‘If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices’, states the poet Susan Howe in a remarkable mixed-genre essay that engages with, and interrogates, the politics of form (1990: 180). Entitled ‘Encloser’, the essay meditates on what it means to ‘enclose’, to ‘include’ and canonize texts, to label them ‘narratives of conversion’, say, when their affective charge explodes that cognitive label. Formal generic categories can enable reading, but impede meaning. ‘Poetry shelters other voices’ because it always exceeds its assigned place. It can suddenly erupt and disrupt the grand master narratives of history, the received critical interpretations and social functions of particular texts. Poetry can convey muted experiences and structures of feeling that exist outside of normative contexts, even when it abides by strict formal rules of composition or expression. It resists absorption, but ‘shelters’ other insights, and when it breaks rules of genre and prosody its impact can be unexpected and far-reaching. This is true of the Early American colonial texts that interest Howe as much as it is of the Francophone colonial and postcolonial texts that will be discussed in this essay.