Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002
Subject: Discount offer - Rachel Back's new Susan Howe book

Oh, drat. And I so eagerly had my credit card poised to order.

More biographical reductivism? (?!)

Is there no end to this People Magazine school of criticism recidivist trend of reading de-subject-ifed text through insiders' information about the private life of the (theoretically extinct [Barthes]) author?

I've presented on Howe only once at an academic conference, a fluke, (--- to paradoxically reverse my protest against personist criticism with an ostensibly personist retort ---) and published criticism/reviews of her books only twice (aside from that, my scansion Howe postings here this past spring serve as the only remaining public tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of in-depth involvement),--- but everything I've been able to amateurishly contrive about her, the "vertical reading," the interpretation of Bed Hangings, etc., was done without this wizard's stone of the conveniently neurotic Oedipal facticity of biograpy; and an entire factory of critics could have gone on writing from now until the deforestation of all paper
sources similarly explicating her books along suprapersonal lines.

What a disappointment, what a crushing disappointment, --- and how perplexing! --- that the first full-length book on our greatest living poet is reported to resort to the universally infallible decoder key of Reading Through The Life.

...As though as indomitable a suprapersonalizer as Mary Magdalene's noli me tangere from Howe's depicted Risen Christ Himself didn't insist on transcendentalisms larger than one-woman (auto)biography.

Language poetry = covert Confessionalism?

>> This study debunks the myth of Howe's impenetrability

One might've chosen a less frustratedly phallic, more invagination-friendly predicate for her unfathomability.