Susan Howe
Excerpt from
 

from NETHER JOHN AND JOHN HARBINGER


 

                 union is called night as night
                  to understanding all one Night

from NETHER JOHN AND JOHN HARBINGER

                  Stoics Academics Peripatetics

                  and liturgical fierce adversity symbol

                  Hazard visionary ages foursquare

                  She ran forward to touch him
                  Alabaster and confess

                  Don't cling to me
                  Pivot

              Literally the unmoving point around which a body
                  Literally stop touching me turns
                  We plural are the speaker


Susan Howe at Academy of American Poets

Susan Howe at Poetry Foundation

Dan Chiasson on Susan Howe (The New Yorker)

At eighty, Howe is among the worthiest heirs to the high-modernist line in American poetry. And yet she is haunted by the oddball past of New England, especially as it inheres in material traces: her spare, astringent poetics derives much of its power from the archival sources it juxtaposes. Howe’s work treats as bricolage the writings of Cotton Mather and the Puritan divines, the captivity stories of Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin, old bird books, Thoreau’s journals, the poetry of Longfellow, dusty municipal histories, and, most of all, the poetry of Emily Dickinson. 


Susan Howe and David Grubbs

Go to Poetry Portraits home page
Go to Tad Richards home page