‘Visible Earshot’: The Returning Voice of Susan Howe

This essay attends to two poems by Susan Howe: ‘Thorow’ (1990) and ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’ (2007). In doing so, it offers both an approach to reading an experimental poetics in transition, and a new angle on the question of what it might mean to hear a lyric voice coming to life in print. The essay situates Howe’s early work in the milieu of American Language writing, before turning (after a glance to Fredric Jameson’s aesthetic politics) to the sonic textures of her recent poetry.