This section contains 3,630 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: “And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe,” in Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 182–94.
In the following essay, Quartermain discusses the defining characteristics of Howe's poetry.
How do I exist in a language that doesn't want me to exist, or makes me exist as a fiction, as la femme?
—Nicole Brossard1
There's a deceptively literary or bookish flavour about Susan Howe's work, especially at the beginning of many of her sequences and books, prefaced as they often are with a quotation or quotations (e.g., Hinge Picture, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time); or opening with lines that have the feel of quotations, unmarked and unacknowledged, though the words may actually be Howe's (e.g., “Thorow”); or opening with a directly identified one.2 Often, as in the case of Cabbage Gardens or The Liberties, the poem...
This section contains 3,630 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |