Susan Howe (born June 10, 1937) is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction, essay, prose and poetry). Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme. Howe received the 2017 Robert Frost Medal awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2011 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life

Howe was born on June 10, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in nearby Cambridge. Her mother, Mary Manning, was an Irish playwright and acted for Dublin's Gate Theatre. Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe, was a professor at Harvard Law School and became the official biographer of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Her aunt Helen Howe was a monologuist and novelist. Howe has two younger sisters, Fanny Howe, who is also a poet; and Helen Howe Braider. Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961. Howe married painter Harvey Quaytman in 1961; they had met at the art school. They separated when their daughter was young. Howe and her daughter lived with sculptor David von Schlegell for several years before the couple married. They were together until his death in 1992. The widowed poet married again, to Peter Hewitt Hare, a philosopher and professor at the University of Buffalo. He died in January 2008. Howe has two grown children, painter R.H. Quaytman, and writer Mark von Schlegell. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Publications

Howe is an author of a number of books of poetry, including Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974−1979 (1996) and The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Bed Hangings with Susan Bee (2001),Souls of the Labadie Track, (2007) Frolic Architecture, (2010), "Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives" (2014) and That This (2010), and three books of criticism, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), "The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems" (2013) and My Emily Dickinson (1985). Howe began publishing poetry with Hinge Picture in 1974 and was initially received as a part of the amorphous grouping of experimental writers known as the language poets-writers such as Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry anthology In the American Tree, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry. In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs. The results were released on five CD's: Thiefth (featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia), Songs of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, Woodslippercounterclatter, and Concordance.

Other activities

After graduating from high school, Howe spent a year in Dublin as an apprentice at the Gate Theatre. After graduating from the Boston Museum School in 1961, she moved to New York, where she painted. In 1975, she began to produce a series of poetry programs for WBAI/Pacifica Radio. In 1988 she had her first visiting professorship in English at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, becoming a full professor and core faculty of the Poetics Program in 1991, later being appointed Capen Chair and Distinguished Professor. She retired in 2006. Recently, Howe has held the following positions: Distinguished Fellow, Stanford Institute of the Humanities; faculty, Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Utah, and Wesleyan University (English Department's Distinguished Visiting Writer, 2010–11).

Awards

Susan Howe was awarded with the American Book Awards organized by the Before Columbus Foundation in both 1981 and 1986. "She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000." She was the fall 2009 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2009, she was awarded a Berlin Prize fellowship. In 2011, Howe was awarded the Yale Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

Exhibitions

Some critical works on Howe's writing