Susan Howe tribute

For the past three and half decades, Susan Howe has been a visionary nonconformist who has left her distinctive mark on American poetry.  More than any other figure associated with Language poetry and the critical writing it has generated, she has applied her innovative poetics to seemingly disparate historical narratives, divergent literary and philosophical traditions, and unchallenged cultural assumptions about gender and authority.

In her books My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Howe undertook a radical and passionate rereading of the foundational literary texts of her native New England--from Cotton Mather and Anne Hutchinson to Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Dickinson--that reclaimed those texts from the puritanical interests of patriarchy and social control.

In her own poetry, notably The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), and The Europe of Trusts (2002), she takes up many of the same themes less methodically, using a hauntingly fragmentary and collage-like approach that acknowledges the text as visual space.   If one were to read her work entirely out of context, she might be mistaken for a literary anthropologist out to demystify the entire edifice of meaning.  "Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin," she writes in The Midnight.

Howe, who spent a portion of her childhood in Buffalo, returned here to teach in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo from 1988 until her retirement this year.  In honor of her influence on an entire generation of students, poet Kyle Schlesinger's Cuneiform Press has just published I Have Imagined A Center//Wilder Than This Region: A Tribute to Susan Howe.

The 120-page volume is edited by Sarah Campbell, the young poet and essayist who made such a strong impression during her year-long stint as host of WBFO's Spoken Arts radio features last year.  It features an introduction by UB professor Neil Schmitz and contributions from 16 of Howe's more prominent students over the years. In addition to Campbell and Schlesinger, contributors include Barbara Cole, Benjamn Friedlander, Peter Gizzi, Jena Osman, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr and Elizabeth Willis.

For information on how to purchase the book, go to www.cuneiformpress.com

Comments

[s. m. hutton]

I had the unspeakably (that word is carefully chosen in mindfulness of Susan Howe) good fortune to have taken an English class at UB in the early 90's (on Transgressive and Monstrous fiction) with Susan Howe in my late 30's. In one class, while discussing Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, she described Bronte as "this creature" with reverent agitation. At the time, I thought Howe could be describing herself. An adjunct staff member once described his/her first meeting with Howe to me by saying the hair stood up on the back of his/her neck. Howe is a force of nature, pure and simple, literary and otherwise. While Howe was away for personal reasons at one point during the semester in question, Bob Creeley sat in to teach the class. I have truly been "touched in the head" by these two. Ask anyone. They'll tell you I'm touched in the head, at the very least. She never knew, but I dedicated a small paper I wrote on Wuthering Heights for the class to her on the event of her artist husband's death.