Fanny Howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Gone: Poems (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), The End (1992), For Erato; The Meaning of Life (1984), Alsace-Lorraine (1982) and Poem from a Single Pallet (1980). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001.
Born in Buffalo New York in 1940, Howe is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist who has won multiple awards for her collections of poetry and novels for young adults. A creative writing teacher of note, Howe has lectured at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
- 2005
- 2001
Judges’ Citation
Fanny Howe’s lyric meditations on matter and spirit, the soul exiled, and the wondrous strangeness of human life on earth are akin to Dickinson’s in their fierce wit, musicality and intelligence.
Fanny Howe’s lyric meditations on matter and spirit, the soul exiled, and the wondrous strangeness of human life on earth are akin to Dickinson’s in their fierce wit, musicality and intelligence. Gathered from nine of her books spanning more than two decades, these poems articulate the inquisitive grace and courage of a secular contemplative, restoring to language its power to question the sacred in the interests of corporeal joy.
Judges’ Citation
These are startling, beautiful, challenging poems that work within the troubled and chafed borders and interfacings between spirit and material world to ask that basic question: how can we live?
These are startling, beautiful, challenging poems that work within the troubled and chafed borders and interfacings between spirit and material world to ask that basic question: how can we live? How can we be ordinary with each other (so necessary) in these times of war and political terror that try to keep our lives in a ‘state of exception’ that seems to justify cruelty? Howe’s poems are firmly on the ground but not grounded; they use lyric energy and phrasings in new ways that are deft, open, and have synaptic intelligence. Here, poetic transport is not transcendent, not consolation; it is earth-bound, immediate and enamoured. This is a book that teaches us to be ecstatic about poetry; in it we hear the frayed and difficult passages of our thought and place as humans, our restive worry and our longing for peaceful cohabitation with all others. On the Ground is an essential book for our times.
Selected poems
by Fanny Howe
I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—
and the short northern nights.
Copyright © 2000
[I won’t be able to write from the grave]
I’d speak if I wasn’t afraid of inhaling
A memory I want to forget
Like I trusted the world which wasn’t mine
The hollyhock in the tall vase is wide awake
And feelings are only overcome by fleeing
To their opposite. Moisture and dirt
Have entered the space between threshold and floor
A lot is my estimate when I step on it
Sorrow can be a home to stand on so
And see far to: another earth, a place I might know
Copyright © 2000, Fanny Howe, Selected Poems, University of California Press
[I’d speak if I wasn’t afraid of inhaling]
The first person is an existentialist
like trash in the groin of the sand dunes
like a brown cardboard home beside a dam
like seeing like things the same
between Death Valley and the desert of Paran
An earthquake a turret with arms and legs
The second person is the beloved
like winners taking the hit
like looking down on Utah as if
it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan
like war-planes out of Miramar
like a split cult a jolt of coke New York
like Mexico in its deep beige couplets
like this, like that … like Call us all It
Thou It. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!”
The third person is a materialist.
Copyright © 2004 by Fanny Howe
9/11
I may never see the Vatican or Troy
but only let me sit in a car somewhere
I recognize as home by the hand
of the one I love in mine-
just once – O universe – one more time
Copyright © 2000 the Regents of the University of California
from Lines Out to Silence
Not a rink but ashed-over ice
Rain on a windshield, a green light
Apartments made of dirt, neon
hangers outlined in the cleaner’s window
I think proximity is the abyss
between God and us because
every fabric of my body is trying
to know why saying
I love you
in a time of extremity is a necessity
Copyright © 2004 by Fanny Howe
from On the Ground
I have seen it happen
A face with fangs and gills
represents history and an angel
is beating the beast on the back
Both are made of marble
One is a dragon
Its head is flat
like the iron tanks
in muddy water
that drove the men into the Gulf of Tonkin.
…
In my experience
the angel with his wings up
is trying to kill the dragon of history
to prove that air
is stronger than the objects in it
and if he wasn’t made of stone, he would.
Copyright © 2004 by Fanny Howe