SOURCE: “Susan Howe: Prisms,” in Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 120–47.

In the following essay, Reinfeld explores the poetic vision and use of language in Howe's poetry.

If the poetry of vision is concerned less with the revelation of light than with the disintegration of light in the language that reveals it, the poetry of Susan Howe is no exception.¹ Here language reaches its limit. From “zero at the bone” to the catastrophic white of Pearl Harbor, vision moves through the text of desolation toward a sovereign point at which it generates, ideally, nothing. Nothing reassures. In place of dialectics, fugitive gods and prismatic fragments—leftovers of a form of life temporarily eclipsed by the devastation of World War II—double and are broken in a series of lyric gestures endlessly repeating the history of loss and the imperfect restoration of hope.

As a...