HOW2 is an online journal focusing on innovative contemporary writing by women. HOW2 is the extension of HOW(ever), a print journal of experimental women's poetry that subscriber's received in the mail. HOW(ever) was founded in May of 1983 by Kathleen Fraser and continued until January 1992. In 1999 the project was taken up again in online form, under the banner HOW2. Archives of all of HOW(ever) and HOW2's work are available online.
HOW2's project is based in poetical and political inquiry and interrogation. It is also based on the insistence that the political and the poetical have something vital to do with one another. In HOW(ever)'s first 1983 issue, Kathleen Fraser writes a cogent articulation of the journal's purpose:
WHY HOW(ever)?
And what about the women poets who were writing experimentally? Oh, were there women poets writing experimentally? Yes there were, they were. They were there and they were writing differently and a few of them were chosen and did appear in the magazines for people writing in new forms. And then several women began to make their own experimentalist magazines. What about that? Well, they read each other. But we hardly ever heard about their poems where I was sitting listening. You mean in school? I mean where poems were being preserved and thought about seriously and carried forward as news.
And the women poets, the ones you call experimentalist, were they reading Simone de Beauvoir? Firestone? Chodorow? Irigaray? Some were. They were reading and they were thinking backwards and forwards. They were writing to re-imagine how the language might describe the life of a woman thinking and changing. And the poetry they were writing wasn't fitting into anyone's anything because there wasn't a clear place made for it.
They must have felt displaced. Yes, they must have. They must have felt unreal. Unrealized. Effaced. Did they know it? Yes, they knew it. Did they talk about it? Yes, they talked about it. We were sitting in a writing group two years ago and we talked about it. One year ago, we were sitting there talking about it. Last summer, I was walking around talking to myself about it and feeling displaced and I wrote to one of my scholar friends and asked her about it and she said you are right. There is this gap. But perhaps we don't know how to acknowledge something, how to think about something, unless it resembles what was already there. I thought of Dickinson. I thought of Stein. Woolf and Richardson. Slashes, anarchies, sentences, disruptions. I was listening and I said to her, but if we could somehow talk to you and tell you about us, would you be interested? Yes, she said, I would be interested.
HOW(ever) proposes to make a bridge between scholars thinking about women's language issues, vis-a-vis the making of poetry, and the women making those poems. HOW(ever) hopes to create a place in which poets can talk to scholars through poems and working notes on those poems, as well as through commentary on neglected women poets who were/are making textures and structures of poetry in the tentative region of the untried.
--Kathleen Fraser
I love Fraser's insistence on "listening" and "talking" as the essential tools necessary in a dialogue re: language's possibilities. HOW2, as an online journal, seems to be talking to a broader audience than that originally intended (scholars).
The current issue features not only new writing and reviews, but sections on new media and performance. There is also a piece on the "Poetic Ecologies Conference" in Brussels:
The participants are post- modern, eco-conscious poets and scholars from all over the world. First-timers, old- timers, everyone is here because it matters. It being poetry and ecology.
I think poetry opens hearts and minds to dialogue, be it the emotional and metered text of yesteryear or the cutting edge sound and sense of today. The commitment to repetition and return plagues me. Braids of thought, words, phrases and circumstances where edges of writing meet, none overtaking itself or the other. Nature has no duality, I hear. Like water it flows and ebbs without competing, is continuous, non-restrictive, inclusive. Poetry (and politics) are most effective when they utilize these principles.
Also, included are two sections on female multidisciplinary language artists/poets, Caroline Bergvall and Carla Harryman. Each section includes about 5 critical papers on their work, as well as an interview with the artist. I had heard of neither Bergvall or Harryman, and am now excited to read/encounter both of them. In 2007, Bergvall founded the Performance Writing department at Dartington College of the Arts, and spoke of the program this way:
...A way of looking at writing within broader textual environments than solely literature, wanting to see literature as a particular point in the history of writing, rather than considering everything to do with writing to be a part of the literary. I think it’s really about considering writing as part of a broader issue to do with memory and inscription, primarily but not exclusively verbal inscription. A lot of poets are working audiovisually and yet they really get validated only once they start publishing books. We’re still at that breaking point, a transit culture, when it comes to really accepting the validity of forms of the production and dissemination of writing that are not only inscribed by the literary, the book. We are moving slowly towards a broader, and perhaps less book-based, understanding of what writing is, what poetry is. I Must add that Performance Writing was initially taught in a performing arts college, so it was immediately clear that we wouldn’t just deal with the books and the literary, but also with manifestations of writing and language arts which are connected to other methods and to performance (mark making, live readings, installed texts, book objects as well as textual and literary influences).
Laura Hinton introduces Harryman by writing:
One of the founders of the West Coast Language School of Poetry in the 1970's, Carla Harryman remains one of this movement’s more enigmatic writers from a critical perspective. The author of 15 books of poetry, prose, and essays, as well as 10 works of poet’s theater —all of which have seen 24 staged productions to date — Harryman is nonetheless one of postmodern American literature’s most original multi-media “Language” artists. She also has worked as a collaborator in art exhibitions, as a theater (and poet’s play actor), and as a screen-writer for experimental cinema...Harryman’s “poetics” in all their incantations and multiple genres exist at the edge of literature. They make us ask: What is literature. They are conceptual works of art.
Both of these “artist statements”, of a sort, could double as statements of purpose for HOW2 as an online journal.
HOW2 is a dense read - both deeply rich and diffuse, convincing and porous - the experience of which, as Hinton writes on Barryman, "is worth the exceptional intellectual effort it demands"
