Do Not Despair: On Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems

We were sitting around the kitchen table in the Birkerts-Focht apartment on Magnolia Street in Cambridge, discussing the work of our contemporaries. Someone quoted Yeats: “I don’t know which of us will succeed, but one thing I know for certain: there are too many of us.” It was the eighties, dawn of the Cambridge Renaissance. The city was aflame with poets. Everyone was writing. The city boasted more bookstores than bars—today we have more banks than bookstores and bars combined, and therein lies a tale leading to the current xenophobic moment. It was precisely the international element in the last decades of the previous century that gave the era its flair: Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and that poet from Ireland lent the neighborhood an aura of glamor and sophistication. “Nobody knows who anyone is,” shrugged Seamus, tipping his glass. We nodded sagely and emptied our tumblers.

We were all just beginning, and none knew where they would land: Tom Sleigh, Lucie Brock-Broido, Stuart Dischell, Bruce Smith, Ha Jin, Steven Cramer, Sue Standing, Marie Howe, the poets of the Dark Room Collective—Sharan Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kevin Young, Patrick Sylvain, Tracy K. Smith. So many others. We’d cross paths at the xerox shop in Porter Square, carrying MSS in elegant black press-binders you can’t find anywhere anymore, stuffing poems into envelopes, lining up at the post office, anxiously checking the mail every day.

Rent control had something to do with it. A building on the corner of Linnaean Street and Mass. Ave. became a haven for writers, thanks to its superintendent, David Bosworth. David himself was a writer who eventually became chair of the creative writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Fortunately, he was able to pass the job on to Tom Bahr, who is also a writer. A two-bedroom apartment rented for around $250 a month.

At one point the denizens of the building included Margo Livesey, Steven Cramer, Nick Brommell, Sharon Dunn, Stuart Dischell, and Marie Howe. Marie became a friend, and then more than a friend. When we met, she was working on the poems that formed her first book, The Good Thief.

Such anxiety haloed our days, such frenzies, so many extravagant hopes and lucid dreams lit the wild nights! Nobody knew who anybody was, leaving us free to become what we made.

Writing about Milton and Camus, Thomas Merton described poets and poetic thinkers as writers who “construct myths in which they embody their own struggle to cope with the fundamental questions of life.” Marie Howe is one of the rare poets of my generation who hasn’t needed to indulge in world-building. The one we already inhabit is more than enough for her. From the start she’s mined the foundational myths defining the “Western” tradition—a nervy decision which has yielded profound outcomes. Her poems’ unsettling power grows out of our hearing in them two stories at once: our memory of the original (via Hesiod or Hamilton, Ovid or Bullfinch) echoes against Howe’s reimagining.

Consider the recent Persephone poems in her New and Selected:“But after I spent several hours with my mother / I often felt her face on my face. // After leaving my mother I’d go to the mirror and look and look / And it was my face I saw // But from the inside it felt like hers / and it was hours before I felt her likeness fade.” This may be a persona poem acknowledging the way we come to embody a parent, but something more urgent and personal pulses behind the words, a particular relationship, unspecified but lurking.

Howe moves freely between the marvelous and the miraculous. While Ovid offers rich pickings, Howe more frequently sources her narratives from the Bible, mining both Testaments to uncanny effect. The Gospel According to Luke tells of the two thieves who were crucified on either side of Jesus. While one recognized his fellow sufferer as the son of God and repented, the other demurred from committing himself. No surprise that the “good thief” got the nod. “‘Do not despair,’” wrote Samuel Beckett, quoting St. Augustine, “‘one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of them was damned.’ I like the shape of that sentence.” Howe, whose first book was titled The Good Thief, seems to locate her metaphysics precisely at the sentence’s caesura, on the semicolon. In “Part of Eve’s Discussion,” which opens the book, she writes:

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies . . . very much like that moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin . . . and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

In the unsettling atmosphere of these sentences, the reader probes for clarity. Is Howe evoking Eve on the verge of biting the apple: that millisecond just before a disaster that will change everything, the moment of precognition before the car starts to spin? One false move loses the kingdom. Forever after, one is haunted by the memory of a time when life was paradise.

But, Howe argues, paradise need not remain out of reach. Exactly thirty years later, she publishes Magdalene with an epigraph from The Gospel According to St. Thomas:“His disciples said: ‘When will you be visible to us? / and when will we see you? / He said, ‘When you undress and are not ashamed.” Lose your shame at being “merely” human, and you will re-enter paradise.

Howe’s work is as rich with life as it is redolent with death. Her poems can be funny, ribald, and frequently heartbreaking—as in the ones about a beloved younger brother who died of AIDS. She writes about love, work, marriage, and the child she adores with enormous tenderness and humor, as in “Two Animals”: “This morning walking naked through the narrow hall / startling the girl who was climbing down the ladder from her loft / she crouched, her eyes wide. // I seemed to see us both like that—the naked walking woman, / the crouching girl—two animals in the world. / You scared me, she said. // And you scared me, I said, / from the bathroom—already looking for makeup and cream.”

Howe’s imagination startles with its rightness. Weigh the apparent simplicity of the diction in “Advent” with the range of its implications: “Not that we knew or could imagine / what some mild evenings made us homesick for. // Call it forethought but not thought of, / not conceived exactly. // When it happened we said we saw it coming / approaching a horizon we hadn’t // known was there. It occurred to us / at once, which altered time thereafter. // By then we could not remember the before / before it had the after in it.”

Howe speaks to the gravest matters shadowing our day without lecturing. Her way of coping with what Merton called “the fundamental questions of life” proposes a path forward. “Postscript,” the first poem in the Selected—so, properly, a “prescript”—begins: “What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters, / one after the other. // What we did to the trees, we did to our elders / stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.” By refusing glib finger-pointing, by distributing the blame and underscoring our collective responsibility for the planet and for each other, she reminds us we’re all active participants in the making of our world. Howe invites us to imagine a creative response to the crisis.

I’ve long held that the best of the American spirit is found in its poetry—in the warmhearted, loving embrace of the outgoing Whitman, and in the intimate probings of Dickinson. That poetry of such depth of feeling and thought continues to be written should give us hope that, despite the darkness hovering over nearly every aspect of democracy and civilization today, “the light sings eternal.”