Susan Howe

The Birth-Mark awakened me to the possibility of writing criticism wildly and wantonly, of bringing everything to the table, including history, research, politics, autobiography, imagination, obsession, and love.

One of the preeminent poets of her generation, Susan Howe is known for innovative verse that crosses genres and disciplines in its theoretical underpinnings and approach to history.

One of the many wonders of Concordance, Susan Howe’s latest collection, is the pitch to which Howe has brought her own marriage of words and shapes, even as she continues to demonstrate her sense of the complex interconnections of memory, history, and culture, and her mastery of the traditionally lyrical.

Howe is a poet who has spent her career reminding us that our experiences of meaning and sound are synchronous. Delighting in new paths around words, exploring their visual, acoustic, sonic possibilities, she revels in ‘affinities and relations,’ in ‘signals and transmissions.’ Howe imbues her investigations of fragment and snippet with such longing that it is hard not to yearn, from one’s own desk, for deep encounter. She writes against a world that disappears too far away online, in which we lose the bodily perception of space, the tenderness of touch. In this era of social distancing, I felt the prick of these poems: They urged me toward aliveness.

Howe frames poetry as a space for dialogue between traditions, literary forms, and artistic mediums in her meditative 11th work. Presented as collages, which cull text from the correspondence and personal papers of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, Howe’s poems skillfully demonstrate the range and possibilities of collage. Indeed, the gorgeous hybrids range from experiments in syntax to art pieces and visual poems that suggest the material nature of the archive, embodying the idea of literary inheritance. Full of thought-provoking juxtaposition, Howe’s latest is beautifully executed and astonishing.

In Concordance, it is as if a manuscript, along with the library used to write it, were both wrecked and then washed ashore, mostly lost, although what remains was carefully recombined and artfully reconstructed into something beautiful, monstrous, and new.

Howe is a poet who has spent her career reminding us that our experiences of meaning and sound are synchronous. Her poems argue this in form as well as content. Delighting in new paths around words, exploring their visual, acoustic, sonic possibilities, she revels in “affinities and relations,” in “signals and transmissions." Howe imbues her investigations of fragment and snippet with such longing that it is hard not to yearn, from one’s own desk, for deep encounter.

Among the worthiest heirs to the high-modernist line in American poetry. Howe’s own ‘American aesthetic of uncertainty’ shuttles among forms, genres, and states of matter. What connects it all are Howe’s powers of insight and the implied relations between her sparkling trouvailles.

In the collage poems language is both word and image. Source texts are cut up and repurposed, overlaid, truncated—they scatter across the page and spill into the gutter, run to the outside margins. Small blocks of quotations are buttressed and broidered by other quotations, slender and enigmatic, running in the opposite direction; some are illegible, serving as shapes, gnomic geometries born of inscrutable utterances, to embody, in graphic or poetic form, a reconstituted approach to reading and writing, one that reaches beyond the page, through difficulty, silence, and stutters, to another kind of knowledge.

Susan Howe has often referred to herself as a ’library cormorant’ but her extraordinary telepathy of archives is the very opposite of passive absorption: each page constructs its own ghostly skein to be woven into what becomes an increasingly mysterious figure in the carpet. What begins as an archival study becomes nothing less than mesmerism.

Memorably fierce: with her long career in the view today, her comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: ‘A great poet, carrying the antique imagination of her fathers, requires of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered and sovereign. She carries intelligence of the past into future of our thought by reverence and revolt.’

Howe should be read in the company of Pound, Stevens, Stein, Ashbery and other American poets who reconfigured the ground rules of their art. With her long career in view today, her comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: ‘A great poet, carrying the antique imagination of her fathers, requires of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to a new situation, undiscovered, and sovereign. She carries intelligence of the past into future of our thought by reverence and revolt.

Howe is among the worthiest heirs to the high-modernist line in American poetry, interested in the accidents, smudges, and tears that fasten works of literature to their material embodiments on the page. Howe’s own ‘American aesthetic of uncertainty,’ shuttles among forms, genres, and states of matter. What connects it all are Howe’s powers of insight, and the implied relations between her sparkling trouvailles.

Howe creates a finely woven exploration of narrative and transmission anchored in the American past and future. A fascinating look at art across time that can be visited many times without dulling.

Debths is a profound synthesis of Howe’s obsessions, methods, and concerns as a writer… an enactment of the eternally present and perpetually surprising conversation between poet and reader. Howe’s writing is as vital now as it has ever been.

A finely woven exploration of narrative and transmission anchored in the American past and future.

As fascinating and compelling as any writer we have.

Invaluable—a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’s rejuvenating power.

A fresh occasion not just to celebrate Howe, who turned seventy-eight this year, but also to read her anew, which is the more formidable and ultimately more rewarding charge. Wildly and wantonly she is bringing everything to the table, including poetry, history, research, politics, autobiography, imagination, obsession and love, all the while demonstrating how strange, puzzling, and untamed writing and thinking can be.

Howe’s abiding concern with our cultural and intellectual inheritance is revolutionary and redemptive. Her work is a force for social change.

The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement.

Howe is one of America’s preeminent experimental poets.

Reaching back through Hawthorne, Dickinson and beyond, Susan Howe taps a stream of American thinking that is as clear and fresh as a draught of well water. She is our conscience, our voice, our song.

She manages to balance the most cerebral passages with a sharp eye for just the right detail.

Invaluable….A reconnaissance mission in language and history.

An astonishing work re-presenting the American past, its history, literature, texts, and critics. At once gnomic and lucid, grave and scintillating—passionate [with] fierce originality.

As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America’s uneasy commerce with the word.

Monomania has its rewards – an incantatory power that shines through. Howe’s images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest.

Universally recognized as a major poet, Susan Howe should also be known as the most innovative, the most thrilling essayist writing today.

No other poet now writing has Howe’s power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention.

Howe’s brilliant, idiosyncratic essay is—like much of her work—a combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks.

Howe unlocks.

The still-new century’s finest metaphysical poet.

A haunter of archives, for whom manuscripts and marginalia and indexes are muses, Susan Howe often works with the materials she finds there. The result may be a textual collage or a ground-breaking work of criticism, or both.

Howe’s images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shadowing of ghosts half-believed in, giving … a surreal, dream-like atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest.

Now a subtle blend, now a violent collision of poetry and scholarship … Howe is staking everything on the venture that theory and practice, artifice and application, are perpetually and messily entwined. It is a proposition that seems self-evident, and at the same time seldom in evidence.

An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality.

For those less interested in a broad, synthetic argument about Marker’s oeuvre and more interested in how writing might pay homage to the experience of watching his films and the fact of his loss, Howe’s essay will be a welcome contribution to a growing corpus of Markeriana.

For nearly thirty years Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She is a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying talent is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’s rejuvinating power.

For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She’s a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’s rejuvenating power.

Susan Howe’s imaginative and irresistible re-creation of’ the hidden life of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, his relationship with the mysterious ‘gypsy’ wife Juliette, his worldly failures and spiritual triumphs, has the intensity of a Jamesian novel in which the figure in the carpet—in this case a figure comprised of Peirce’s astonishing visual texts, scenes from the Iliad, from the poems of Swinburne and Meredith, and finally the Tristan and Iseult legend—crystallize in an overarching vision of the poet’s own desire—and failure—to achieve oneness, union with another self. Part narrative, part lyric, this profound memory poem conveys, as do few poems of our time, what Howe refers to as ‘Mind’s trajected light.’

Howe’s words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sun in another room––except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable. Her vocabulary includes the whole past of language. The words are magnetic filings that adhere uncertainly to a receding body of meaning.

Howe has continued to produce work of meditative urgency unmatched in recent American poetry.

As one of the country’s leading experimental poets… Howe knows that there is a ‘war-whoop in each dusty narrative’ and words have the power to emancipate a person from the manacles of one’s false self; they have the power to connect the present with the past and form with content.