One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Fanny Howe (b. 1940)
Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet. What this meant to me was a life outside the law; it would include disobedience and uprootedness.

Praising her "Selected Poems" -- winner of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize -- Albert Gelpi gave the following economical portrayal of Fanny Howe: " [She] is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since Dickinson herself."

Howe was born on October 15, 1940, during a lunar eclipse in Buffalo, New York. Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at UC San Diego, she has taught at Columbia, Yale and MIT. A most esteemed American avant-garde poet, novelist and short story writer, she has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Poetry Foundation. In 2008, she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2009, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Howe has published nearly 40 volumes of verse and prose. The Fanny Howe Papers are now housed at Stanford University.

***

" I was never, as a child, taught respect for religious faith. My parents, born in the first years of the twentieth century, the terrible century, were skeptics. Events confirmed their opinions on enlightenment and moral governance so I absorbed their feelings and acted accordingly, hating (fearing) school, grown-ups, authority and my own inheritance.

" In 1961 I dropped out of college and married. In 1963 I left the marriage, and fell apart. In 1968 I married again and had three children in four years, and the marriage fell apart. In 1980 I married for the third time, this time with determination to fulfill my vow. You see, I married the Catholic Church this time, which meant I could make no more momentous but casual mistakes.

" This marriage has been like any other: loving, boring at times, disappointing, occasionally joyful, in the end a matter of habit and perseverance. Unlike a human marriage, it bears no fruits and it gives no physical warmth.

" To get up in the morning and go out the door and put your feet on the ground and walk: this is all the faith I know. I cannot have a spiritual moment without remembering the evils of war, poverty, and illness.

" When I went down to the bottom of the social well and had to get food stamps for myself and my young children to live on, and stood in unemployment lines, with no one to help me get out of the murk of living in economic fear (this lasted about four years), I realized that most rituals in the world are about standing in line and waiting for a change to come.

" I went to the West Coast at age seventeen from a sheltered Boston childhood. It was the tail end of the Beat movement, and some of my friends were believers in Marxist ideals and poetry. But women at that time, as beautifully depicted in the movie "Let's Get Lost," sat on the backs of motorcycles and in the back seats of cars, and competed for the attention of bad boys.

" When not with children, I have lived most of my life alone, for better or worse. I am overly attached to freedom, you could say. I like to do what I want. I like being alone at the window or on the streets.

" Even as a child I preferred invisibility to being noticed. We had a very ethical and artistic childhood, my sisters and I. None of us graduated from college. We all married very young. Our parents were permissive, liberal, but not reckless. They would have no problem with writers or any kind of artist being one of their own, but hoped for us to be financially safe.

" When my children were young, I woke up at five and scribbled, or wrote while one was nursing and the other two were in day care. Then I usually have had to go to work at a job. In recent decades, I have worked from early in the morning until about two.      

" I have been lucky with friendships and have worked at keeping them alive, but my friends have done that too, so it has not been real work but reciprocity. I have no idea what to do with men, although I was close to a few. I prefer old-fashioned friendships with men because I like having a man around, but then it's great going home alone. Only one man was kind and loving and acted like a grown-up, and he had four children and I had three, so it was too difficult in the end.

" I spend a lot of time working at the words, the way a plumber might fumble around for ridges in pipes, and daydreaming. I think I was drawn to writing because I couldn't express myself verbally, aloud; I still find it hard.

I am deeply grateful to Professor Howe for allowing me to use excerpts from a piece that she wrote for an interview, to come out in a book on poetry and religion.

NOTES

  • The opening quote is from "The Winter Sun" (2009). This is Howe's memoirs, including anecdotes about her parents (playwright and actress Mary Manning and law professor Mark DeWolfe Howe) and family friends such as Robert Lowell and Samuel Beckett. Howe is a sister of Susan Howe, also a prominent poet.
  • The poem appears courtesy of American Letters & Commentary. Copyright © 2004 by Fanny Howe.

 

A BROKEN VOW
The city is a desert with water on every side
And strong working people

Pushing along.
Soon you will be one of them.

X forgave Peter three times three
Then went into a nearby garden to cry.

A rejected gesture turns to syrup
It has a sickening taste

And its color is maroon.
It is a substance you carry around like an island.

I told you love produces more love
Until it is marooned in its own dark hands.

Then it knows something.