SOURCE: “And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe,” in Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 182–94.

In the following essay, Quartermain discusses the defining characteristics of Howe's poetry.

How do I exist in a language that doesn't want me to exist, or makes me exist as a fiction, as la femme?

—Nicole Brossard¹

There's a deceptively literary or bookish flavour about Susan Howe's work, especially at the beginning of many of her sequences and books, prefaced as they often are with a quotation or quotations (e.g., Hinge Picture, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time); or opening with lines that have the feel of quotations, unmarked and unacknowledged, though the words may actually be Howe's (e.g., “Thorow”); or opening with a directly identified one.² Often, as in the case of Cabbage Gardens or The Liberties, the poem...