The Birth-mark (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Susan Howe
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Work: Literary history
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction
- Subjects: Colonialism, Colonies or colonization, Literature, Poetry or poets, Feminism, Women’s issues, Puritans or Puritanism
A member of a group known since the 1970’s as the Language Poets (which also includes Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and others), Susan Howe has mapped a career protesting the ways in which editorial policies and traditional rules of syntax and form have stifled spiritual development and freedom of expression in poets. Detaching language from convention meant producing, at times, an unreadable text, but one that did not impose on either the writer’s or the reader’s freedom. In such collections of poetry as Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987) and...
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