16 Nov Chipping Sparrow by Susan Howe
To Fanny Howe
Left the body
Drowsd a little
Done with soul
–
What to think
Dusting up crown
Garment mirror
Pull me close
–
Quietness and calm
Rest and rejoice
No more doubt
Astonishing!
–
Bird and pencil dining
Bird and pencil dining
–
Special visitors
Walking on stilts
in snow
–
On the subject
of assurance
I should have
I should have
–
Self-scrap
Imagination
on the bias
–
Language of cold
Sitting beside sleep
Body as empty shell
–
When I came home
it was very late
There was little in
work but did go on
–
Civil fortification
years awayaway
whishth chipping
About the Poet
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements.
She is the author of several poetry collections, including Penitential Cries (New Directions, 2025); Debths (New Directions, 2017), which received the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize; That This (New Directions, 2010); The Midnight (New Directions, 2003); Kidnapped (Coracle, 2002); The Europe of Trusts (New Directions, 2002); Pierce-Arrow (New Directions, 1999); Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (New Directions, 1996); The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New Directions, 1993); The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (New Directions, 1990); and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
Howe is also the author of two books of criticism: The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), which was named an “International Book of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985). Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg (University of California Press, 1998).
Howe has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in the winter of 1998, was named a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities. In 2011, she received Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.
Howe was a longtime professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and held the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2006. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
This poem is the concluding poem in her new collection Penitential Cries (New Directions, 2025).
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.