CONCORDANCE
By Susan Howe

“One must cross the threshold heart of words,” Susan Howe writes early in her new book, “Concordance,” an appealingly jagged sequence of collage poems. The “threshold heart,” for Howe, is a kind of echo chamber where sound dazzles the inner ear and resonance dances with meaning. To invite us into this complex space, Howe populates the pages of her new book with sliced texts and textures, pasting down items as varied as draft letters, the preface to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Common Law” and (yes) concordances. These collages invite readers into protracted encounters with scraps. Some of the book’s pages are just glued together slivers of dislodged indexes. This is not to say they are not also delightful.

Howe, a Bollingen Prize-winning poet whose career spans 45 years and whose work has been grouped among the language poets, has an abiding fascination with histories, archives and ghosts. “Concordance” appears alongside a rerelease of Howe’s much-admired 2014 book “Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives,” a critical book of complementary fascinations, scraps and glued-down tatters. To enter either book — one poetry, the other criticism, though in Howe’s hands these cousins share shaggy features — is to suspend oneself in a conversation about meaning, about how texts allow us to find it. “Concordance” requires readers to channel their inner bookworm or hungry archivist, the tender scholar for whom typefaces, fonts, ink stains and marginalia create an ardent flutter. Utility is beside the point. Of what use now the concordance, that elaborate alphabetical list that helps scholars illuminate a word’s frequency in a deeply studied text? To whom and for what is this painstaking and antiquated piece of work useful, especially in the era of Google word clouds and computational linguistic analyses? Howe wants us first to be the kinds of readers who swoon as much for the yellowing paper and the dated stamps as for the content of the letter itself.

This posture of adoring encounter, Howe suggests, goes for language as well. She is a poet who has spent her career reminding us that our experiences of meaning and sound are synchronous. Howe’s poems argue this in form as well as content. Delighting in new paths around words, exploring their visual, acoustic, sonic possibilities, she revels in “affinities and relations,” in “signals and transmissions.”

“Concordance” collages its texts to open us to their potential. Here are two tantalizing lines from one page, hard to quote here, because in the quotation we lose their scissored-and-pasted quality, their essence as rewoven text patchwork of an old book. The lines (a bit of metacommentary) read: “easily destroy, since it has been cut down and fa / antine can be uprooted and transported more eas / lm tree.” If Howe has created something pleasingly dislodged, it is also hard to dislodge again: In doing so we lose the sense of the fragment’s objectness as slivered typeface, the pleasure of what Howe calls the “grapheme.” Sense as meaning is not (and cannot be) what we are after here, but rather sense as sensation and encounter. Earlier Howe has warned: “Hereinafter microscopic reduplications of desire are pieced together through grid logic.” Names, she says, “set off phonologic sparks and echoes can be seen as rungs on a veil ladder.” We are amid the sparks, climbing the rungs, into a land of veils and valence.

Yet Howe shows that this mysterious ladder of sense and sensation actually helps ground us — both in language, and in our own attention to the leaps of our minds. Words (no less than the objects that contain them) come sticky with histories: The concordance, both as object and repository, draws us into relation with language and history both. Concordances perform a “half-remembered / worthy service”; they also help us fathom the wider field on which we come to speak at all. As Howe put it in “Spontaneous Particulars”: “Names are supposed to be signs for things, but what if things are actually the signs of names? What if words possess a ‘spirit’ potential to their nature as words?”

Together, “Concordance” and “Spontaneous Particulars” read as a kind of diptych, assembled by the same bibliophile, her collage unfolding across time. In each, Howe imbues her investigations of fragment and snippet with such longing that it is hard not to yearn, from one’s own desk, for deep encounter. In “Spontaneous Particulars,” Howe writes: “Coming home to poetry — you permit yourself liberties — in the first place — happiness.” Howe wants texts to make us feel that we draw near to the possible in one another, in words and in ourselves. The tactile, woven text may open us to touch. It may remind us of our own possibility to touch in return.

In this precarious moment, such communions feel newly poignant. When do we risk happiness? When do we risk encounter? How can reading offer those things now? Howe’s books may accompany you in these questions. They may also make you long for the smell of libraries, for the humming quiet of reading rooms, the gentle rustle of others turning pages, too. Howe writes against a world that disappears too far away online, in which we lose the bodily perception of space, the tenderness of touch. In this era of social distancing, I felt the prick of these poems: They urged me toward aliveness. Rereading “Spontaneous Particulars” now, I could not help hearing Howe newly as I read: “We need to see and touch objects and documents.” Many of us now feel it also. We look for new ways to feel, imagine, meet. We need to see and touch.