It’s evident that I’m a firm believer in close reading. It’s a process that I think can be easily extracted from its origins in New Criticism* and put to good use in a wide range of contexts. Close reading generally will lead you to notice things that might otherwise escape you. But there are poems & poets that demonstrate almost as clearly just what the limits of this process might be. “The Descent,” the third section of Fanny Howe’s newest book, Gone, is a great example. Among its fifteen poems are some the finest Howe has ever written (which is saying something), but they are the sort that can only be partially unpacked via the close reading process. Here, almost at random, is one of maybe 6 or 7 “favorites” of mine, entitled “Again”:

 

When training to die

with your back to the train

 

you cry green green

to a blind Metropolitan

 

it means

you can’t and you can

 

Then leap on the lap

of the tall blind man

 

who asks you to repeat

 

the word again

 

though now you’re so beat you can’t open your eyes to speak

or are you just unmanifest

 

Close reading will cause you to follow the course of vowels & consonants in this work, which is amazingly complicated & yet seems so extremely simple – an excellent example of Howe works her magic. Follow, for just one example, the long i sound through die, blind, blind & finally eyes (noting the pun), then the long a & long e as they work through the piece, then the deployment of terminal n sounds – six of the poem’s eighteen lines, seven if you permit the ns combination of means, end on this sound. Note also that the poem is not entirely composed of couplets and the two single-line stanzas that form the exception do so in order to create the remarkable line the word again, a phrase that can be taken at least three different ways (all of which I find audible virtually on first reading, thus setting up a terrific resonance). Then note how that long penultimate line is built not only around long e & long i but also on the terminal t of beat & the k in speak (echoing repeat & even leap), leading to the absolute – and absolutely deliberate sonic trainwreck that is unmanifest. This last term will also recall the one other word here that violates the simple aural palette of the text, Metropolitan.

 

It’s possible to recognize, follow & read through all of the above in this text, even just as markers of what a master craftsperson Howe is, yet I don’t think any of them – or even the sum of them all – can tell you precisely just why this poem is so terrifically powerful. It is conceivable to say, almost as a problem of the philosophical construction of language, that Howe develops multiple, partially conflicting & partially accumulative image schemas in order to structure a meaning that is at once complex & indeterminate – and that this indeterminacy has to be completed in some fashion by (within) the reader – but that ultimately doesn’t tell me anything. It’s like reading a bad prose description of Baryshnikov’s dancing – there is just no way for a reader to come away with any sense of the grace that inheres to this text other than through reading it & rereading it & rereading it. I’ve done so over a dozen times already & feel as though I’m only starting to scratch the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Which is to say that the problem with the New Critics was not close reading, but rather in their (sometimes willful) misuse of the process to agitate for a reactionary poetics that was sclerotic 50 years before they came to the fore in the 1930s.