Susan Howe

Susan Howe (born 10 June 1937) is an American poet, literary critic, and visual artist whose work over five decades has constituted one of the most ambitious and intellectually rigorous projects in contemporary American poetry. Her poetry — archivally researched, formally experimental, and deeply engaged with the silences, erasures, and margins of American history — draws on Puritan and colonial texts, literary manuscripts, legal documents, and the physical properties of the printed page to create works that are simultaneously poems, historical investigations, and visual compositions.

Life and Background

Howe was born in Boston. Her mother was Irish (from Dublin) and her father was an American lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School. She was educated at the Boston Museum School, where she studied painting, and her early career was in visual art. She began writing poetry in the late 1960s and gradually moved from painting to text-based art to poetry proper — a trajectory that explains her persistent attention to the visual dimension of the written word.

She taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo for many years and later at Yale University, where she held a Sterling Professorship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received a Bollingen Prize for American Poetry (2011) — one of the most prestigious awards in American poetry.

Poetry

Howe’s poetry resists summary. Her characteristic method involves immersion in archives — reading colonial histories, Puritan conversion narratives, the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, the marginalia of Jonathan Edwards, the trial records of Anne Hutchinson — and constructing poems that incorporate, fragment, layer, and rearrange these historical texts. The resulting works are dense, allusive, and visually striking: words scatter across the page, lines overlap, margins dissolve, and the physical layout of the poem becomes part of its meaning.

Singularities (1990) — which includes the sequence “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” based on the 1704 narrative of Hope Atherton, a minister lost in the woods after a failed military expedition against the Deerfield Indians — is one of her defining works. The poem reconstructs Atherton’s experience through fragmented, half-articulate language that enacts the disorientation and terror of being lost at the border between colonial settlement and wilderness.

The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993) takes its title from an eighteenth-century catalogue of dissenting ministers and builds a meditation on religious dissent, persecution, and the voices that official history excludes.

That This (2010) — written after the death of her husband, the philosopher Peter Hare — combines elegy, dream transcription, and archival research into a work of devastating emotional force. It is perhaps her most accessible book, though “accessible” is relative.

Debths (2017) extends her work into visual collage, incorporating photographic reproductions of manuscript pages, book fragments, and textual layers. It won the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

My Emily Dickinson (1985)

Howe’s most influential prose work is a critical study of Emily Dickinson that approaches Dickinson’s poetry through the lens of her manuscript practice — her dashes, her variant word choices, her spatial arrangements on the page — and through her reading of Shakespeare, the Brontës, Robert Browning, and other Romantic and Victorian writers. The book argues that Dickinson was not an isolated eccentric but a radical artist whose formal innovations anticipated modernism. It was groundbreaking in Dickinson studies and remains essential.

The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993) extends her critical project to a broader examination of the gaps and repressions in American literary history — the voices silenced, the texts lost, the stories not told.

Critical Standing

Howe is associated with the Language poetry movement — alongside Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman — though her work is more historically grounded and less theoretically programmatic than some Language poetry. She is widely regarded as one of the most important living American poets, though her difficulty limits her readership. Her influence on younger experimental poets is immense.

Collecting Howe

Early chapbooks and small press editions — published by Telephone Books, Tuumba Press, and other small presses in the 1970s and 1980s — are scarce and collectible, bringing $100–$500. My Emily Dickinson (1985, North Atlantic Books) in first edition brings $50–$200. Singularities (1990, Wesleyan University Press) brings $30–$100. Signed copies are available from readings and events.