Quotes from Susan Howe

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism.

we that were wood when that wide wood was in a physical Universe playing with words bark be my limbs my hair be leaf Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver

Now faith is not what we hereafter have we have a world resting on nothing Rest was never more than abstract since it is empty reality we cannot escape

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.

We are all clothed with fleece of sheep I keep saying as if I were singing as these words do. Throw a shawl over me so you won't be afraid to sleep. I have already shown that space is God.

Originality is the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity's sovereign power.

Once you admit that time past is actually infinite, being a child gradually fades out. ::: That this book is a history of a shadow that is a shadow of me mystically one in another Another another to subserve