"A Single Liturgy": Fanny Howe's the Wedding Dress

The Carmelites, who have housed several spectacular poets and mystics, are committed celibates married to Christ. They have a ceremony with bridal dresses and rings. They encourage a relationship between the body's parts and its perceptions that is the reverse of the usual order. One is not so much running from object to object as receiving the future, which is empty. The wedding dress marks the start of a period of waiting. How does a change in vocabulary save your life? --Howe, The Wedding Dress 54, 47 Postwar discussions of religion and literature have often debated whether twentieth-century philosophy's "linguistic turn" (its deconstruction of language, logic and logos; its demystification of myth and demotion of metaphysics), as well as its pluralizations of such things as the "truth" can possibly serve poets devoted to writing about God. Already unnamable and unknowable, God's (non)being retreats even further from grasp for many of the would-be faithful when stories about it in our world become unhinged from old pictures of the literal "real"--with their concomitant and expanding orbits of the figurative and allegorical--leaving us uncertainly positioned in the universe, in despair or aporia: the Greek word used by postmodern philosophers to signal our incarceration in linguistic labyrinths that forever accrue with no exit, "no way" out. In this excerpt from my ongoing work on avant-garde, or "Language," poetries I want to disturb several assumptions that underwrite this debate by suggesting that the project of, for example, American writer Fanny Howe takes part in something that critics of her sort of deconstructive writing would never suspect: work that, like so many of its ancient and modern faith-based predecessors, strives to achieve perceptions liberation--even what she without irony calls its "conversion"--through what may be (if in a post-Heideggerian sense) the most down-to-earth "new realism" imaginable in theological poetry. (1) Utterly devoted to truth-seeking, Howe's hope-filled, prayerful, indeed "Catholic" work is inspired by what many consider devastatingly secularized theories about both language and the actual world--most of which involve twentieth-century phenomenology, which has been so influential in radical American poetics--as well as other forms of what she considers enabling agnostic and even atheistic hermeneutics alongside the (at times startlingly similar) ideas of some of Christianity's best-loved saints and seers. I want to focus primarily on how the ideas of St. Edith Stein and Simone Weil (as well as, through deep time, St. Thomas Aquinas) contribute to Howe's evolving thoughts on her conversion to Catholicism in her recent and very remarkable book, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003). Arguably a late-career ars poetica for her work as a whole--her more than twenty volumes of poetry and fiction--this book in my view offers her fullest articulation of what one might call (in the tradition of both avant-garde poetics and postmodern theology) "a/theological poetics." (2) By this I mean "a theological" poetics written against itself, in a sense--or, rather, written in phenomenological mode, bracketing perception against preconceptions about the matter at hand. For "the father of phenomenology" Edmund Husserl (as well as his best-known disciple, Martin Heidegger), such preconceptions most importantly arise from what he called "transcendent" spheres like religion, or any discourse founded and perpetuated in realms beyond shareable experience. Yet though this might suggest that his was a wholly secular or "atheist" project (as indeed many still assume phenomenology itself to be), Husserl was known in his letters and conversations to assert that what led him from the study of mathematics to the development of his new investigatory procedures were "overpowering religious experiences and complete transformations" (Wright 134)--i.e., conversion. …