Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.
Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry… - Susan Howe
Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry…
- Susan Howe
Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence? - Susan Howe
Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?
A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding. - Susan Howe
A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.
Soundwaves. It’s the difference between one stillness and another stillness. - Susan Howe
Soundwaves. It’s the difference between one stillness and another stillness.
I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across. - Susan Howe
I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.
There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace. - Susan Howe
There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.
In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambi… - Susan Howe
In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambi…
If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices. - Susan Howe
If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.
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