SOURCE: “Susan Howe and Sam Cornish: Two Poetries, Two Histories,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. 14, Spring, 1992, pp. 176–83.

In the following excerpt, Conoley discusses Howe's use of language in Singularities.

The impulse in Susan Howe's ninth book of poetry, Singularities, is also revisionist. She, too, uses several genres, several “media” in her text—poetry, prose, reportage, autobiography, fragment, concrete poetry. Like [Sam] Cornish's book [1935,] the text has a visual as well as a verbal life. A far more experimental writer than Cornish, especially concerning language, Howe searches through history's “mortal particulars / whose shatter we are” (50). Yet for all its experimentation and inventiveness, its high and serious play, the book's forward movement is linear—from Puritan New England where “Land! Land! Hath been the idol of many in New England!” (Increase Mather) to contemporary America where “Money runs after goods / Men desire money” (68). Stylistically, Howe begins with representational reportage, delivered in...