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