The Poetry of Susan Howe

Montgomery, Will

doi:10.1057/9780230113091

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…89 Similarly, Howe's poetic practice 'is a form of ghostwriting', 90 with poems 'inhabited by the voices of the dead'. 91 Her work, which is keenly interested in how we might learn from the lost, asks how to 'approach the dead ones deep in time's silence'. 92 Such an elegiac question involves opening textual space to the time of the lost so that 'the past is present when [we] write'.…”

Section: Spectral Solidaritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Specters of Minks: Postcapitalist Elegies and Multispecies Solidarities

Leep

2022

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

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While narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) have become increasingly prominent, posthumanist narratives of capitalism remain on the margins. Informed by feminist avant-garde poet Susan Howe and philosopher Jacques Derrida, I develop a ‘drift narrative’ approach to human-mink relations during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wherein millions of minks in fur farms were infected by the coronavirus and culled. This approach employs the use of postcapitalist elegies constructed in a wildlife refuge located near a mink factory farm. In a context of global mink culls, the wildlife refuge – where minks live freely – proximate to a local industrial mink fur farm – where minks are caged and killed for profit – became the site of (re)writing IR in drift narrative form. This poetic analysis highlights trans-spatial links of animal capital and employs intermixed elegiac images, sound recordings, and textual fragments to help us become attuned to nonhuman dreams, desires, losses, and futures. Grounding persistence for postcapitalist futures within the dreams of the dead, the drift narrative generates a spectral form of global multispecies solidarity. Contributing to the interspecies and narrative turns in IR, as well as multidisciplinary work on multispecies solidarity, the drift narrative offers an aesthetic and ethical critique of past and future animal capital systems that render more-than-human life as killable.

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Section: Spectral Solidaritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…107 Yet spectral solidarity, as informed by Susan Howe, eschews the clarity of narrative by embracing 'stumbling', 'stuttering', and textual forms of 'wandering'. 108 Textuality, in this sense, sounds desire for solidarity through poetic stutter-rhythms that raise the uncertain demands of the dead.…”

Section: Spectral Solidaritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specters of Minks: Postcapitalist Elegies and Multispecies Solidarities

Leep

2022

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

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“…25 However, as Will Montgomery notes, her work adheres to a backwards glance towards American Romanticism, foundation myths and the lyric that puts her at odds with her Language school contemporaries. 26 Like Secret History of the Dividing Line and The Birth-mark, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time constitutes a critical reengagement with the American past on the levels of content, language and form. 27 Specifically, it engages with aspects of enclosure and the Picturesque to bring into question the ethicality of the borders between subject and Other that inform the foundation myth of the United States as we know it today.…”

Section: Feminine Enclosure In Maggie O'sullivan's States Of Emergencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of course I mean future too and present as I do always in all these 'meditations' […] The woods were a region of terror and the only answer was to hurl brutal cries of war through them -to cut down the wood -even to burn and defoliate the forest in Vietnam. 40 For Howe a return to the archaic pastoral binary between enclosure and wilderness is important if we are to critique the legitimacy of the US (and its allies too) as an invading force.…”

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confidence: 99%