The Wings

Susan Howe’s collection of poems That This won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017, she received the Robert Frost Award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. She has made five albums in collaboration with the musician and composer David Grubbs: Thiefth (2005), Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), Frolic Architecture (2011), WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (2015), and most recently Concordance (2021), all released on the Blue Chopsticks label. Over the last decade, The Quarry (2015), her book of selected essays, and a new collection of poems, Debths (2017), were published; the latter won the Griffith Award for Poetry in Canada in 2018. Last year, her collection of poems Concordance was published by New Directions.Emily Coates has performed with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Her choreographic projects have been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum, University of Chicago, and Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick 2017, NYT Fall Dance to Watch 2018), and Performa (NYT Best Dance 2019, with Yvonne Rainer), and in Hard Return at Neuberger Museum. She is Professor in the Practice and Director of Dance Studies at Yale, where she created the dance studies curriculum. She co-authored Physics and Dance (2019) with physicist Sarah Demers, and co-edited Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 with Yvonne Rainer (2023).This conversation took place in Guilford, CT on August 2, 2023.■COATES: Susan, I’d love to talk with you about how you work with archives and your transformations of archival fragments into poetry. I am captivated by your craft, as I have begun to incorporate archival research into my performance projects. This process feels like it holds the future of my work because it marries different aspects of who I am. Your work sets such a formidable, generative example of slipping between modes. Though we create in different disciplines—poetry for you, live performance for me—I see overlap, which is why I want to ask you all sorts of questions about how you do what you do.HOWE: I look upon you as a classically trained ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, who has worked closely with other dancers and choreographers, and now you’re working across disciplines with physicists, theatre artists, and visual artists, as you step out into your own innovative choreographic productions.COATES: Thank you for recognizing that. It has taken me time to find a way of creating that synthesizes all these parts of myself and feels true to me.HOWE: The space that you cover in your discipline and your work is extremely wide. As a performer, you’re the real thing. And now you’re also working with archives. My poetry and essays also involve, in some sense, going backstage—because an archive is, in its way, a hidden theatrical space behind history’s curtain.COATES: I love that. And the question is what those histories give us. What it gives you, what it gives me.HOWE: We’re both drawn to inhabiting dual—even triple—identities. In a play, the script holds the characters one must search for and cling to; one clings to words on the page, on a piece of paper. But when you’re dancing, you’re inhabiting both your own body and a character’s body and spirit. That’s one thing I found interesting about Jennifer Homans’s biography of George Balanchine: the way Mr. B. required of his dancers both strict precision in terms of counting and repetition as well as gymnastic leaps of faith. What are the different ways dancers and choreographers feel about inhabiting roles?COATES: I think a dancer either has the talent to inhabit or does not. You can teach technique, but no one can teach you how to live inside of the music, the poetic gesture, the role. You must find that for yourself. For me, living within my art form involves believing yet questioning. Since I was a child, dancing has always been a medium I can question through.I come from the Balanchine tradition, and I can work with music when I choreograph. But because I love words, I have become interested in using archival language as the music that gives rhythm and form to my choreography.My first introduction to your work was Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, in which you masterfully describe the theatrical force of inhabiting archival voices. How would you describe the migration of archival voices into your poetic craft?HOWE: Sometimes I think of my work as documentary poetry. Early on I wrote a book called My Emily Dickinson. While doing this, I became obsessed, among other things, with her own reading practices, as well as the complicated editorial history of her manuscripts. At the time, during the 1970s and 80s, her work was locked away in archives only accessible to a privileged few. Now, due to technological developments, these visual and verbal performances on paper are available to a much larger audience. I can’t imagine teaching her work today without referring to this now-digitized evidence.After I wrote the Dickinson book, my editor, along with the philosopher Stanley Cavell, asked me to write a piece about poetry and documentary for an anthology they were working on called Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. But the documentaries about poets that I knew, PBS things and the like, were so dull. Then a graduate student of mine introduced me to the work of the French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker, who had been a poet before he began making films. This opened a whole new world for me. The wonderful Carpenter Center at Harvard has a vast film archive, and I was able to get whatever video cassettes I asked for. This was unlike my experience at Houghton with Dickinson’s manuscript, to put it mildly. But Dickinson’s papers themselves weren’t so different from Marker’s films. Both rely heavily on montage.Documents draw me to certain people and events, as they did to filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, or Andrei Tarkovsky, who are all interested in the question of time and history. They all found their way into my essay, “Sorting Facts,” which ended up being the size of a small book. This is what I found so exciting about the way you use sources in your own work. Your piece We starts in the Dartmouth College observatory (a beautifully designed nineteenth-century structure) with very specific documents, such as Ebenezer Adams Jr.’s weather reports from the 1820s. And as it goes on, you begin to move through Cosmic Dance, Lincoln Kirstein, yourself, Isamu Noguchi, and finally an astronaut who describes floating in outer space.COATES: Yes, it’s a collage of sources. Those weather reports came from the Dartmouth observatory’s archives. Delicately handwritten, disintegrating at the edges. I transcribed Noguchi’s letters in Ruth Page’s papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and stumbled upon an original copy of Kirstein’s 1935 book in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.HOWE: Who is this Ebenezer Adams, Jr. who made the lists? His names alone pull me in, because they’re biblical and hark back to early American histories in New England. And this is a performance piece. You use an actor . . .COATES: Derek Lucci, a luminous actor and an ideal collaborator for this work, because he can be both inside and outside of a voice at once—inhabiting it, while commenting on it.HOWE: Derek. Ebenezer in the flesh. He performed it beautifully, adding a note of sadness to the list-making. For you, the performer inhabits the character.COATES: The character, yes. Absolutely. But also, something else: the missing flesh, the spirit, its tempos.HOWE: That’s the way I see the figures whose documents I explore in archives.COATES: There’s always a person that you want to know more about?HOWE: There’s a person, yes, but the person you imagine is never the person you think they are. Homans emphasizes in her biography that Mr. B. didn’t want his spirit frozen in a name. You can’t freeze a spirit.COATES: You can see the internal workings of their imagination in the records they’ve left. And as you write in My Emily Dickinson, you can intuit the ways the poet absorbs her environment and influences.HOWE: After writing My Emily Dickinson I became fascinated with the editorial problems involved in bringing her later work, often written on scraps, to an audience. Anything I did in relation to her could be a violation of privacy. I have no idea. But those marks and line breaks, all the slashes, they’re not just dashes. The crosses, the lists of variants—they’re percussive.COATES: Yes, they’re a rhythm.HOWE: And they’re also a performance, in a way.COATES: You say you would be drawn to know more about Ebenezer Adams, Jr., the young man who created the weather records. I was more drawn to his daily list: “Cloudy, cloudy, rainy, fair, fair, stormy . . .” We used that rhythm to ground the opening scene. Ain Gordon, my wonderful director and dramaturg on the piece, also works with archives in his own playwriting. I’ve learned a lot from his wisdom. We talk about what I am drawn to in the archives, and why. When to adhere to facts, when to take imaginative leaps. Where does the research end—when do I have what I need—is always a question for me.HOWE: “Cloudy, cloudy, rainy, fair, cloudy, stormy . . .”—that’s such an excellent beginning. Not sure why, but it works. That’s what a good poem does. It just works. And lives in time. Then to have We end with an astronaut floating, literally, in space—it was a brilliant conclusion.Could you talk about the way you use Lincoln Kirstein in this same piece? Without him there wouldn’t be a New York City Ballet, and clearly his book Dance interests you, because it becomes a part of We.COATES: Ah yes, Lincoln Kirstein . . . I encountered him first in the flesh. He would slip into the studio and watch my ballet classes at the School of American Ballet. He died a few years after I joined the company. So I have that sense of his actual body, which I think helps when you then start searching through an author’s book from 1935 to see what he had to say about ancient Egyptian dance and astronomy. But I have yet to find his sources for the Egyptian Dance of the Stars . . . so much for facts and their verification. Another good example of the question, When does the research end?In Spontaneous Particulars, you write: “Each collected object or manuscript is a pre-articulate empty theater where thought may surprise itself at the instant of seeing where thought may hear itself see.” I love the complexities in this quote. Your work is profoundly theatrical. What were your early influences?HOWE: My mother has always been a huge influence on me, even after her death, and on my ear in particular. She was born in Ireland in before the As a in she performed in a by and for years she was an actor and at the which was by the and In she for because in in those was a for a the she was trained in She in theatre and in In the years of the the Ireland was young and Then came the of Ireland with of the so she She and and for years and for the her a But my was going to the at of going to I her in a this was not this was when was in a of The were by the was as to the on I it in all its its its was a we have But I came back after a because I was American and or wouldn’t my I to the in New which was by when was in its for me. has brilliant and but I out for a I the I research and I do have So it was a not to to You for I I and that in not not At the you had so there was a of Yes, I was by other young ballet dancers on a But it’s of to in of My took me and for of those years I was dancing time at New York City Ballet, then with Baryshnikov and Twyla I to and my at and then one of my me to begin teaching at and a dance What was it like to with How different was Twyla When you came to Yale, to a dance how did you about doing had been my first dancing I was in a of young dancers who worked closely with an experience which is in my dancing When he I to see the world and Yvonne Rainer were and I that dance could be used to I of just to and think a to New to my at was a I would for in Sterling Memorial the am by your love of to Sterling Library and and which through your I have always those were It was to you thought so and to see their place in your poetic has a about the in that is there is a or of in all the so It is And what are the of that they did not know you would come along and find For me, always a about the of and Then as writing is he Ebenezer writing his lists is also using a of and you are This me to a composer whose music itself is a of He also wrote a of essays about the And Balanchine You to me that ballet you, and you me a For I can’t with that It in and the film I you was made in in for you can it.HOWE: of the in is his so of the drawn to this ballet is because when I to New York to at the School of American Ballet, I with the for Balanchine created She the and out her to I this is no at in the in her she was a of the It me an for the that Balanchine in the he through the language of They all had to have . . .COATES: Yes, and he for of dancing, or with her I was at this history very I to it, but it had I it’s wonderful that your you, that you At I was just into and which in a way involved I never was so and in my with was Balanchine by the time you Yes, I Balanchine by five His spirit was What for in the the I get when alone in and of on become The its and the of the music, the piece into a never She a so It me of last words to B. when she was When she asked is the and received no she that what is the dancing is just poet to a in all its even the The very to me, is are all we have to on I from your poetry that the is the but it’s also much more the The language becomes more itself by what you do with And in your you to move words As a I that You to put a into these In you your own body into the work, your own voice on the This is what Balanchine of you But you You And I learned about from years of with Yvonne Rainer. I wrote the while in her papers at the I could her voice in the and yet always while dancing helps me do something different with my Balanchine other is interested in so and using the language hidden in That’s where I think you’re a While also being classically of have in this of using disciplines to inhabit other voices and How are you both inside and outside of your How do you How do you know they’re I feel while writing that There’s something about who is doing the Who are you it You think you found a book, but the book It to and as is the to a of and to use And you get about creating something new with are in the The is a body and a body or or into the I like the way you the in or for Dickinson has a in a poem that then I am the I so I at my I The same poem that the of a This is and and there some encountered that have to you, me Balanchine feel that his were up in his body and specific he had for As for Emily Dickinson, I often feel her of the way her poetry was because and But I it’s like, it’s the ear and the in one How did you the to into a voice like Emily Dickinson’s that may be me and to I can say something I didn’t think that when I working on I had a for her writing and how and where it came the history of the place she in, the of her I to know where her voice came I in a poetry of I not written that book, I would not have the at But I had no when writing that book of a in It was a I because I was a You could say it was Yes, I also came into and The was the I a This was a I was teaching graduate not I had to be on my without At the same time, a is a of performance piece. In my it required a lot of me to archival research in a new at was and The people in my that I thought did know I They weren’t They weren’t They thought I had something interesting to graduate you in with the The was good for my I feel the When I teaching at Yale, I this to know I but the did not. I was in the of to for dance as a form of But I also used dance to more about other histories of of I from being an to being a after with the I use that research to ground my I in your work, and I’ve this to you’re not You know the You know the And you to do with it what you want and to do with it for your The is an I love the search and part of my and And then you take You describe poetry as as as you You the to and at has an collection called and and I love that and is that sense that made a and a But then I who or what that That’s why so interested in Chris Marker’s work, or use of documentary in or this piece of We.COATES: Yes, things that not be one My piece with Derek reading a by the astronaut his first while I do a with that to do with Ebenezer Adams Jr., I see as And it works. You have to into that where it not work. You have to know the Sometimes when working on one of my and it through the there is something I think I’d or But then I find I have what was The And how you teach The can’t be there is the of the of the book as When you’re working on a you on all these other I do For me, there is my at New and who my I’ve also with the composer and musician David of this work is which is because to be a is always That’s what I to never my own as an I see this in your work, work, her in this with my to dance in her new We had a time, on her at in her I learned is a very of from art which made a lot of like What is your to the while in the process of I want to my for which is me in its to I want to create poems in performance, and My new up archival of with other histories and into something see leaps your work. You talk about this in My Emily she had an a of She was always her own So people this work is just like Emily You hear that in of And like They can’t be like Balanchine could be like But I as an person at the it It does not. You think it when you’re and even But it a on this either you’re or you’re What does The work It does. But you can’t . . . I know what is there a . . . I know what you That’s what so In all And I and in the the I how much I love the is like a and now so are in You always into the I into the And just about being the one I when I was at Ebenezer Adams Jr.’s weather I so to this person who years before me.HOWE: There’s the the same sense to me at at the film you me of dancing in and the other dancers in in the That they’re from I thought of you when I was at the New York City opening and were in the After the on the last we in the and only to on the was in the and did a dance with her we were a living archive of My Emily Dickinson you write: voice from my to no one What I put into words is no my has The future or and is a between poetic and The for poetry outside but in to This describes both your and you, the I was young and very alone when I wrote this book. a when I the book for I found where I did I write that It This is a book from an I have written this with after You say you had no audience. So you could write I was But I have written The had I not been a part of the at This book was in a different and we a take a

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