SOURCE: Quartermain, Peter. “And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe.” In Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, pp. 182-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Quartermain considers the defining characteristics of Howe's poetry through a reading of her eight-poem sequence “Scattering as Behavior toward Risk.”

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...