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“... woods, some wandering for days before stumbling back to their settlements. Atherton was among them.Susan Howe took Atherton’s ordeal after the ‘Falls Fight’ as the focal point for her poem sequence ‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’, which was published as a chapbook in 1987 and later collected in Singularities (1990). It was his name that ...”

“... Fanny Howe​ is so adept at creating floating worlds, gossamer meditations on being and art, that a reader might mistake autobiographical anecdotes for fables. In the final piece in her 2009 essay collection, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, she goes to a café in Paris to meet an unnamed older woman, vaguely a colleague, whose existential pronouncements bear down harshly: ‘You are welcome to commit suicide ...”

“... as a performance for children, and is based on the Grimm tale of the same title, which the poet Susan Howe, an old friend, had recommended. (A young boy is beheaded by his wicked stepmother, served up to his father, reincarnated as an avenging bird.) The ‘stage set’ version at Tate Modern, constructed in 1994, has a recording of Jonas reading the ...”

“... language poets: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and perhaps a dozen others, who first published during the 1970s in a brace of little magazines, one of which bore the all too catchy name L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Often – too often – seen as a uniform group, language writers soon ...”

“... he brought on himself. For this reason, some writers have removed Mangan from history to typology. Susan Howe, in a prose poem, ‘Melville’s Marginalia’, claims that ‘the real James Clarence Mangan is the progenitor of fictional Bartleby.’ But there is a problem of chronology. Melville wrote ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall ...”

“... and real people (Kathy Acker, David Bowie, Connie Converse) in the fiction, and real people (Susan Sontag, Fleur Jaeggy, Kaitlin Phillips) in the real endnotes. Lacey has said her intent was random and irreverent – ‘There’s no hidden agenda or code,’ she told the New York Times – but it is also pragmatic. How many novels about artists fail to ...”

“... and misogynistic contempt that writers such as Guest and Hollenberg (and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman and Susan Gubar) did much to dispel. Yet one does want to know just how things were paid for: did H.D. have any money of her own? It turns out she had an allowance from her parents, and that a brother ...”

“... texts she gathered into fascicles – hand-sewn groupings – are full of variant words (which, as Susan Howe has argued, are part of the structure of the work, as are the crosses Dickinson uses to indicate them). Then there are the famous dashes, which I like to think of as markers of the limits of the actual, vectors of implication where no words will ...”

“... to offer a critical reading that is inevitably shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of its time as Todd and Bingham’s blithe imposition of titles and removal of ...”

“... of this avant-garde theatrical troupe, of which the presiding spirits were Lang and Molly Howe (mother of the poets Susan and Fanny Howe), who had trained at the Abbey Theatre in the 1920s and had been directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John ...”

“... went to Hunter, another part of CUNY). Most of the teachers were nothing special. Irving Howe remembered them as dull and overworked; they were ‘old dodos’, according to the sociologist Daniel Bell. The real action took place in the alcoves next to the cafeteria. Irving Kristol, who would move far to the right, wrote in Memoirs of a Trotskyist ...”

“... Benjamin​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: ‘Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star.’ In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature’s first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan ...”

“... There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving Howe, currently the very model of New York social democracy and of its literary counterpart, is not exaggerating when he calls the following excerpt from Deutscher ‘Shakespearean in quality’. Trotsky, on the run from Stalin, is in Norway in 1936. The ...”

“... early in 1876, a person connected with the James family met a 27-year-old woman called Alice Howe Gibbens at the Radical Club in Boston and immediately concluded that William James should marry her. In one version of the story, Henry James Sr returned from a meeting and announced to those at home that he had seen William’s future bride. Another version ...”

“... rivalry. Paradoxically, this is why so many of the club escape mention except in footnotes. Irving Howe, for example, gave no sexual trouble to anyone we know about. Nor indeed did Diana Trilling. William Phillips and William Barrett seem to have been uxorious or monastic by contrast to the friends whose hands they held at moments of crisis. Irving Kristol and ...”