Language a Wood for Thought

During my first year of college, in February 2018, when I’d convinced myself that biology was my vocation and that poetry exceeded my capabilities, Susan Howe came to read. I remember the auditorium in which she appeared and the impossibly glamorous, aloof English faculty that she enraptured. (A tip, by the by: never compare the fashion sense of scientists and humanists.) Why did I attend? I’m not even American. I had lived in Argentina most of my life and grown up in a family of accountants, for whom literature and the arts were foreign. I didn’t know who Howe was and had certainly never read her.