Marie Howe is interviewed about her work. I think that this is interesting because it gives us insight on her work and also shows her perspective on the works she created. It made me understand better what her writing was about and where her inspiration came from.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
The Complexity of the Human Heart:
A Conversation with Marie Howe
by David Elliott
Marie Howe is the author of two books of poetry, The Good Thief (which was chosen for the 1987 National Poetry Series) and What the Living Do. She has also co-edited In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Many of the poems in her second book tell stories of living and dying with that disease, especially the story of her brother’s death. Her poetry speaks to the wisdom that can emerge from a confrontation with death, making vivid the pleasures of daily life so easy to take for granted. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University and lives in New York with her daughter, adopted from China in 2003. I spoke with her after a reading at Keystone College in La Plume, Pennsylvania.
Elliott: You started writing poetry seriously somewhat late in life, after taking a summer class at Dartmouth. You have a line in “The Meadow”: “As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them . . . .” Was that the feeling you had at that moment in your life?
Howe: Don’t you feel as if our lives are these compositions that we don’t really know how to make end? Every once in a while we walk through a door and we realize, “My God, it’s the right door. This is the door I was meant to walk through.” I felt that when I took the class at Dartmouth. I was thirty years old, after teaching high school for years and being a journalist, and I felt like this was what I wanted to do. Of course I had doubts. I was beleaguered by doubts, but I had found a joy, and I just felt so happy. It’s hard to sustain that over time, of course, because it becomes something else as you look through it and keep going, and your own life takes different turns; but at that period of my life it felt like I had stumbled into the right room and there were clear and specific directions, and I was so, so, so grateful. And the directions were just this kind of profound sense of meaning and happiness in work that meant something to me. I didn’t even know I could stay at a desk for five, six hours working on the same thing. So I found a way of being with experience in language that made sense. It was miraculous, looking back at it—a near miss
Elliott: Is “Part of Eve’s Discussion” still a cornerstone poem for you? It seems to establish so effectively the interests that many of your poems have with moments of transformation, of becoming--things on the edge of change.
Howe: Imminence. When I wrote that it was the first time I was really transported by writing a poem, and it was the first time I found a . . . “Vehicle” is not the right word; “metaphor” is not quite the right word either. It was a situation that was resonant of some inchoate situation in my own soul. And that situation provided a way of speech, a way of speaking about it, which is for me the struggle in writing. What Frost says, you know, a poem begins with a homesickness, with a lump in your throat, and that inchoate homesickness, that gathering of force of new feelings and thoughts. It seems miraculous that it ever finds an expression. And for me it only works one out of thirty times. There are so many poems I throw out, so that Eve poem I think was the first time that something I had been feeling all of my life found some voice through her. Let me put it this way. I say this to my students all of the time. I don’t think we really have very much to tell poems; I think poems have a great deal to tell us. That was the first poem that actually spoke to me, and I think that was a cornerstone and a beginning, like the poem itself could talk.
Elliott: How much did you have to work at the music of poetry? Is it something that came really naturally to you? It is certainly important to your work.
Howe: Poetry to me is oral; it really should be said out loud. Now this third book might not be. It might be something you’d want to read quietly to yourself, which is weird. But I grew up with the Bible, with all that parallelism and anaphora and the rhythms of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the sound of that Hebrew prosody. So it’s that kind of music in most of the poems. And I also think it is my desire to have them be experiences that actually happen between the speaker and the hearer so that they happen in the air. That has been important to me.
You can read more here.
David Elliott is professor of English at Keystone College in La Plume, Pennsylvania. His interviews with poets, including William Stafford, Robert Creeley, Naomi Shihab Nye, and W. S. Merwin, have appeared widely.
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