Co-organised with Catherine Martin. (Details listed below)
All welcome.
Susan Howe is a unique figure in twentieth-century poetry. Her work came to prominence in the early 1990s in association with the American Language poets, but quickly set its own agenda outside these parameters. From her first career as an artist, Howe brought an intense sensitivity to the visual dimensions of the text, producing a diverse body of work that has continually probed the borders between poetry and other disciplines and media. In its unorthodox readings of the American canon, its obsessive interest in history and what the official narratives of history exclude, and, more recently, in her collaborations with the experimental musician, David Grubbs, Howe’s work is unrelenting in its capacity to surprise and stimulate us.
In this, the first conference devoted to her work, we aim to recognise the impact Howe’s writing has had on contemporary poetics, and to provide a focus for new critical approaches to her poetry.
The symposium begins at 9.25am with the keynote lecture by Elizabeth Willis, followed by four panels of papers, and finishing with a drinks reception at 6.30pm. All welcome. Coffee and tea served from 9am.
This event is sponsored by the Centre for Poetics and School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, and the University of Sussex.
PROGRAMME
9.25 Welcome
9.30 -10.30 Keynote Lecture
Chair: Carol Watts
Elizabeth Willis (Wesleyan University), ‘The Sovereign Page: Placing Authorship and Power in the Eikon Basilike’
10.30-12.00 Panel One
Chair: Carol Watts
Stephen Collis (Simon Fraser University), ‘On Becoming Archival’
Drew Milne (Cambridge), ‘Susan Howe’s iconoclasm and its protestant vicissitudes’
Mandy Bloomfield (Southampton) ‘Counter-memory and the “Visible surface of Discourse” in Susan Howe’s Eikon Basilike’
12.00-12.15 Coffee
12.15-1.45 Panel Two
Chair: Stephen Collis
Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway), ‘Susan Howe and the Visual Arts’
Tony Lopez (Plymouth), ‘Susan Howe: Visual Poetics’
Anna Reckin (SUNY Buffalo), ‘Space as frame: Susan Howe’s textual landscape’
1.45-2.30 Break for lunch
2.30-4.15 Panel Three
Chair: Will Montgomery
Nick Selby (UEA), ‘Tissue: Interleavings in The Midnight’
William Watkin (Brunel), ‘Spiritual typography of elegy: Susan Howe and the limits of elegy’
Catherine Martin, ‘How the dead prey upon us: Susan Howe and Robert Duncan’
Carol Watts, ‘Antigone’s Demand’
4.15-4.30 Tea
4.30-6.00 Panel Four
Chair: Cathy Martin
Will Montgomery (Royal Holloway), ‘Perilous quillwork: lyric and patterning in the recent poetry of Susan Howe’
Jess Wilkinson (Melbourne), ‘Word, Speech, Voice: Melville’s Marginalia and the Material Stutter in Surround Sound’
Susan Nurmi-Schomers (Tübingen), ‘Strands of meaning: a topological reading of Susan Howe’
6.00 Recording of ‘Thiefth’ by Susan Howe and David Grubbs
6.30 Drinks reception
