The works of the American poet Susan Howe explore the visible intimations of writing. After studying at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, Howe was active as a painter in the New York art milieu of the 1960s before publishing a first book of poems, Hinge Picture, in 1974; she has described her work as "visual art […] on pages with words" (Howe, 1995 8). Her poems, in modernist fashion, bring the historical archive to the space of the page, exploring how the material processes of writing and printing and archiving inform what a culture remembers, and disremembers. Starting with her first collection, Howe's poetry has often taken the form of centered or decentered blocks of quoted text whose more or less justified, widely-spaced lines seem to hover somewhere between verse and prose. Habitual orientations of reading are unsettled in the oft-cited "A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike," published in The Nonconformist 's Memorial (1993), where lines of text drawn from a body of writings supposedly bequeathed by King Charles I at his death are scattered across the page, crisscrossing and overlapping. In Howe's most recent books, This That (2011) and Debths (2017), sections of block-like poems alternate with series of her "type-collages," strips or fragments of prose or verse text pasted over each other and then photocopied; in these works, letters, words, and lines have been scissored through while syntax is necessarily discontinuous, leaving partially-legible scraps of printed matter: text in tatters. In the introduction to an interview with Howe, Maureen N. McLane notes of her work: "The page, not the line, is her unit" (Howe, 2012).2 But Howe's unit is also the line. Or, rather, if it may be questioned whether poems, and a fortiori poets, have units, the line of type as rhythmic gesture is an indispensable part of what her poems do. Craig Dworkin, in a study of Howe's earlier works, made the acute observation that "deviations from the conventional horizontal axis in her texts arise primarily from the manipulation of lines rather than individual words or letters," such that "the line […] forms Howe's basic unit of both prosodic and spatial composition" (393). 1 One approach to Howe's works might then see them as using the page to frame, disrupt, comment on their verbal content; but so saying, we oppose the visual and the linguistic, and treat language as though it were the poem's "material." In a compelling account of Howe's use of facsimile reproduction, Chelsea Jennings argues
