Pierce-Arrow Book

I will begin with review with an apology. I am sorry that it will not offer anything remotely resembling a coherent account of what this book is about or how it works, rather it is my attempt to make sense of what I just read.

I did not enjoy Pierce-Arrow. I found it frustrating and alienating and largely unpleasant to read as a result. There were moments that I liked well enough--especially in the final section/sequence "Rukenfigur" which focuses on Tristan and Isolde.

I think Howe is attempting to represent some sort of associative scheme that connects Charles Peirce and his wife to the Iliad and to Alexander Pope and Tristan and Isolde and George Meredith and Theodore Watts-Dunton and Swinburne and philosophy and history and I'm really not sure what all else she's going for when she says things like Phenomenology of war in the Iliad
how men appear to each other when
gods change the appearance of things
Send him down unwilling Captain of
the Scorned he is singularly doomed or "Staring in in the face the material the unreal real thing that is in money enters into language by determining it. Recklessly they acquire more land, apple and nut orchards, a slate quarry. Both of them are very nervous very often very ill. / An authentic modern tragedy if we think of gold as being money. / A capitalist who loses everything is hurled into the enormous wave of a money-fed river." or "Hector self-object of Achilles / Who by impersonating Achilles / will ever overtake the tortoise / Mirror-impulse ask Fortinbras"

She flies back and forth seemingly at random between verse and prose (although all the prose is in "Arisbe") and between topics, coming back to Meredith, Peirce, Swinburne, Tristan/Iseult, Troy most often. I assume there is some sort of connection that she is trying to make--scholars who blurbed the book and wrote on it seem to think so--but I can't find it and I can't tell whether the problem is me or her. I think her grammatical play/discarding of the rules is uninteresting and unbeautiful (although I have encountered similarly a-grammatical and nonsensical poems that are not). Perhaps I would be better able to understand the book if I understood the history she was using? But I wonder if poetry should need a scholarly background (especially one in philosophy, or history, or anything other than poetry itself) to understand it. Part of this is that she, unlike some other poets and poems I have read (see Novel Pictorial Noise or Invisible Bride or Lo Kwa Mei-En's The Bees Make Money in the Lion (which I haven't yet reviewed)) seems to really want to be understood in a scholarly, historical/philosphical way. These don't feel like poems that are designed to be experienced by the reader; they feel like poems designed to be understood. I don't understand them and I have trouble seeing how anyone does, although I know people must. People have touted the musicality of Howe's verse, but I can't find it.

I will be reading some literary criticism this summer that will hopefully help me learn how to read this sort of work, or else articulate better why I like some superficially similar pieces but very much do not like this or some other people she is affiliated with.