Howe, Susan | Marjorie Perloff (essay date 1990)
Marjorie Perloff (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Collision or Collusion with History’: Susan Howe's Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” In Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, pp. 297-310. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
[In the following essay, Perloff perceives Howe's verse as a combination of three elements—the historical, the mythic, the linguistic—and informed by “an urgent, if highly individual, feminist perspective.”]
Flocks roost before dark Coveys nestle and settle
Meditation of a world's vast Memory
Predominance pitched across history Collision or collusion with history
—Howe, Articulation
The two words are identical except for a single letter: according to the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], collision means “1. The action of colliding or forcibly striking or dashing...
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