SOURCE: “The Mysterious Vision of Susan Howe,” in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 4, 1987, pp. 312–21.

In the following essay, Butterick examines Howe's body of work and poetic technique.

I've not been more intrigued in recent years with how a poet composes than I have been with (the rhyme is unavoidable) Susan Howe. Does she write a line or a block of lines and then cut back, literally erase? (Is she, in Charles Boer's term after the cult movie, an “eraserhead”?)¹ Does she consult “sources” or make notes from sources, including the dictionary (of which Olson was the greatest example I know)? Was there an original continuity or an ever-receding Big Bang? There is the strongest sense that she deliberates, that she hunches and slaves, her writing desk a light-table, her pen an X-acto knife. Does she mix and match? Does she sit until her hand jolts into action, almost...