SOURCE: Renfield, Linda. “Susan Howe: Prisms.” In Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, pp. 120-47. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Renfield surveys the range of Howe's literary and intellectual explorations, focusing on a stylistic and thematic analysis of “Hope Atherton's Wanderings” in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.

If the poetry of vision is concerned less with the revelation of light than with the disintegration of light in the language that reveals it, the poetry of Susan Howe is no exception.¹ Here language reaches its limit. From “zero at the bone” to the catastrophic white of Pearl Harbor, vision moves through the text of desolation toward a sovereign point at which it generates, ideally, nothing. Nothing reassures. In place of dialectics, fugitive gods and prismatic fragments—leftovers of a form of life temporarily eclipsed by the devastation of World War II—double and...