SOURCE: “Howe Not to Erase (her): A Poetics of Posterity in Susan Howe's ‘Melville's Marginalia,’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 106–33.

In the following essay, Williams analyzes Howe's treatment of literary history in her poem “Melville's Marginalia.”

Susan Howe's most recent work, The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, overflows with a series of questions that beg to be turned back on Howe's own poetry. At the beginning of this text, Howe questions the reader and the figure of Anne Hutchinson whom she has reinhabited:

you. Fate flies home to the mark. Can any words restore to me how you felt?

you are straying, seeking, scattering. Was it you or is it me? Where is the stumbling block? Thoughts delivered by love are predestined to distortion by words. If experience forges conception, can quick particularities of calligraphic expression ever be converted to type? Are words...