SUSAN HOWE / Spontaneous Particulars - The Telepathy of Archives

Susan Howe 
Spontaneous Particulars - The Telepathy of Archives  2014
Hardcover, clothbound, 64 pages
21 x 14.5cm
Christine Burgin / New Directions

Condition: New

Great American writers — William Carlos Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, Noah Webster, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Henry James —in the physicality of their archival manuscripts (reproduced here in the beautiful facsimiles)—are the presiding spirits of Spontaneous Particulars: Telepathy of Archives. Also woven into Susan Howe’s long essay are beautiful photographs of embroideries and textiles from anonymous craftspeople. The archived materials create links, discoveries, chance encounters, the visual and the acoustic shocks of rooting around amid physical archives. These are the telepathies the bibliomaniacal poet relishes. Rummaging in the archives she finds “a deposit of a future yet to come, gathered and guarded…a literal and mythical sense of life hereafter—you permit yourself liberties —in the first place—happiness.” Digital scholarship may offer much for scholars, but Susan Howe loves the materiality of research in the real archives, and Spontaneous Particulars “is a collaged swan song to the old ways.”

"As they evolve, electronic technologies are radically transforming the way we read, write and remember. The nature of archival research is in flux… While I realise that these technologies offer new and often thrilling possibilities for artists and scholars, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives is a collaged swan song to the old ways."

Susan Howe, from the introduction to Spontaneous Particulars