【Hannah Harper Archives】
Defenestration of Prague
From the Archive
Susan Howe at a lecture in 2011.
An excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” originally published in our Winter 1982 issue. Howe, who was born in Boston, is eighty-eight today. “People often tell me my work is ‘difficult,’” she told the Reviewin 2012. “I have the sinking feeling they mean ‘difficult’ as in ‘hopeless.’ ”
Skeletal kin
tilt
italic lunacy
long illness of little difference
Seventy memories
masks
singing and piping
to be
(half words)
beginning and begetting
strangers nodding to one another
stumbling and scrambling
(uncertain theme)
random form
strong arm of my name
Emblem
sign strewn flapping
(flapping of ravens in rain)
What sequence
Mothers hide harmless
weary for antiquity
the simple
Eglatine
Soldiers moving as toys in a
world soul
War
Obdurate as ocean he went forth
conquering
—and to conquer
Anathema
who was my father
Empty dominions beyond structure
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