SOURCE: Simpson, Megan. “‘Cries Open to the Words Inside Them’: Textual Truth and Historical Materialism in the Poetry of Susan Howe.” In Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women's Language-Oriented Writing, pp. 163-206. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Simpson reveals a central paradox in Howe's verse-empiricism and textuality, and views that paradox as one of the major strengths in her work.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the...