Susan Howe
Although not primarily known as a visual poet, Susan Howe (1937-) has incorporated fine examples of visual poetry into her body of work. Howe's career as a poet has been diverse, spanning essays, poetic criticism, and collage, as well as more traditional verse; however, all of these various modes can certainly be seen as integrated into Howe's larger poetic project. Born in Boston, Howe's work often investigates the religious, political, and social history of the Northeast, excavating haunting and lyrical stories from archival documents, journals, and other ephemera. The material qualities of Howe's research sources, however, remain present in the resulting creative works. Howe does not just mine these sources for information, but pays close attention to the historical documents as material objects. In the example shown above, one of a series of collage pieces from Howe's recent volume That This made from the photocopied pages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary (housed at the Beinecke Library), the collage is made to mimic a scrap of 18th century cloth, blurring the worlds of the textual and the textile. Throughout Howe's work, the 'poem' is not just the words on the page, but is produced out of the emergent relationships between herself, the widely various objects of her investigation, and the writings resulting from her research.
