One thing I have learned from teaching uninterested university students about literature is that there's a threshold of effort dividing "confusing" from "relatable." That is to say, there are books that are too much trouble to read to understand and other books that are comprehensible enough, that required no more effort to understand than was given them and are therefore, not really good--because any effort at all is surely "bad" and takes away from the much valued freedom not to read, or think--but, are anyway "relatable," whatever that means.

I can only imagine what these students would think of Susan Howe's poetry, so filled with cross-references and dismissive of grammar, essay-logic, and grounding context for what seem like an army of hostile, fragmentary non-sequiturs. Her verse/books are quite difficult for me--this one particularly--although I enjoy the challenge, the puzzle of references, the meanings created seemingly out of impossible grammatical constructions and fragments of discourse. I really enjoyed the introduction on Pierce, a figure who I knew nothing about going in to Pierce-Arrow. Then the poetry, although metrically lovely and pleasing me frequently with the frisson Howe gets in a phrase or the pairing of certain words, frequently lost me in references I didn't get, or was too lazy to research, or seemed oddly brought into the Pierce/Trojan Women/my library research world that the first section of poems seemed to create. And it was very long. It made me feel like my own hopelessly lost and frustrated communications and business undergrads, who had hoped, by choosing thses majors, to get through college without ever having to read any book at all. But I refuse to use the word "confusing." still, my enjoyment level was diminished by a combination of my own ignorance of the context of the references, by the nagging feeling of not getting it and the helplessness of not really knowing how to go about figuring it out.

I really, really enjoyed the shorter final section/poem cycle(?) "Rukenfigur." Primarily a Medievalist by trade, I've done my time with the Tristan & Isolde story and the medieval love lyric so these poems were familiar ground reshaped wonderfully in Howe's inimitable style for me. Just excellent. I loved this section as much as I have loved much of Howe's previous work. But I'm pretty sure it's me and not her that provides the difference.

Imagine each page as a minimalist painting.