SOURCE: DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Whowe.” In The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, pp. 123-39. New York: Routledge, 1990.

In the following essay, DuPlessis provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Howe's verse and views her as a feminist poet.

A Drawing

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to shown sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Susan Howe takes the experimentalist desire for interrogation of the mark and combines it with the populist mysteries of such oblique and marginalized materials as folk tales and early American autobiography, and fuses these under the complex and resonant sign of human femaleness. Her work with its minimalist elegance and economy of gesture is also charged with social density, in her critical allusions to our...