Voice, music, sound: Poetic histories beyond the printed word in the collaborations of Susan Howe and David Grubbs

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.