Susan Howe

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.

Susan Howe studied at University at Buffalo, School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Beaver Country Day School. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Princeton University, Wesleyan University and University of Chicago. Work by Susan Howe is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Bollingen Prize, American Book Awards and Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Name — Susan Howe • Born — 10 June 1937 • Birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. • Occupation — Poet, scholar • Education — Boston Museum School of Fine Arts (1961) • Spouse — Harvey Quaytman, David von Schlegell, Peter Hewitt Hare • Genre — Poetry, essay • Movement — Postmodern • Awards — Bollingen Prize in American Poetry (2011); Guggenheim Fellowship; Roy Harvey Pearce Prize for Lifetime Achievement; Robert Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America (2017) • Illustration — Susan Howe, c. 2007

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. Manning was a close friend of Samuel Beckett, with whom she had a brief affair a year before Susan was born; this led to a rumour that Beckett might be her biological father, although Susan Howe has stated that DNA tests show Beckett was not her father. 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.

Poetry collections • The Europe of Trusts (1990, Sun and Moon) • Singularities (1990, Wesleyan University Press) • The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993, New Directions) • Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996, New Directions) • Pierce-Arrow (1999, New Directions) • The Midnight (2003, New Directions) • Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007, New Directions) • That This (2010, New Directions) • Debths (2017, New Directions) • Concordance (2020, New Directions) • Penitential Cries (2025, New Directions) Chapbooks, pamphlets and artist's books • Hinge Picture (1974, Telephone Books) • Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975, Fire Exit) • The Western Borders (1976, Tuumba Press) • Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978, Telephone Books) • Cabbage Gardens (1979, Fathom Press) • The Liberties (1980, Loon Books) • Pythagorean Silence (1982, Montemora) • Defenestration of Prague (1983, The Kulchur Foundation) • Incloser (1985, The Weaselsleeves Press) • Heliopathy (1986, Pushcart) • Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987, Awede) • A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike (1989, Paradigm Press) • The Nonconformist's Memorial (1992, The Grenfell Press) • Silence Wages Stories (1992, Paradigm Press) • Bed Hangings I (2001, Granary Books) • Bed Hangings II (2002, Coracle Books) • Kidnapped (2002, Coracle Books) • Poems from a Pioneer Museum (2009, Coracle Books) • Frolic Architecture (2010, The Grenfell Press) • Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013, New Directions) • Tom Tit Tot (2014, The Grenfell Press) • Concordance (2019, The Grenfell Press) Essays and criticism • My Emily Dickinson (1985, North Atlantic Books) • The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993, Wesleyan University Press) • Introduction to 'The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems (2013, New Directions) • Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2014, New Directions) • The Quarry: Essays (2015, New Directions)

• Tom Tit Tot, Yale Union, 2013.