Susan Howes Werk beschäftigt sich mit dem komplexen Zusammenspiel von Sprache, Geschichte und Spiritualität und erforscht dabei oft übersehene Bereiche der amerikanischen literarischen Tradition. Sie ist bekannt für ihren experimentellen Formansatz, der Poesie, Essays und historische Fragmente verwebt, um zum Schweigen gebrachte Stimmen aufzudecken. Howes Schriften stellen konventionelle Narrative in Frage und regen die Leser an, neu zu überdenken, wie die Vergangenheit konstruiert wird und wie sie in der Gegenwart nachhallt. Ihre einzigartige Perspektive bietet eine tiefgründige Meditation über die beständige Kraft von Sprache und Erinnerung.
Exploring themes of language and perception, this collection features three influential works by Susan Howe, originally published in the early 1980s. Each book delves into the complexities of communication and historical context, marking Howe as a pivotal figure in experimental literature. Her unique approach transforms words into both a journey of discovery and a potential source of uncertainty, inviting readers to navigate the intricate landscapes of meaning and memory. Critics have praised her work for its depth and innovative style.
The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."
In this classic, groundbreaking exploration of early American literature, Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville and Emily Dickinson as a fellow writer--her insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose--and of poetry and prose. The Birth-mark, first published in 1993, now joins the New Directions canon of a dozen Susan Howe titles.
In Frame Structures , Susan Howe brings together those of her earliest poems she wishes to remain in print, and in the forms in which she cares to have them last. Gathered here are versions of Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) that differ in some respects from their original small-press editions. In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word. Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York―Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).
Exploring the psychic past of America, Susan Howe intertwines poetry and prose in a journey inspired by the Labadists, a Utopian sect from the 17th century. The work features three long poems and prose pieces that delve into archives filled with historical remnants and ghosts. Central themes include connections to Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens, with motifs of silk and transformation, culminating in the poignant image of a wedding dress. Howe's unique style blends evocation with refraction, creating a rich tapestry of literary exploration.
In The Midnight's amply illustrated five sections, three of poetry and two of prose, we find—swirling around the poet's mother—ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, bed hangings, unfinished lace, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, the Yeats brothers, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Frederick Law Olmsted: a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.
Exploring the life and thoughts of Charles S. Peirce, this collection delves into the complexities of the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American intelligentsia. Intertwining Peirce's experiences with those of notable figures like George Meredith and Swinburne, the poems reflect on themes of love, loss, and the impact of war. Howe emphasizes the significance of the unseen connections between disparate ideas, suggesting that poetry reveals a map to understanding amidst the gaps of knowledge and experience.
A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event “Only artworks are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,” Susan Howe has said. In Concordance , she has created a fresh body of work transmitting vital signals from a variety of archives. “Since,” a semi-autobiographical prose-poem, opens the concerned with first and last things, meditating on the particular and peculiar affinities between law and poetry, it ranges from the Permian time of Pangea through Rembrandt and Dickinson to the dire present. “Concordance,” a collage poem originally published as a Grenfell Press limited edition, springs from slivers of poetry and marginalia, cut from old concordances and facsimile editions of Milton, Swift, Herbert, Browning, Dickinson, Coleridge, and Yeats, as well as from various field guides to birds, rocks, and the collages’ “rotating prisms” form the heart of the book. The final poem, “Space Permitting,” is collaged from drafts and notes Thoreau sent to Emerson and Margaret Fuller's friends and family in Concord while on a mission to recover her remains from the shipwreck on Fire Island. The fierce ethic of salvage in these three very different pieces expresses the vitalism in words, sounds, syllables, the telepathic spirit of all things singing into air.
