how to draw foundation grid of a poem
Answers
Answer:
r a nice weekend as well I don't have a great day and a nice day and a blessed day and a great year ahead and thank you for your name and thanks and thank you for
Answer:
There was a time, now more than a decade ago, when I found Susan Howe’s poetry too opaque. The fractured and clipped syntax, and the stuttered sounds, left me searching for a point of entry. Her use of typography, symbols (arrows, brackets, etc.), and idiosyncratic punctuation halted my attempted reading. But then I read My Emily Dickinson (1985), her unclassifiable prose work that created a dialogue between the namesake Amherst poet and the Brontë sisters. It helped me understand how radical art could emerge from something as austere and stultifying as Puritanism. Through a structure more architectural than argumentative, it built an expanse of ideas, traced literary genealogies, and illuminated aspects of American history that previously hadn’t interested me but that in Howe’s framing became urgently alive. After reading the book, it was as if the difficulty, or at least the opacity, I previously experienced with Howe’s poems suddenly fell away. It wasn’t that her work was easier to access—it was that I was willing to go wherever the work took me; what at first felt closed seemed like a series of open doors.
Like her contemporaries Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, Howe is a radical stylist. An atomistic attention to units of sound and typographical form characterizes her work, which in recent years has extended to her practice of composing poems with tape and scissors from found texts, resulting in photocopied collage works that challenge the limits of legibility through poems increasingly proximate to visual art. (A selection of these compositions was exhibited at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.) Also like Carson’s and Rankine’s poems, Howe’s sometimes look more like essays; she shares Carson’s habit of revivifying the intellectual lives of the past and Rankine’s concern for interrogating American self-mythology. In her essayistic mode, Howe relies extensively on quotation, stitching together brief illuminating anecdotes, lyrical fragments, philosophical observations, lists, and dictionary definitions. Entries from early editions of Noah Webster’s dictionary are used as if to view the origins of American word usage like preserved specimens under a microscope. A rich and expansive set of sources and concerns repeat in her work, most notably centering around the intellectual history of the United States and New England, including Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle; encompassing the Brontës, the Romantics, and Shakespeare; forward to the high modernism of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and on through to contemporary art and film.
Howe is as interested in theology and the law as she is in art and literature, all of which she brings together in sometimes cacophonous choral dialogue. Although her subjects may seem antiquarian, the means with which she addresses them is starkly avant-garde, doing for early American intellectual history what the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin did for the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcades in his unfinished Arcades Project. As Benjamin did, Howe composes by collecting quotations, facts, and related observations, which she then arranges as much by rhythm as by theme. Howe has said “my work is a mass of quotations,” and in her work, readers experience an eclectic but judiciously curated personal library that has been cut down and reassembled into stylized, intellectual auto-portraits.
Howe’s techniques for writing cut-up histories are on display in three distinct modes in the three sections—let’s call them long poems—of her latest book, Concordance (New Directions, 2020). The title refers to a list, usually in book form, used for textual analysis and navigation. A concordance, first used to study the Bible, consists of an alphabetical arrangement of principal words in a book or some other body of text (such as the complete works of an author) along with their immediate contexts. Howe’s Concordance asks a question at the hinge of form and content: what is the relation between collage and concordance? Although the latter is formally rigorous and indexical in the way it parses text into an enumerated alphabetical list, the process of collage—from the French “to glue”—is aesthetic and intuitive as it arranges disparate parts into a coherent whole.
The epigraph to Howe’s book comes from the Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson and uses the entry for “Sliver” to show how a concordance functions:
Explanation:
Have a nice day dear