Susan Howe at a lecture in 2011.
An excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” originally published in our Winter 1982 issue. Howe, who was born in Boston, is eighty-eight today. “People often tell me my work is ‘difficult,’” she told the Review in 2012. “I have the sinking feeling they mean ‘difficult’ as in ‘hopeless.’ ”
Skeletal kin
tiltitalic lunacy
long illness of little difference
Seventy memoriesmasks
singing and pipingto be
(half words)beginning and begetting
strangers nodding to one another
stumbling and scrambling
(uncertain theme)random form
strong arm of my name
Emblemsign strewn flapping
(flapping of ravens in rain)What sequence
Mothers hide harmless
weary for antiquitythe simple
EglatineSoldiers moving as toys in a
world soulWar
Obdurate as ocean he went forthconquering
—and to conquerAnathema
who was my father
Empty dominions beyond structure
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