Howe, Susan, 1937-

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1937, Susan Howe's career as a poet grew from a painting and drawing career and began, with the exception of publications of earlier poems in serials, with the 1974 edition of Hinge Picture (New York, Telephone Books). Closely associated with the late 1970s and 1980s Language Poets' movement, Susan Howe's poetry and scholarship are most accurately characterized as language based and experimental. Howe's early training and careers in drama and visual arts--she was an actress and an assistant stage designer at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961--are reflected in the dramatic sections of her poems, as in The Liberties, and in her attention to the visual aspect of the page. Her mother, Mary Manning Howe, an Irish actress and playwright, and her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, a Harvard Law School professor, each appear as influences in her poetry. Much of the subject and location of her work--her close affinity with Emily Dickinson and early American history, as in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, her interest in Jonathan Swift's Irish residency in The Liberties--reveals Howe's Irish ancestry combined with hard-biting New England literary heritage and politics.

Howe's activities as a lecturer and reader are numerous. In the late 1970s, Howe produced a radio talk show for WBAI radio in which she interviewed and hosted a wide range of American and European poets. In 1980 Howe received the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Secret History of the Dividing Line and again in 1987 for My Emily Dickinson. In 1985 she was one of ten American poets at the New Poetics Colloquium in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she returned in 1987 as visiting artist-in-residence. Howe was one of five American poets at the Rencontres Internationales de Poesie Contemporaine in Tarascon, France, 1988, as well as a Butler fellow in the Department of English at SUNY, Buffalo, also in 1988.

In 1991, Howe was appointed as a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she has taught numerous classes on American literature and creative writing. She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and in 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1999 she was elected to the Academy of American Poets.

While Howe has continued to produce books of poetry and literary-historical criticism, her work crosses the boundaries of genres: her poetry stems from her archival research in literary history, while her literary scholarship is poetic and personal. For example, her 1993 book, THE BIRTH-MARK: UNSETTLING THE WILDERNESS IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY (named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement), is a collection of scholarly essays on literary history. Nonetheless, the essays contain personal anecdotes, marginal quotations from authors and poetic observations on the nature of literary historical scholarship. Similarly, in her book, THE NON-CONFORMIST'S MEMORIAL (1993), Howe interweaves the marginal words of literary figures such as Melville and Shelley with her own poetic lines.

For more biographical information, see Susan Howe's SINGULARITIES, "About the Author" (Hanover, University Press of New England, 1990), and the following website: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/howe.

From the guide to the Susan Howe Papers, 1942-2000, (Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD)