Susan Howe
Encyclopedia
Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets
, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction
, essay
, prose
and poetry
). Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme. She is the recipient of the 2011 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.
. 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.
, and the important Language School anthology In the American Tree (edited by Ron Silliman
).
In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs
. The results were released on two CDs: Thiefth
(featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia) and Songs of the Labadie Tract.
, 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.
. 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. Recently, Howe has held the following positions: Distinguished Fellow, Stanford Institute of the Humanities; faculty, Princeton University
, University of Chicago
, University of Utah
, and Wesleyan University
(English Department’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, 2010–11).http://www.buffalo.edu/news/12324http://www.wesleyan.edu/writing/distinguished_writers/writersevent9.html?ref_homepagehttp://www.wesleyan.edu/cfcd/NewFaculty/newfaculty1011.htt In 2009, she was awarded a Berlin Prize
fellowship. In 2011, Howe was awarded the Yale Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2011/03/01/howe-awarded-bollingen-prize-for-poetry/ "She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1999 and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000."http://www.buffalo.edu/news/12324
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
, prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
and poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
). Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme. She is the recipient of the 2011 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.
Personal life
Howe was born in Boston, MA and grew up in nearby CambridgeCambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. Her mother, Mary Manning, was Irish and wrote plays and acted for the Abbey Theatre
Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...
. Her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a professor at Harvard Law School. Her sister is the poet Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She has written many novels in prose collection. Howe was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S...
. Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is an undergraduate and graduate college located in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to the visual arts. It is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in partnership with Tufts University...
(1961). She was married to the painter, Harvey Quaytman. She was married to her second husband, sculptor David von Schlegell
David von Schlegell
David Von Schlegell was an American abstract artist and sculptor.-Biography:David Von Schlegell was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1920, the son of American impressionist artist William von Schlegell. He studied at the University of Michigan in the 1940s, and then entered the United States Air Force...
, until his death (1992). Her third husband, Peter Hewitt Hare, a noted philosopher and Professor at the University of Buffalo
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...
, died in January 2008. She has two children, the painter R.H. Quaytman, and the writer Mark von Schlegell. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut
Guilford, Connecticut
Guilford is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States, that borders Madison, Branford, North Branford and Durham, and is situated on I-95 and the coast. The population was 21,398 at the 2000 census...
and was a fall 2009 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
American Academy in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is a research and cultural institution in Berlin whose stated mission is to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and the people of Germany.The American Academy was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent...
, where she is working on her newest poetic sequence A Collection of Poems and Essays.
Publications
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 PoetryThe Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry is an anthology of two volumes edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair....
, and the important Language School anthology In the American Tree (edited by Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
).
In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs
David Grubbs
David Grubbs , guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in Codeine, The Red Krayola, Bitch Magnet and The Wingdale Community Singers....
. The results were released on two CDs: Thiefth
Thiefth
Thiefth is an album by the American musician David Grubbs and the poet Susan Howe....
(featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia) and Songs of the Labadie Tract.
Influences
Her main literary influences are DickinsonEmily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
, Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
and early Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
writers like Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather, FRS was a socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, prolific author and pamphleteer; he is often remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials...
, as well as minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin and historians such as Richard Slotkin. The link between these is New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
, 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.
Other activities
Howe spent some time in Dublin, where she worked as an actor and assistant stage director with the Gate TheatreGate Theatre
The Gate Theatre, in Dublin, was founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, initially using the Abbey Theatre's Peacock studio theatre space to stage important works by European and American dramatists...
. 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
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...
until she retired in October, 2006. Recently, Howe has held the following positions: Distinguished Fellow, Stanford Institute of the Humanities; faculty, Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
, and Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
(English Department’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, 2010–11).http://www.buffalo.edu/news/12324http://www.wesleyan.edu/writing/distinguished_writers/writersevent9.html?ref_homepagehttp://www.wesleyan.edu/cfcd/NewFaculty/newfaculty1011.htt In 2009, she was awarded a Berlin Prize
Berlin Prize
The Berlin Prize is a residential fellowship at the Hans Arnhold Center, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin.- Fellows of the American Academy in Berlin :-References:*http://www.americanacademy.de/home/about-us/hans-arnhold-center/...
fellowship. In 2011, Howe was awarded the Yale Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2011/03/01/howe-awarded-bollingen-prize-for-poetry/ "She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1999 and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000."http://www.buffalo.edu/news/12324
Some Critical Works on Howe's Writing
- Back, Rachel Tzvia. Led By Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe. Tuscaloosa, AL: 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, 1999.
- Davidson, Michael. "Palimptexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text", Postmodern Genres. Marjorie Perloff, ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988/89. (Coll.: n° 5 of Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory.) pp. 75–95.
- "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) v.1 n° 4, May 1984.
- Foster, Ed. "An Interview with Susan Howe", Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, n° 4: special issue 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): http://reconstruction.eserver.org/063/howard.shtml.
- 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.
- Keller, 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 v.36 n° 3, 1995, pp. 466–489.
- 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, 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: 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. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
- Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukovsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Rankine, Claudia, and Spahr, Juliana. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University PressWesleyan University PressWesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The Press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist...
, 2002. - Reinfeld, Linda M. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
- 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, ed. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, 1998. pp. 630–641
- Ziarek, Krzysztof. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
External links
- Susan Howe Homepage @ the EPC
- Susan Howe Page @ Modern American Poetry
- Jon THOMPSON's “Interview with Susan Howe” from Free Verse: A journal of contemporary poetry and poetics, 2005. at: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Pages/interviews.html
- A review of Susan Howe's collaboration with David GrubbsDavid GrubbsDavid Grubbs , guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in Codeine, The Red Krayola, Bitch Magnet and The Wingdale Community Singers....
by Ben LernerBen LernerBenjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, . In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry... - Susan SCHULTZ's « Exaggerated History. » Postmodern Culture. v. 4, n° 2, Jan. 1994. online at: [www.english.upenn.edu]
- Cole SWENSEN's « To Writewithize (as in "to hybridize" to "harmonize" to "ionize" etc.)» American Letters & Commentary, Winter 2001. at: http://www.du.edu/~cswensen/writewithize.html
- Cole SWENSEN's « Seeing reading: Susan Howe's Moving Margins. » Conférence: Louisville Conference on Modern Literature. April 1999. at: http://www.du.edu/~cswensen/howe.html
- Brian MCHALE's « HER William Shakespeare: On the interventionist poetics of Susan Howe (in the male literary cannon) » Conference on contemporary poetry: Poetry and the Public Sphere. Rutger's University, avril 24-27, 1997. at: http://eng.rutgers.edu/brian.html
- METCALF Paul. "Untitled: on Hope Atherton's Wandernings." on Modern American Poetry Website: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/howe/about.htm
- Bruce Campbell and Susan Howe, On Susan Howe and History, Modern American Poetry
- INTERVIEW in FRENCH with Omar BERRADA. « the space between: Poésie, cinéma, histoire. Entretien avec Susan Howe. » publié dans Vacarme, n° 32, été 2005. Disponible sur : http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article610.html