Susan Howe Quotes

God was true everything was

a mother's role in childhood

Someone was in that garden

each knowing the other to be

entirely inasmuch what each

believed or what confessed for

cordial confinement is God's

glory each seed every word

I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.

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

In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambiguities, surrealistic conundrums, kaleidoscopic comedies, puzzlements, certain and uncertain loves and losses.

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.

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.

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

A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.

Edwards's stark presentation of the immanent consciousness of Separation enters the structure of her poems. Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century.