Abstract Susanne Rohr
“‘Arrows to pierce dust’ – Susan Howe’s Philosophical Poetry”
In her 1999 book of poems Pierce-Arrow, Susan Howe weaves an intricate texture of ‘poetic
historiography’ of the late nineteenth century by instigating a dialogue between various
discourses and media. The poems, narrative elements, and drawings are orchestrated to tell
exemplary stories of banished genius, wasted chance, suppressed passion, and unsolved
riddles. The text starts with Charles Sanders Peirce, America’s brilliant yet neglected
philosophical enfant terrible, and the poems keep coming back to him in their attempt to
recreate the intellectual climate of the American fin-de-siècle. Peirce, however, proves to be a
difficult point of reference, his personality being as enigmatic as his philosophy is elusive.
Nonetheless, as I will show in my talk, this unstable center is well chosen. For the poems not
only talk about the fleeting quality of their object, their particular poetics also re-enacts
certain core elements of Peirce’s theory of creativity.