"Tangible Things": Susan Howe's Interdisciplinary Materials and Complex Kinships: Five Sequences

This thesis uses Susan Howe's poetry, visual art and sound collaborations as a leaping-off point for my own explorations in poetry. "Tangible Things" takes as its starting point the materiality of Howe's work and examines it in the context of post-war capitalism and Neo-colonialism. The research asks, what can reading poetry through the lens of materials teach us about the conditions in which language is produced? The five following sequences are my own experiments in making visible networks of kinship, power and narrative hierarchy from the position of a feminist living and working in late-capitalist society. These interlocking poems provide spaces in which to address, re-think and make poetry with, the multi-layered voices that structure the present.