Background

Susan Howe was born on June 10, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She is a daughter of a playwright and critic Mary Manning who played in the Gate Theatre of Dublin, and Mark DeWolfe Howe who taught at Harvard Law School and worked on the official biography of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Susan has two siblings named Helen Howe Braider and Fanny Howe, a poet.

Education

Susan Howe spent her early childhood in Buffalo, New York, and then was raised in Boston and Cambridge. She finished the Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1955.

She spent the following year training at the Gate Theater in Dublin, Ireland where her mother acted. While there, Howe performed and designed sets.

From 1957 to 1961, Susan Howe was a student at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston.

Career

Susan Howe began her career in the arts as a painter and enjoyed some success with gallery shows in New York City, including the Kornblee. In 1971, she relocated to Guilford, Connecticut.

It was then, in the early 1970s, when she met with her first success as a poet. With her first book, 1974’s ‘Hinge Picture’, Howe spoke from the standpoint of an unknown author who existed at some point in time on the bridge between prehistory and history. From this primeval writer might have come the Bible, and Howe’s verse related a tale that integrated mythological sources, ancient texts, and classical writings. The volume was well received, and its author was quickly admitted to the group of experimental writers, Language poets.

Howe continued to enjoy success with literary-press editions of her work throughout the decade. The volumes published during this time include ‘Chanting at the Crystal Sea’ (1975), ‘Secret History of the Dividing Line’ (1978), and ‘The Liberties’ (1980). In the latter, Howe examined the relationship between Jonathan Swift and Esther (Hester) Johnson, whom he referred to as Stella. From 1975 to 1985, Susan Howe was a producer of the program ‘Poetry’ for the New York City’s WBAI radio station. Then, she had served for a couple of years as a bookseller at Breakwater Books.

Her 1983 collection, ‘Defenestration of Prague’, has been termed the most difficult of her works. The title poem refers to an incident in Prague in 1617 when Catholic clerics were thrown from windows to their deaths by supporters of Calvinism. Howe has also written a book of literary criticism that was much lauded by critics for its unique approach. In 1985's ‘My Emily Dickinson’, she offered insight into one of the nineteenth-century New England poet’s works ‘My Life Had Stood – a Loaded Gun.’

Two years after the publication, Howe tried herself for the first time as an educator serving as a visiting poet in residence at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, Canada. A year later, she joined the staff of the State University of New York at Buffalo as a visiting professor of English. After serving in that capacity for one year, she was assigned a full professor and a head of the faculty of the Poetics Program in 1991. Other positions of the period related to education included a professorship of writing at the Temple University, Philadelphia. Howe retired from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2006.

Susan Howe’s passion for history has manifested in her later works such as ‘A Bibliography of the King's Book, or, Eikon Basilke’, and ‘Singularities’. Her recent works include poetry collections Pierce-Arrow, The Midnight, That This (in collaboration with an artist James Welling), and Debths. She has also collaborated with a musician David Grubbs on several sound pieces and performances, such as Frolic Architecture (2011) and Woodslippercounterclatter (2014).

In addition to her own publications and collaborations, the author has contributed to many periodicals such as Conjunctions, Contemporary American Literature, Paris Review, Hambone, Archives of American Art Journal, and others.

Achievements

• Susan Howe is an accomplished author and distinguished poet who made a great contribution to American poetry.
  
  Her writings have been featured in lots of anthologies, including the American Tree, American Poets Today, UPDATE: American Poetry Since 1970, and Pushcart Prize XU: Best of the Small Presses among others.
  
  Howe has been a recipient of such prestigious awards as the Before Columbus Foundation Award (twice) and the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. She has been a several times fellow, including Guggenheim fellowship, the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, and Roy Harvey Pearce Award for Work by a Poet and Critic, and a distinguished fellow at Stanford Institute for Humanities.
  
  Howe’s ‘The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History’ was named one of the ‘International Books of the Year’ by the Times Literary Supplement in 1993.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Nonconformist's Memorial: Poems

    (The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long ...)

    1993
  • The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

    (Susan Howe approaches early American literature as pet an...)

    1993
  • Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-1979

    (Susan Howe brings together those of her earliest poems sh...)

    1996
  • Debths

    (The book is composed of a preface and four sections of po...)

    2017
  • My Emily Dickinson

    (In the literary criticism book, Susan Howe embodies the a...)

    1985
  • Pierce-Arrow

    (The book takes as its shooting off point the figure of Ch...)

    1999
  • Singularities

    (A celebration of language by a gifted poet)

    1990
  • Hinge Picture 1974
  • Chanting at the Crystal Sea 1975
  • The Western Borders 1976
  • Secret History of the Dividing Line 1978
  • Pythagorean Silence 1982
  • Defenestration of Prague 1983
  • Articulation of Sound Forms in Time 1987
  • A Bibliography of The King's Book, or Eikon Basilike 1989
  • The Europe of Trusts 1990
  • Bed Hangings 2001
  • Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives 2014

Views

Susan Howe is often associated with Language poets writing school whose poetry is marked by a deconstructionist attitude toward language, and a disregard for conventional literary formalities. In this same vein, Howe has sometimes placed her verse upside-down, or crossed out parts of it, or let the words overlap one another, and the observation that her poetry is ‘difficult’ is a common sentiment in critiques of it. Her work is also marked by plays upon words that possess phonetic similarities. She doesn’t use punctuation marks with frequency, and, like the Language-writers, might even carry over the last letter of a word onto a new line of verse. Howe’s style, however, may be due more to her sensibilities as a trained visual artist than to any affinity to a literary group.

As to the main subject matters of her works, they are often focused on such topics as existence, remembering, and the unique position of the female gender in relation to history and the written word.

For Susan Howe, history is an ongoing subconscious thread and she wants “to speak for those left behind by history.”

Quotations: "Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame."

"I write to break out into perfect primeval Consent. I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted – inarticulate."

"Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology."

Membership

Susan Howe became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and became a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets the following year.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Susan Howe is a kind of post-structuralist visionary. This means that, while attuned to a transcendental possibility, she is fully aware of how mediated both language and consciousness are. This awareness leads her to acknowledge and investigate history, but, recognizing, as she does, the 'infinite miscalculation of history,' she cannot accept history as truth. Yet, truth be told, neither can she ignore history." Bruce Campbell

Connections

Susan Howe was married three times.

Her first husband became a painter Harvey Quaytman in 1961. They divorced in five years. On November 30, 1978, she married a sculptor David von Schlegell with whom she had lived until his death in 1992.

The third husband of Howe was a philosopher and professor Peter Hewitt Hare who taught at the University of Buffalo. He died in January 2008.

Susan Howe has two children named Rebecca Howe Quaytman and Mark von Schlegell. Rebecca is a contemporary artist, and Mark is an author of science fiction.

Father:

Mark DeWolfe Howe

Mother:

Mary Manning

Sister:

Helen Howe Braider

Sister:

Fanny Howe

Ex-husband:

Harvey Quaytman

Ex-husband:

David von Schlegell

husband:

Peter Hewitt Hare

Daughter:

Rebecca Howe Quaytman

Son:

Mark von Schlegell