Susan Howe is one of the most influential American experimental poets, best known for her innovative and visually distinctive poems. Born in 1937, she is closely associated with Language poetry, a movement that challenges traditional poetic form, grammar, and linear meaning. Susan Howe’s poems often appear fragmented on the page, using unusual spacing, broken lines, and scattered words to create both visual and intellectual impact.
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| Susan howe |
A major theme in Susan Howe’s poetry is American history and archival memory. She frequently draws from historical documents, letters, sermons, and manuscripts to question official narratives and reveal forgotten or silenced voices. Her work gives special attention to women writers, religious dissenters, and marginalized figures who were excluded from mainstream history.
- Susan Howe’s poems also explore language, silence, and absence. She believes meaning is not only found in words but also in gaps, interruptions, and what is left unsaid. This makes her poetry challenging but deeply rewarding for serious readers and scholars.
- Some of her most famous works include My Emily Dickinson, The Europe of Trusts, and That This. Overall, Susan Howe’s poems have reshaped modern American poetry by blending poetry, criticism, history, and visual art, making her a vital figure in contemporary literature.
from My Emily Dickinson
By Susan Howe
When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from
the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.
DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera,
good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things
such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil
he classified darkness, females, and so forth.
(Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)
Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal
vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in
disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse.
First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover
myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of
the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.
That This
Day is a type when visible
objects change then put
on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed
The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually
concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth
Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace
copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
A secular arietta variation
Grass angels perish in this
harmonic collision because
non-being cannot be 'this'
Not spirit not space finite
Not infinite to those fixed—
That this millstone as such
Quiet which side on which—
Is one mind put into another
in us unknown to ourselves
by going about among trees
and fields in moonlight or in
a garden to ease distance to
fetch home spiritual things
That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to
an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is
From “Debths”
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s nursery
bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear. I recall each little
motto howling its ins and outs to those of us who might as
well be on the moon illu illu illu
_
Antique Mirror
Etce ce Tera. Forgotn quiet all. Nobody grows old and crafty
here in middle air together. Long ago ice wraith foliage.
I had such fren
_
Our mother of puddled images fading away into deep blue polymer.
Seaweed, nets, shells, fish, feathers
From “Periscope”
If you remember cosmology
there is nothing to stop time
running all the way to zero
Lying up or even lying down
I will just wiggle my hand to
remind you I was timorous
