SOURCE: “‘Between Ourself and the Story’: On Susan Howe,” in Denver Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Winter, 1994, pp. 89–96.

In the following favorable review of The Birth-mark and The Nonconformist's Memorial, Ramke argues that the two books allow readers “an opportunity to read across boundaries and to allow the margins of [Howe's own works to coincide.”]

American poetry of the past twenty or thirty years often suffered from (gloried in) a now-horrifying sentimentality. A narrowing range of vision (I lie abandoned, / abused by rain) added to an indulgence of the generalizing impulse (I am the little death / beneath your feet) became the ploddingly inexorable formal development. The lessons all came from Whitman, but few of the voices were big enough to compass such freedom. Perhaps as a kind of unconscious corrective aesthetic, the LANGUAGE poets developed poetic language into a public anti-ego; as Michael Palmer wrote in “On the Way to...