In her 2025 conversation with Elizabeth Willis, Susan Howe underscores a theme at the heart of her poetics since at least 1970: vital intersections among libraries, forests, landscapes, and oceans. Libraries embody forests as breaking waves, which Howe’s collage poems limn as watercolors of nested soundscapes. In their discussion of Howe’s collages gathered in the “Sterling Park in the Dark” section of Penitential Cries (NDP, 2025), Willis invokes this poem from page 42, saying that it lives “in the landscape of the actual page.”

Howe reflects: “most people consider these poems as collages or cut-ups or something, but to me, they just are […] it’s like a watercolor. It’s an accident. In ‘Sterling Park in the Dark’, each page is its own little epiphany. When you’re making a watercolor—at least when I was making watercolors, and I don’t know why I stopped making them—you make a wash and the whole thing looks like an accident. You can ruin it in a minute. It needs a certain transparency knocking against another.” Their conversation then turns to Howe’s training in the visual arts at the Boston Museum School in the late 1950s, her friendship with Joan Jonas, her early watercolor paintings, and how she and Jonas “both have a love of certain austere landscapes by the North Atlantic Ocean.”

Howe shares with Willis vivid memories from those years, her love of painting en plein air while on trips to Ireland, “trying to grasp the cloud changes and the turf, and all the blazing colors constantly shifting.” During one of those visits, she went to Achill Island to paint at the ‘deserted’ village on the southern slopes of Mount Slievemore; echoes from that haunted soundscape inform “The Deserted Shelf” section in Penitential Cries. Howe recalls these details from that uncanny visit to the Deserted Village: “There was no one else around. I had just set up my canvas when I was shoved from behind and fell down. I felt I had to get out of there, and I did. It was haunted. One of the legends about it is all the inhabitants left in one night during the famine.” And that memory sparks Howe’s subsequent reflection that amplifies these deep resonances for her among libraries, landscapes, soundscapes, oceans, and watercolors: “I like to have all these ghosts speaking to each other. Of course, libraries are landscapes too. They’re oceanic, but I also think of them as parklike spaces.”

There are numerous kindred passages in Penitential Cries, including talismanic phrases that invoke the symbolic powers of forests, “branches and brilliance” (10), “breaking waves,” and enjambments “tipped in with wings extended” (10) in Howe’s nested collages: “[S]till depths of the mighty forest thank you love of the sea under whose breaking waves // Enjambment tipped in with wings extended” (10). Earlier in her conversation with Willis (just before their discussion of the poem on page 42 noted above), Howe compares enjambment to “a kind of collage”—that is, breaking “off the sentence and start[ing] on another line” which “is the greatest part of poetry in a way.”

Compared with her recent volumes that have included sequences of collage poems (Souls of the Labadie Tract, THAT THIS, Spontaneous Particulars, Debths, and Concordance), Penitential Cries introduces a distinctive gesture that frames Howe’s nested inter-/intra-textual stichomancy in a new way. Souls of the Labadie Tract (NDP, 2007) manifested Howe’s collage poems as embodiments of textiles (inspired by the fragment of the wedding dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards). THAT THIS (NDP, 2010) and Spontaneous Particulars (NDP, 2014) transformed Howe’s collage poems into telepathic transcriptions (“Hannah doves”) from the diary of Hannah Edwards Wetmore. Debths (NDP, 2017) curated the collage poems in “TOM TIT TOT” as a gallery installation of facing pages (recalling their first public appearance in 2013 at the Yale Union gallery in Portland, OR).

And Concordance sequences Howe’s collage poems in baroque choral arrangements of acousmatic architectures and synesthetic soundscapes (Howard, 2023), emulating her studio and field recordings (Blue Chopsticks, 2021) with David Grubbs. Among the various multimedia transformations of Howe’s collage poems in Concordance since the 2019 Grenfell Press artist book edition, the 2020 trade edition from New Directions, the 2021 recordings from Blue Chopsticks, and their 2022 curated virtual installation at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin (all of which are discussed in my 2023 essay noted above), Howe also collaborated with Sarah Moody for these sculptural letterpress broadside pasteups (Center for Book Arts, 2022) that adapt two pages (49 and 55, respectively) from the NDP text.

In her remarks accompanying a 2015 exhibit of her artist books at the University of Denver, Howe reflected upon some of these differentiations in her collage poems’ methods since Souls and THAT THIS (which includes the sequence of collage poems, “Frolic Architecture”):

“TOM TIT TOT broke my poetry, opened a new path to follow that began with the poems in Frolic Architecture and has been encouraged in acoustic directions while working on collaborations with the musician and composer, David Grubbs. I still felt somehow that Frolic was anchored-down to some material, a document or fact—to Hannah Edwards’s original text—whereas TOM TIT TOT tosses chance and discipline together in a more kaleidoscopic way” (Howard, 2015).

In a 2021 Zoom conversation with Grubbs and David Bernabo, Howe describes her methods of preparing for the 2019 Grenfell Press artist book edition of Concordance, assembling the collage poems via stichomancy and splicing during her visits to NYC: she would scan, print, and cut up reproduced passages from “an enormous collection of nature books from all over the world” that she found at a loft she was renting, as well as passages from scanned prints “from old Concordances [she had previously] found while roaming the stacks at [Yale’s] Sterling Library in New Haven, [… cutting] words and bits of sentences from the xerox copies, [taping] them to a page in various ways, then [running] the result through a copier again.” Howe would then continue the process with Leslie Miller, scanning her “pasteups” to prepare them for high-resolution digital images, which would form the basis for the photopolymer plates that Miller would later prepare for letterpress printing at Grenfell. Howe tells Bernabo that this collaborative process of assembling palimpsestic inter-/intra-texts was “repetitive, rather rigid, but wonderful in the sense of chance and telepathy,” and likens the resulting collage poems to field recordings and watercolors. And in her 2025 conversation with Elizabeth Willis, Howe offers these reflections upon her methods for the collage poems in the “Sterling Park in the Dark” section of Penitential Cries: “The field of the page has something else going on, even in the shapes of print letters. For instance, ‘Sterling Park’ opens on the cutout word Antiq. That fell onto a piece of paper when I was scissoring the text, and I just thought, It’s so beautiful. That’s where I feel like I’m at the brink. But that little Antiq was just caught on the fly. Could it be an antiquity? Could it be antique? Could it be an antic? It’s all of those things.”

In each of these collections (Souls, THAT THIS, Spontaneous, Debths, Concordance, and Penitential), Howe’s collage poems embody themes and methods central to each work’s occasion(s) and subject(s). Penitential Cries sets forth a sequence of forty-eight stichomantic nests under the title of “Sterling Park in the Dark” that suggests a landscape of inter-/intra-textual sculptural installations, such as these facing pages (from pages 52 and 53).

Howe’s various source texts (some of which she identifies in the book’s concluding notes) include selections from Goethe’s scientific writings, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems, the letters of Henry James, and (as is the case in these above facing pages) Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems (52 – 53, and 54). All of Howe’s source texts for these collage poems are in the public domain, and many may be easily found in electronic editions via the web. Some of Howe’s nested inter-/intra-textual collages in Penitential Cries (50 – 51, 52 – 53, 54 – 55, 62 – 63, 78 – 79) fold and refract across reflective boundaries between “SHEET[S] OF WATER AT THE EDGE OF WOODS” (30) in the spirit of her perspectival landscapes in Secret History of the Dividing Line (Telephone Books, 1978) that includes this memorable cover image by Jean Dubreuil (from The Practice of Perspective, London, 1765).

Susan Howe’s Penitential Cries takes a deep dive into the existential core of her life experience and poetic wisdom, reckoning with legacies of trauma (personal, cultural, and literary), seeking transcendence through her collection’s bracing lyricism, ecstatic prose, and regenerative collage poems. In the spirit of her poetic ancestors and their resonant works (such as Shakespeare’s Tempest, H.D.’s “Eurydice,” and Hart Crane’s “Voyages,” among many others invoked in these pages), Howe’s resilient sequential forms lead us downward, respectively, “full fifty fathoms five” (23) into the underworld that “‘must open like a red rose / for the dead to pass’” (20), following the “‘Imaged Word … that holds / Hushed willows anchored in its glow’” (85). One of the collage poems from “Sterling Park in the Dark” (61) follows the Orpheus and Eurydice story through Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the turning point when they lose each other for a second time:

In their 2025 conversation, Willis comments upon this poem: “in the midst of ‘Sterling Park in the Dark’, there’s a page that includes Orpheus and the River Styx, and across from it, we have the image of a sailboat with the one-word sentence ‘EXIT’. It seems like the allegorical world of childhood has come all the way round. And the absent father, who comes into many of [Howe’s] poems, including this one, instead of being away at war, now he’s on the other side of the River.”

This is Howe’s fifteenth book from New Directions (since The Nonconformist’s Memorial, 1993) following kindred volumes (most recently Concordance, 2020) that combine hybrid sequences of historical contexts, lyrical poetry, visionary prose, and inter-/intra-textual collage poems. Howe arranges Penitential Cries into four parts (“Penitential Cries,” “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and “Chipping Sparrow”) the first and third of which combine poetry and prose. “Penitential Cries” (the book’s first section) opens with an untitled poem followed by four hybrid sequences: “Widows and Pariahs 1,” “Widows and Pariahs 2,” “Widows and Pariahs 3,” and “Experience.” “The Deserted Shelf” (the third section) opens with an untitled prose poem followed by an “Epilogue.” “Sterling Park in the Dark” presents a sequence of forty-eight collage poems/stichomantic nests; and “Chipping Sparrow” (dedicated to Fanny Howe) includes three pages of meditative poetry (in the spirit of the volume’s grounding in early modern devotional verse, such as that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose sonnets inform at least three of the book’s collage poems (52, 53, 54) as well as Howe’s reflections upon her work in this volume: “My galley, charged with forgetfulness, / through sharp seas in winter nights doth pass”). The book also includes three images: the front cover’s vivid adaptation of a foreboding image from Emily Dickinson’s 1859 letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson; a black and white photograph of a sailboat (in the midst of the collage poems); and a devotional image/text (“My Book and Heart / Must never part”) that concludes “Epilogue.” The volume also includes the publisher’s page, which notes that “Widows and Pariahs 2” was previously published (appearing in The Paris Review), and concludes with “End Notes” that lists the previous publication of portions of “Sterling Park in the Dark” in Bricks from the Kiln vol. 7 (2024) and documents many of the numerous contextual materials (historical and literary) that shape Howe’s research and creative/critical methods throughout the book. (In that regard, dedicated readers will recognize the familiar co-presence of many of Howe’s kindred spirits, such as Jean Cocteau, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, John Donne, and Emily Dickinson (among others) alongside the co-presence of several historical and/or literary figures specific to this volume (Marguerite Porete, Catherine Sloper, Alvin Lucier, Lady Honoria Dedlock, Mary of Clopas, and William Blake (among others).)

Penitential Cries (96 pages) is a more compact volume compared with THAT THIS (2010), Debths (2017), and Concordance (2020), although not as brief as Spontaneous Particulars (2014, 79 pages); Howe’s distillation of lyrical sequences, prose poems, and inter-/intra-textual palimpsests in this new volume emulates the work’s deep dive (katabasis) over “the brink of afterlife or nothing” (9) “even if we are dead and even if there is nothing in the tomb” (24). In the spirit of Debths, Howe listens closely to messages from the other side(s) of the tomb, acousmatically “transmitting chthonic echo-signals” (11) that she collages into prose poem sequences in Penitential Cries inflected and illuminated by spontaneous telepathic particulars “scattering stars across a field running parallel with eternity the truth of quietness before birth of the world we need to run across to ask if nomen has other omens when each lost letter speaks for itself” (16). Compared with Howe’s NDP volumes since Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), for example, in this new collection Howe turns her chthonic echo-signal stethoscope more closely upon herself than ever before, documenting her daily bouts with tachycardia—“Each morning rapid heartbeat. Scattered alphabet” (9)—that modulate into the more consistent measures of her “still beating heart tell all” (11) and her “Heart pictograph little frills” (25), which (in one memorable line) transpose the echocardiogram’s visualization into the variable music of her palpitations tuning from pitch to pitch: “Mitral tremolo sliding glissandi chaff” (25). In several instances such as this, Howe abruptly undercuts her lyrical resonance (“glissandi chaff”) with a widow-pariah’s acerbic riposte: “There remains a root of bitterness in the best hypocrites” (10); “I have wept away all my brain” (11); “Body as empty shell … whishth chipping” (90 – 91). Another sarcastic refrain running through this collection concerns Howe’s frustrations with the health care system: “Don’t worry. You have met your deductible and can check in at one of our Welcome Kiosks before headlong drop to earth whether gold or no” (12); “I didn’t see a memory test for octogenarian pariahs coming and yes I admit the fact that I failed this first one is a bad sign but if only you had asked me to repeat ‘unanswered perilous, question’ after counting down from 47 backward in increments of seven ….” (16). Howe’s playfulness transforms these grim reflections upon her own vulnerability into conversational humor.

Penitential Cries is also a book of dreamwork through which Howe communicates with her former husband, David von Schlegell (11); her mother, Mary Manning Howe Adams (23); and her father, Mark De Wolfe Howe (79) in addition to connecting telepathically with several kindred literary ancestors and Christian mystics (as noted above), especially H.D. and Eurydice (12, 18, 19, 20, 61, 83), Marguerite Porete (15), Sarah Pierpont Edwards (18), John Donne (20, 22), Mary of Clopas (84), and Hart Crane (85) among others. Howe’s keen interests here concerning H.D.’s “Eurydice” circle back to 2023, when she contributed to a performance of Alvin Lucier’s “So You … (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice)” with Anthony Burr, Charles Curtis, and Jessika Kenney on March 11 at Amant in Brooklyn. Earlier that year, Howe’s longstanding devotion to the writings of Sarah Pierpont Edwards was sparked anew by her colleagues at Yale (Catherine Berkus, Kenneth Minkema, and Harry Stout) who introduced her to recently encountered manuscripts from the Edwards Family archives at the Beinecke Library.

Libraries, archives, manuscripts, landscapes, and books always contribute significantly to Howe’s research contexts, creative and critical methods, publications and performances, and this is certainly true for Penitential Cries in which the Sterling Library at Yale plays a central role for Howe’s telepathic quantum quests (18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 86):

“I’m sifting for sterling particles, delight of the hunt. Sometimes afternoon sun filters through tercet bone-dust, allophonic dust, pastoral watermark teething all here—all about the heart. The history of the world, a heap of refuse books, captivity, moments of birth and beauty, penitence, promiscuity, etc. One wise pariah of the mystic class going under the name of Spiritual peeps through an upper tower window-sliver into the center of the Starr Reading Room far below. She has left the metaphysical field as her work is not religious. Only an empty shell” (22).

This passage in particular echoes Howe’s ardent reflections in “Personal Narrative” (from Souls of the Labadie Tract) upon her early visits to the Sterling Library (during the 1970s and 1980s) when she “felt the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates” and where in “Sterling’s sleeping wilderness [she] felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms” (14).

Such vital intersections among libraries, forests, landscapes, and oceans; breaking waves, collage poems, and watercolors of nested soundscapes travel across many decades for Susan Howe. In her 2025 conversation with Elizabeth Willis, Howe recounts a pivotal moment in her journey through the worlds of painting and poetry since her days at the Boston Museum School in the late 1950s:

“Over the years I always used words in my work and gradually the words became more important to me than anything else. I ended up in a workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Ted Greenwald. At the time I was sharing a studio space with the painter Marcia Hafif when I was in town, and I had some of my word collages and paintings pinned up around my part of the studio. Ted came over to look at my work, and he said, ‘You should take it down and put it into a book’. And that’s what I did. I called that book Hinge Picture, after something I had seen in a show by Marcel Duchamp.”

Hinge Picture (1974) was published by Maureen Owen’s Telephone Books, which also published Howe’s geometric, forested soundscapes in Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978). Some of Howe’s unpublished early landscape drawings and word collages may be visited in the Susan Howe Papers Collection at the University of California, San Diego, including this acousmatic and synesthetic poem, “Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness” (from Box 6, Folder 6, c. 1970 – 72, “First Poems” and “Installations”), in which “the cry of the curlew over the sad marshes […] alone on the longness / bloodroot sparkles // ankle deep the flightless seabird crouches.”

Acknowledgements: thank you beyond measure to Susan Howe, New Directions Publishing, and the University of California, San Diego for permission to include in this essay selected images from Penitential Cries, The Center for Book Arts, Secret History of the Dividing Line, and the Susan Howe Papers Collection at the Mandeville Special Collections Library (UCSD). Images from Susan Howe’s 2013 gallery installation at Yale Union are from the author’s photographs.