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Susan Howe Quotes

There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.

There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.

Susan Howe
Skins, Fascination, Archives

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

Susan Howe
Voice, Poetry, Survivor
Susan Howe (1993). “The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History”, p.47, Wesleyan University Press

A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.

Susan Howe
Return, Forget, Rebellious
Susan Howe (2007). “My Emily Dickinson”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

Soundwaves. It’s the difference between one stillness and another stillness.

Susan Howe
Differences, Stillness
Susan Howe (2010). “That This”, p.15, New Directions Publishing

Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?

Susan Howe
Order, Structure, Sentences
Susan Howe (2007). “My Emily Dickinson”, p.11, New Directions Publishing

Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.

Susan Howe
Children, Writing, Comforting

I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.

Susan Howe
Moving, Character, Thinking

In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambiguities, surrealistic conundrums, kaleidoscopic comedies, puzzlements, certain and uncertain loves and losses.

Susan Howe
Loss, Erosion, Everyday

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