SOURCE: “Susan Howe: Where Are We Now in Poetry?,” in Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History, Northwestern University Press, 1999, pp. 43–70.

In the following essay, Naylor traces the development of “pure” poetry through the works of Wallace Stevens, Jack Spicer, and Susan Howe.

“My poems always seem to be concerned with history,” says Susan Howe.¹ “No matter what I thought my original intentions were that's where they go. The past is present when I write” (Beckett, 20). Her poetry ranges across vast tracts of English, Irish, and American history in the service of a resolute investigation of the “dark side” of colonialism and imperialism. Clearly, Howe sees her poetic investigations as ways of writing history poetically. Yet, as we saw with the brief excerpt from her poetry in the introduction, her work is highly paratactic, which makes it difficult for a reader to find his or her way in...