Susan Howe (10 June 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American poet and critic who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others. Her work has often been classified as Postmodern, and it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction, essay, poetry). Her books are layered with historical, mythical and other references, and contain lyrical echos of sound yet they are never pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or traditional poetic rhyme scheme.
Howe was born in Boston and grew up in nearby Cambridge. Her mother, Mary Manning, was Irish and wrote plays and acted for the Abbey Theatre. Her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a professor at Harvard Law School. Her sister is the poet Fanny Howe. Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts (1961). She was married to the painter, Harvey Quaytman. She was married to her second husband, sculptor David von Schlegell, until his death (1992). Her third husband, Peter Hewitt Hare, a noted philosopher and Professor at the University of Buffalo, died in January 2008. She has two children, the painter R.H. Quaytman, and the writer Mark von Schlegell. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut and was a Fall 2009 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she is working on her newest poetic sequence A Collection of Poems and Essays.
Howe is author of a number of books of poetry, including Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996) and The Midnight (2003), and two books of criticism, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993) and My Emily Dickinson (1985). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and the important Language School gathering of poets: In the American Tree (edited by Ron Silliman).
In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs. The results were releasedon two CDs: Thiefth (featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia) andSongs of the Labadie Tract.
Her main literary influences are Dickinson, Charles Olson and early Puritan writers like Cotton Mather, as well as minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin and historians such as Richard Slotkin. The link between these is New England, and Howe can be viewed as a New England poet in her sense of new possibilities and preference for an economy of means. Recent writings, including Pierce-Arrow (1999), reflect an ongoing dialogue and engagement with the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Howe spent some time in Dublin, where she worked as an actor and assistant stage director with the Gate Theatre. She paints and has worked as a radio producer. Since 1989 she taught English at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York until she retired in October, 2006.
Back, Rachel Tzvia. Led By Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe. Tuscaloosa, AL & London, (University of Alabama Press, 2002).
Crown, Kathleen "Documentary Memory and Textual Agency: H.D. and Susan Howe", How2, v. 1, n° 3, Feb. 2000.
Daly, Lew. Swallowing the Scroll: Late in a Prophetic Tradition with the poetry of Susan Howe and John Taggart. Buffalo, NY, M Press, 19994.
Davidson Michael "Palimptexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text", Postmodern Genres. Marjorie Perloff, ed. Norman, OK and London, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988/89. (Coll.: n° 5 of Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory.) pp. 75—95.
Difficulties "The Difficulties Interview", issue dedicated to Susan Howe. The Difficulties, 3.2 ,1989. pp. 17—27.
Duplessis, Rachel Blau "Our law /vocables /of shape or sound : The work of Susan Howe", How(ever) alerts v.1 n° 4, May 1984.
Foster, Ed. "An Interview with Susan Howe", Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, n° 4: issue of this magazine is on Susan Howe, 1990. pp. 14—38.
Howard, W. Scott "Literal/Littoral Crossings: Re-Articulating Hope Atherton’s Story After Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time." Water: Resources and Discourses. Ed. Justin Scott Coe and W. Scott Howard. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6.3 (2006): [1].
Howard, W. Scott “Teaching, How/e?: not per se.” Denver Quarterly 35.2 (2000): 81-93.
Howard, W. Scott “‘writing ghost writing’: A Discursive Poetics of History; or, Howe’s hau in ‘a bibliography of the king’s book; or, eikon basilike’.” Talisman 14 (1995): 108-30.
Lynn. Forms of Expansion: recent Long Poems by Women, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
MA Ming-Qian "Articulating the Inarticulate: Singularities and the Countermethod in Susan Howe", Contemporary Literature n° 36 (3) 1995.
Naylor, Paul Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes In History. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Nicholls, Peter "Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History", Contemporary Literature, V.37, n° 4, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. pp. 586—601.
Perloff, Marjorie "Against Transparency : From the Radiant Cluster to the Word as Such" & "How it means: Making Poetic Sense in Media Society" in Radical Artifice, Chicago and Londres, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Perloff, Marjorie "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo", Critical Inquiry, n° 25, Spring 1999. pp 405—434.
Perloff, Marjorie Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. 1990.
Quartermain, Peter, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukovsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Rankine, Claudia & Spahr, Juliana American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2002. pp. 308—352.
Reinfeld, Linda "Susan Howe: Prisms", Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. 1992. pp. 120—147.
Swensen, Cole "Against the Limits of Language: The Geometries of Anne-Marie Albiach and Susan Howe", in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing By Women, Mary Margaret SLOAN, dd. Jersey City, New Jersey, Talisman House Publishers, 1998. pp. 630—641
Ziarek, Krzysztof. Chapters dedicated in part or in their entirety to Howe's writing: 7. "A Sounding of Uncertainty: Susan Howe’s Gendering of History" (pp 263—293) "Introduction: The Avant-Garde as a Critique of Experience" (pp 3—32) and "Beyond the Negative: An Afterword on the Avant-Garde"” (pp 294-300) in The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Evanston, Illinois, USA: Northwestern University Press, 2001. (Coll: Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)
