The name Susan Howe has, over the last two decades, rapidly become a fierce presence on the contemporary poetry scene. Stimulating the reader’s senses with her visual and verbal play, her radical and difficult experimentalism marks a significant effort to explore and interrogate the margins of literary history. My interest in Susan Howe’s work shares the concern, articulated by Stephen Greenblatt, that ‘new literary histories’ poised to find a place for marginalised subjects ‘should do more than put them on the map; they should transform the act of mapmaking.’ My analysis of Howe’s poetry is guided by questions of how to produce these maps—these new forms of historical writing. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which she utilises the poetic medium as a way towards a recovery of narratives that have been stifled by dominant narrative forms.
This essay considers the ways in which Susan Howe’s vocal-acoustic collaborations with musician David Grubbs extend the dimensions of her poetic explorations of history and marginalised subjects. The collaboration between poet and musician for the albums Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract and Frolic Architecture has dramatically transformed and enriched the already complex printed texts by Howe, connecting them with sounds that powerfully interpret and extend the moods and ideas of the printed poems. My essay will discuss the various components of these recorded works, how they provoke different responses from the listener, and the ways in which Howe continues to present a “picture” of the past/world that is multiple, shifting, and always developing. My aim is to explore sound as a dimension available to the poet-historian for the production of a new kind of history.