Contaminated artworks: Sorting Facts, de Susan Howe

Abstract

Susan Howe, by mixing essay, poetry and memoire in her book Sorting Facts, helps to expand the limits of what poet is in contemporaneity. This work analyzes this process. To do so, it starts with a short explanation of the film that inspires the book – Chris Marker’s La Jetée – and then follows the reflections that Susan Howe develops in her book. A poetry stands out here in which presuppositions of modernity – such as the autonomy of art and the specific medium – appear to be destabilized. In this sense, we call contaminated artworks those in which one uses several mediums in its construction, as is the case with Howe's poetry. This contamination helps to redesign the contemporary poetry and even classic formulations, such as the elegy.