SOURCE: “Poetry as History Revised: Susan Howe's ‘Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk,’” in American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 716–37.

In the following essay, Ma explores Howe's overriding concern with history and discusses the impact that it has on her poetry.

… the double of his path, which, for him, has meaning, but when repeated, does not.

—Jean Baudrillard, Please Follow Me

… till other voices wake / us or we drown

—George Oppen, Primitive

Collision or collusion with history

—Susan Howe, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time

“My poems always seem to be concerned with history,” Susan Howe says in an interview with Tom Beckett. “No matter what I thought my original intentions were that's where they go. The past is present when I write” (“Difficulties” 20). To Edward Foster in a subsequent interview, she thus acknowledges, in terms more affirmative, “So history and fiction have always been united in my...