9 Quotes by Susan Howe

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.

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

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.

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

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

Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?

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.

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

Originality is the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity’s sovereign power.