Literary Arts and Yale Union present
Susan Howe
Friday, October 4th
7:00 p.m.
Literary Arts
925 SW Washington
Free and open to the public
Literary Arts and Yale Union are pleased to announce a free lecture by poet Susan
Howe.
This lecture is a component of Susan Howe’s
exhibition, TOM TIT TOT, at Yale Union, which runs from October 5 through
December 6.
Howe’s talk will feature plenty of know-how, but it won’t be an
attempt to condition or explain her work. Rather it will articulate how her
writing is an endeavor that inevitably leads to other writing, to
libraries, archives, and neglected aspects of history. “I have dived
through other people’s thoughts with footnotes for compasses and categories for
quadrants. I have plagiarized sermons, memorial introductions, epitaphs,
anagrams, epigrams, dictionaries here and elsewhere.” A trip to
the archive can exert on Howe an influence that produces a
concrete result only years later. “Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to
live deliberately in order to give a true account in his next excursion. I go
to libraries because they are the ocean.”* The evening will be thorough but won’t
miss the dimension of mystery. Questions will follow the lecture.
Susan Howe has published a number of poetry books, landmarks
of literary criticism, including Defenestration of Prague, and My Emily Dickinson, and three records with David Grubbs. Howe received the
2010 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship. She has been a Stanford Institute for Humanities
Distinguished Fellow, as well as the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American
Academy
in Berlin. She taught for many years at the State University of New
York-Buffalo, where she held the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the
Humanities.
