# 9... More on Marie Howe.

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.

# 8... Marie Howe's material.

Well, as stated in class and after rereading the poems again, I would have to say that my favorite piece is still "Death, the Last Visit."

Her exploration of death is depicted in this piece in an interesting manner. Her use of raw, explicit language is unique.

The death she speaks of is in the form of release. the poem shows how death is the ultimate way to let go.

She has a somewhat sexual appeal with this poem which makes it interesting because one would not readily think of it in that light. But as she puts it in this poem sex and death are intertwined with each other through the loss of control of the body.

Howe's material explores spiritual/ biblical references and other themes such as alcoholism, child abuse, gender inequality, etc.

This poem relates to these themes as it discusses mortality. She talks of every day experiences in each poem as she does with the others. Well, every day occurrences for her and those who may suffer the same plight as her. She also explores how people deal with life/ living in her poems as well.

# 7... Stanza changes

The Pardon
ROBERT PACK

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honey-suckle smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tonguelss head.
. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

I have decided to turn the poem into tercets.

Rewrite of The Pardon

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.

I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honey-suckle smell

Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.
Well, I was ten and very much afraid.

In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)

And saw the dog emerging. I confess
I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,

And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started to cry and call his name,
Asking forgiveness of his tonguelss head.

. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

When written in tercets the poem has a clearer flowing structure to it. You can actually see in each stanza the different feelings that the boy is going through while trying to express his feelings over the death of his dog.

When it was written in the quatrain the poem, to me felt more disjointed. The reader has a greater challenge of trying to piece together the thoughts of the boy as some of the ideas ended in one stanza and then continued in the next.

When split into the tercet form you also see a clear example in some of the stanzas of the "perfect off-balance" feel to the poem that Wendy Bishop spoke of in the excerpt from Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem.

For example:

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.

OR

. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

The nature of the poem is not lost when written in either form. I just believe that it flows better and is a more comfortable read when read as a tercet instead of a quatrain.

#6... My favorite poem from week 3

Visions and Interpretations by Li-Young Lee would be my choice for favorite poem from the package. The reason I like this poem is the change that Lee uses in his stanzas to illustrate the different interpretations of a single event.

He starts off with the normal four-line stanza and then reduces it to a tercet and then to a couplet to help differentiate between each variation of his story. I like this idea for the mere fact that it sets apart each version from the other.

I also liked the idea suggested in class that he reduced each stanza to individual lessons to help the reader pay attention/ consider each element discussed in each stanza.

The breaking of the lines and stanzas in the odd places that he does kept my interest as well and made me concentrate more on how to read it properly so that it would keep its' flow and also maintain some sort of sense for me.

I think this piece is a beautiful way of looking at death and the way a child interprets, grasps and trys to deal with it.

# 5 ... Bed Talk

Why are you still lying here?
You've got to get up and face the world
These walls at which you stare
Won't conquer your fears
The ceiling is closing in
You're suffocating

Why are you still lying here?
You can't sleep it all away
The world goes on spinning
Tonight turns into tomorrow
And tomorrow's a new day

Why are you still lying here?
You can't hide from it all
The covers can't protect you
Eventually you will get back up
From the fall

Why are you still lying here?

Get up and live
You are meant for something
More than this vegetative state you're in.

Wake up
Get up
I can't hide you anymore.

#4... What is poetry?

As defined by dictionary.com:
The art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

Class ideas on poetry:
Collection of emotion
Free thoughts -- Creative, expressive manner
Deliberate continuous flow of words -- evoke feeling/ meaning
Interpreted in various meanings
Colorful way of painting a picture of world
Expression -- Written/ Verbal/ Visual
Helps make people feel things

As defined from this list of ideas:
Poetry is the deliberate grouping of descriptive words to evoke a feeling or meaning.


My understanding is that poetry is free thought used in an expressive, creative manner to convey ones' thoughts to his/ her readers.
It is a colorful way of painting a picture of ones' point-of-view of the world.

From discussions with my dad about poetry:
In poetry you can provoke understanding by apparent contradiction.

But my favorite definition, for now, would be:

Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.

-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

#3 ... Words I like

Phenomenal -- Highly extraordinary or prodigious
Thwart -- To oppose successfully
Abase -- To reduce or lower
Fathom -- To penetrate the truth of; comprehend
Fete -- A festive celebration or entertainment
Gossamer -- A fine, filmy cobweb seen on grass or bushes or floating in the air in calm weather
Rue -- To feel sorrow over
Sanguine -- Cheerfully optimistic
Fret -- To feel or express worry, annoyance, discontent, or the like
Daunt -- To overcome with fear
Dwell -- To live or stay as a permanent resident
Lurk -- To lie or wait in concealment, as a person in ambush
Linger -- To remain or stay in a place longer than is usual or expected, as if from reluctance to leave.