Susan Howe is a poet beloved by many archivists, and called by several writers, “a poet of the archives.” Emily LaBarge, writing in a 2018 BOOKFORUM piece, remarks that Howe “perceives and investigates the stutters and absences in the historical record, particularly in the literary artifacts we have deemed worthy to attend to and preserve.”
In the passage chosen here, used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, Howe writes of conditions in libraries and archives with microfilm. She asks and reveals in a very short passage complex questions about what documents do and do not survive, and how we, researchers or archivists, come to them. Her point is both poetry and inquiry.
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Keeping (and Telling) the Past 