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Marie Howe

{{Short description|American poet (born 1950)}}

{{for|the feminist organizer and writer|Marie Jenney Howe}}

{{for|the American politician|Marie E. Howe}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Marie Howe

| image = Marie howe 0396.JPG

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| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1950}}

| birth_place = Rochester, New York, U.S.

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| nationality = American

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| alma_mater = Columbia University

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| genre = Poetry

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| notableworks = * The Good Thief (1988)

  • What the Living Do (1998)
  • The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008)
  • Magdalene (2017)
  • New and Selected Poems (2024)
  • What the Earth Seemed to Say (2024)

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| children = Grace Inan Howe

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| awards = * Guggenheim Fellowship

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| website = {{URL|https://www.mariehowe.com/}}

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Marie Howe (born 1950) is an American poet. Howe served as New York Poet Laureate from 2012–2016. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Poet-in-Residence at The Cathedral of St John the Divine. Throughout her career, she has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.“Marie Howe.” Marie Howe (Writing, MFA Writing Program) | Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Accessed November 3, 2024. https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/faculty/howe-marie.html.

In 1987 her debut collection The Good Thief was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series.“Marie Howe.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed November 3, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marie-howe. Her subsequent collections include What the Living Do (1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), and Magdalene (2017), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.“Marie Howe.” National Book Foundation, January 8, 2018. https://www.nationalbook.org/people/marie-howe/. In 2024 W. W. Norton & Company published her New & Selected Poems,“New and Selected Poems.” Home Page. Accessed November 4, 2024. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075035. while Bloodaxe Books published its UK companion, What the Earth Seemed to Say, to critical acclaim.{{Cite web |title=What the Earth Seemed to Say |url=https://guardianbookshop.com/what-the-earth-seemed-to-say-9781780377247 |access-date=2025-02-05 |website=The Guardian Bookshop |language=en}}

Early life

Howe was born in Rochester, New York. In a 2013 interview with On Being, Howe would note that

{{Blockquote

|text= I grew up in the Catholic religion, in a large Irish-Catholic family. I was the oldest daughter out of nine children. All of my sisters had nine or ten kids, and all of my father’s sisters and brothers also had nine or ten kids, so I had literally over a hundred first cousins. It was a tribal childhood, and the Catholicism was at the center of it. Tippet, Krista. “Marie Howe: The Power of Words to Save Us.” The On Being Project, April 25, 2013. https://onbeing.org/programs/marie-howe-the-power-of-words-to-save-us-may2017/.

}}

In the 1960’s Howe enrolled in the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a socially progressive, parochial all-girls school, where the nuns centered what Theology has to do with “social justice, service, questioning, and authority.” Tippet, Krista. “Marie Howe: The Power of Words to Save Us.” The On Being Project, April 25, 2013. https://onbeing.org/programs/marie-howe-the-power-of-words-to-save-us-may2017/. Howe would later observe that “it was there that I began to appreciate that spirituality could be rigors, imaginative and an essential part of living in the physical world.” Tippet, Krista. “Marie Howe: The Power of Words to Save Us.” The On Being Project, April 25, 2013. https://onbeing.org/programs/marie-howe-the-power-of-words-to-save-us-may2017/. During this time she would spend “hours lying in the bathtub” reading from The Lives of Saints, which would become her first example of “women who were the subjects of their own lives, not objects.” Tippet, Krista. “Marie Howe: The Power of Words to Save Us.” The On Being Project, April 25, 2013. https://onbeing.org/programs/marie-howe-the-power-of-words-to-save-us-may2017/.

Howe would later attend the University of Windsor, a historically Roman Catholic university in Ontario, Canada, where she earned a BA in English. She would subsequently relocate to Groton, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a journalist, and later a high school English teacher. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the Summer Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College, where she had applied to study Philosophy, but ended up enrolling in a creative writing workshop. Liebegott, Ali. “Road Trip: Marie Howe.” Believer Magazine, March 19, 2019. https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/road-trip-marie-howe/.

In 1981 Howe relocated to Concord, Massachusetts. When reflecting on this time later in life, Howe would note that

{{Blockquote

|text= Every day I would walk to the old North Bridge and visit Thoreau’s Grave and Emerson’s grave. I was so lonely, lonely, lonely. And I learned how to sit still. And how to sit in a chair and bang on a typewriter. You know. You have to learn how to sit still. I didn’t know how to do that.  It took me a long time. I applied to graduate schools and I went. It was a miracle. Liebegott, Ali. “Road Trip: Marie Howe.” Believer Magazine, March 19, 2019. https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/road-trip-marie-howe/.}}

The following year she moved to New York City to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Career

She worked briefly as a newspaper reporter in Rochester and as a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. Howe did not devote serious attention to writing poetry until she turned 30. At the suggestion of an instructor in a writers' workshop, Howe applied to and was accepted at Columbia University where she studied with Stanley Kunitz and received her M.F.A. in 1983.{{cite web|url=http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/olv6n2.html |title=New York State Writers Institute > Writers Online: Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2002 Marie Howe Profile |publisher=Albany.edu |date= |access-date=2017-07-23}}{{cite web|url=https://www.slc.edu/writing-mfa/faculty.html |title=Sarah Lawrence College: MFA Writing Faculty > Marie Howe Bio |publisher=Slc.edu |date= |access-date=2017-07-23}}

She has taught writing at Tufts University and Warren Wilson College. She is presently on the writing faculties at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University.{{cite web|url=http://www.slc.edu/faculty/howe-marie.html|title=Marie Howe|work=slc.edu|access-date=18 March 2015}}{{cite web|url=http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/object/cwp.faculty.mariehowe|title=Marie Howe, Faculty of CWP - NYU|work=nyu.edu|access-date=18 March 2015}}

Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.{{cite web|title=Book Winners|url=https://nationalpoetryseries.org/nps-books/#1987|website=The National Poetry Series|access-date=20 March 2018}} In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems, What the Living Do; the title poem in the collection is a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: "I am living, I remember you."

Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. "John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely," she has said.{{cite web|url=http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2004/howe-elliott.html|title=AGNI Online: Complexity of the Human Heart: A Conversation with Marie Howe by David Elliott|work=bu.edu|access-date=18 March 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150619000604/http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2004/howe-elliott.html|archive-date=19 June 2015|url-status=dead}}

In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.{{cite web|url=http://blueflowerarts.com/marie-howe|title=Blue Flower Arts|work=blueflowerarts.com|access-date=18 March 2015}} Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.{{cite web|url=http://www.arts.gov/pub/NEA_lit.pdf |title=Archived copy |access-date=2006-09-23 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060811235711/http://www.arts.gov/pub/NEA_lit.pdf |archive-date=2006-08-11 }}{{cite web|url=http://www.gf.org/fellows/results?query=Marie+Howe&lower_bound=1925&upper_bound=2011&competition=ALL&fellowship_category=ALL&x=0&y=0|title=Search Results|work=gf.org|access-date=18 March 2015}}

In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.[https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/marie-howe "Marie Howe"] Poets.org

Literary themes and style

File:Poets Wash Square NYC Poetry Rally December 20, 2014 35.jpg

Marie Howe is praised for her poetry which captures the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of everyday life .{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marie-howe|title=Marie Howe|date=2020-04-12|website=Poetry Foundation|language=en|access-date=2020-04-12}} Her work explores the nature of the soul and the self through literary themes of life, death, love, pain, hope, despair, sin, virtue, solitude, community, impermanence, and the eternal.{{Cite web|url=https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_marie12.html|title=Marie Howe|website=www.albany.edu|access-date=2020-04-12}} Despite the strong themes in her writing, Howe subtly expresses these messages through the explanation of daily tasks and regular lifestyles in most of her poems.

Her first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was made philosophical and reflective with the incorporation of Biblical and mythical allusions. Margaret Atwood, who chose this book for the National Poetry Series, praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” Additionally, Stanley Kunitz noted, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” Such an esteemed review justified the selection of The Good Thief for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets.{{Cite web|url=https://poets.org/poet/marie-howe|title=About Marie Howe {{!}} Academy of American Poets|last=Poets|first=Academy of American|website=poets.org|access-date=2020-04-12}}

A year after the publication of her first poetry book (1989), Howe’s brother John died from AIDS. According to Howe in an [https://agnionline.bu.edu/about/our-people/authors/marie-howe AGNI] interview, “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” Consequently in 1997, she published a second collection, What the Living Do, as an elegy for John which reflected a new style. Stripped of metaphors, her writing was described as “a transparent, accessible documentary of loss” by the [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marie-howe Poetry Foundation].

In 2008, Howe distanced herself from the personal narrative and returned to the spiritual style in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. This is most representative of Howe’s style now, a balance between the ordinary and unordinary. It is best put by playwright Eve Ensler, who describes her poems as “a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.”

Honors and awards

Published works

Poetry Collections

  • {{cite book|title= What the Earth Seemed to Says|publisher=Bloodaxe|year= 2024|isbn= 9781780377247}}
  • {{cite book|title= New and Selected Poems|publisher=W. W. Norton|year= 2024|isbn= 9781324075035}}
  • {{cite book|title=Magdalene|publisher=W. W. Norton|year= 2017|isbn= 9780393285307}}
  • {{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2GXQoCwpNGAC&q=Marie+Howe|title=The Kingdom of Ordinary Time|publisher=W. W. Norton|year= 2008|isbn= 9780393337341 }}
  • {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TpHP2LTJBowC&q=marie+howe|title=What the Living Do|publisher=W. W. Norton|year= 1998|isbn=9780393318869}}
  • The Good Thief. Persea Books. 1988. {{ISBN|9780892551279}}

Anthologies

  • Counting Time Like People Count Stars, (by Luis J. Rodríguezed, ed. by Spencer Reece, Foreword by Marie Howe, Afterword by Richard Blanco, Northwestern University Press, 2017) {{ISBN|9781882688555}}
  • In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, (ed., with Michael Klein, Persea Books, 1995) {{ISBN|9780892552085}}

References

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Sources

  • [http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&Search_Arg=marie+howe&Search_Code=GKEY^*&CNT=100&hist=1&type=quick Library of Congress Online Catalog > Marie Howe]

External links

  • [http://www.mariehowe.com Marie Howe's Official Website]
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20090519074912/http://www.blueflowerarts.com/mhowe.html Author's Booking Agency > Blue Flower Arts > Marie Howe Author Page]
  • [https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/marie-howe Marie Howe: Poems and Profile on Poets.org]
  • [http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/01/14/080114po_poem_howe Poem: The New Yorker > January 14, 2008 > The Star Market by Marie Howe]
  • [http://www.alittlepoetry.com/howe.html Poem: A Little Poetry > How Some of It Happened by Marie Howe]
  • [http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200808_omag_memoir_howe Personal Essay: O: The Oprah Magazine > Memoir by Marie Howe: Not to Look Away]
  • [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/howe.html Video: PBS > Poetry Everywhere > Marie Howe Reading The Gate]
  • {{YouTube|dSffAewEhGI|Video: Marie Howe Reading at the NYS Writers Institute in 2008}}
  • [http://bombsite.com/issues/61/articles/2105 Interview: Bomb Magazine > #61, Fall 1997 > Marie Howe Interviewed by Victoria Redel]
  • [https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141502211/poet-marie-howe-on-what-the-living-do-after-loss Poet Marie Howe On 'What The Living Do' After Loss], NPR, October 19, 2011
  • {{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l-Cf9ejl2foC&q=marie+howe&pg=PA203|title=The Face of Poetry| editor=Zack Rogow | publisher= University of California Press|year= 2006|isbn= 9780520246041 }}

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{{NY Poets Laureate|state=autocollapse}}

{{PulitzerPrize PoetryAuthors 2001–2025}}

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Category:1950 births

Category:Living people

Category:Sarah Lawrence College faculty

Category:New York University faculty

Category:Columbia University School of the Arts alumni

Category:Writers from Rochester, New York

Category:Poets from New York (state)

Category:Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners

Category:National Endowment for the Arts Fellows

Category:The New Yorker people

Category:Poets laureate of New York (state)

Category:American women poets

Category:20th-century American poets

Category:20th-century American women writers

Category:21st-century American poets

Category:21st-century American women writers

Category:American women academics