SOURCE: Palattella, John. “An End of Abstraction: An Essay on Susan Howe's Historicism.” Denver Quarterly 29, no. 3 (winter 1995): 74-97.

In the following essay, Palattella provides an analysis of Howe's poetics, focusing on her utilization of historical, cultural, and literary elements in her verse.

What is the end to insects that suck gummed labels? 

—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, poem XII

Shortly after her first collection of poems Hinge Picture appeared in 1974, Susan Howe published “The End of Art,” a short essay on correspondences and collaborations between Ad Reinhardt, the American color field painter, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish concrete poet. Howe sketches a genealogy of Reinhardt's brief involvement with Finlay's magazine Poor Old Tired Horse by explaining how the austere abstraction of Reinhardt's black paintings, in which image is emptied of reference through the play of monochrome tones, compliments Finlay's word constructions, which condense and compound language's...