Susan Howe is the winner of the 2018 International Griffin Poetry Prize, for her singular and intriguing poetry collection Debths. Let’s celebrate this milestone in her distinguished career by revisiting our Poem of the Week look at “Epistolary Correspondences”.
“Epistolary Correspondences” picks up from the very beginning of the Foreword section, where Howe reminisces,…
Susan Howe is the winner of the 2018 International Griffin Poetry Prize, for her singular and intriguing poetry collection Debths. Let’s celebrate this milestone in her distinguished career by revisiting our Poem of the Week look at “Epistolary Correspondences”.
“Epistolary Correspondences” picks up from the very beginning of the Foreword section, where Howe reminisces, but in somewhat pointed fashion, about the summer camp her parents sent her to when seh was eight. “I hated the place.” In one visit where she had a solemn picnic with her parents, “I begged them to ransom me” … but they departed at the end of the day and left her at the camp.
Clearly, that incident still haunts her, not only raising the spectre of Mr. Bickle (although surely we think fondly about childhood imaginary friends, he’s rather coldly referred to as a “transitional object”) but earning the troubling adjective “half-suffocated” and other haunting analogies for that unfortunate picnic.
The leap from there to the paintings of Paul Threk – here is a gallery of them to capture the mood – is fascinating. Did Threk’s images somehow disinter the unhappy summer camp and perceived parental insensitivity?
“So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden.”
That images – not words – provoked this unearthing of memories further intrigues. If Mr. Bickle lived in a mailbox, perhaps he would have witnessed some written missives petitioning for a summer camp reprieve … but no, he had already transitioned and vanished, perhaps taking the power of words with him. As we delve into Howe’s Debths, we see that images and text often battle it out on the page, deepening our curiosity and drawing us into her explorations.
