Rhythms, Networks: Caroline Levine Meets Susan Howe and Marina Tsvetaeva

Extract

whoosh, hum. Imagine that sound, like an air vent cycling on. It circulates fresh air, the fresh air of poems that breathe into our lungs, whether we are standing in the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or reading the poems on a porch, looking out on a summer day. You will not find a description of that sound in the pages of Susan Howe's book Debths, only the phrase “Titian Air Vent.” Its rush of phonemes energizes the whole. he verbal rhythms and the visual patterns respond to its acoustic energy, pulsating across the different parts of the book, creating not so much a hierarchy of theories or subtexts as an interlocking and interwoven set of patterns that spread out on every page—in irregular or fragmentary form, in neat prose paragraphs, and in blocks of verse. In Debths, where so much depends on sound orchestration, verbal transformations, and visual arrangements, the networks connecting sight and sound are always being tightened, loosened, playfully intensified. Whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. These are Caroline Levine's terms, here embedded in my account of Debths. What might a book like Howe's, drawing on many aesthetic modes but built on the foundation of poetry, ask of Levine's Forms, a remarkable theoretical intervention whose many examples are nearly all narrative?