoustic and visual – it’s both things. The great mystery to me is where letters meet paper, where every mark is acoustic and visual. What is that? Words are all we have; words are the ladder but where is it going? From the top of Mount Leinster, watching the ark sail past, calling to Noah: “It’s a soft day.” ◉

Collapse poems from Susan Howe, Concordance, 2020