‘I won’t be able to write from the grave’, the American poet Fanny Howe once wrote, ‘so let me tell you what I love’. The list that follows is brief: brown bread, salt, wine, a windy day, intimacy with friends and family. Art’s great promise is that such transient pleasures can be extended, even made permanent. The conceit is borrowed, I think, from Brecht’s ‘Vergnügungen’ (‘Pleasures’), whose list ranges from comfortable shoes to dialectics. Both, in turn, recall a classical fragment by Praxilla of Sicyon, who in her itemization of the ‘loveliest of what I leave behind’, includes the stars, sunlight, ripe cucumbers and pears. Praxilla’s poem survives in a piece of commentary that criticizes her for the mixing of high and low. Such are the risks of poetry that finds in the quotidian material for profound feeling and complex thought.
By the time of her death last summer, Howe was well-garlanded. Through her teaching career – at the University of California as well as various institutions in her native Massachusetts – she became a mentor to many younger writers. A Catholic and a Marxist (in that order), her work placed spiritual and social struggle in a fierce embrace. She was born in 1940 to a prominent Boston family. Her father was a prominent civil liberties lawyer, a critic of McCarthyism and an advocate for racial equality. Her mother was an Irish novelist and playwright. Her older sister, Susan, also became a major poet. It was, by any measure, an unusual childhood. Howe appeared in plays by John Ashbery, was chaperoned to the cinema by Samuel Beckett. FBI agents turned up on the doorstep. Pulled between her mother’s bohemianism and her father’s political commitments, the atmosphere could be volatile. In one of her autobiographical texts, The Winter Sun (2009), Howe described the family dynamic: ‘between us all was an electric tension as fiery as that which ghosthunters felt between their upraised palms.’
Howe enrolled at Stanford in the late 1950s, got married, but soon left them both. She worked for the Congress of Racial Equality, spent time in New York city among the Warhol superstars. After returning to Boston in 1967, where she edited a poetry magazine, Fire Exit, she met the writer Carl Senna. They married in 1969 and started a family. Their daughter, the novelist Danzy Senna, has described it as ‘a marriage so disastrous it looks in retrospect like a war’. Howe’s preface to her essay collection The Wedding Dress (2003) is only a degree more sanguine. She writes of Boston as a ‘parochial and paranoid city’, riven by racism and corruption; the failure of the relationship comes to stand for the dashed hopes of the 1960s and the stark realities of the 1970s.
Despite Howe’s prestigious family, when the marriage fell apart there was no money to fall back on. She became a single mother of three, surviving on a mixture of writing, teaching and living by her wits. Her bibliography, which is vast and messy, full of nooks and crannies, reflects these pressures. It includes several odd, spiky novels (collected, in 2006, as Radical Love); books for young readers; a couple of pulp paperbacks; several volumes of genre-defying essay and memoir; an experimental film or two. At the heart of it all is more than a dozen collections of poetry. As Howe put it: ‘my passion, first and last, / is for the ecstatic lash / of the poetic line.’
Her ‘passion’ is also, in the theological sense of the word, her sufferance. Or as Simone Weil, one of Howe’s great intellectual influences, had it: ‘Poetry: impossible pain and joy.’ The ‘first and last’ recalls a line of scripture, Revelation 22:13: ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and last, the beginning and the end.’ Lines of poetry, with their uncertain beginnings and endings, and their strange sonic transformations: little mechanisms of connection and crossed wires. But the ‘poetic line’ might also be her poetic lineage, Howe’s sense of place in a tradition; I hear a hint of the Party line too.
As a rule, Howe tends towards the lyric sequence, with bursts of attention that expand into larger units, like smoke after blowing out a candle, or the dispersal of seeds from a dandelion. Her posthumous This Poor Book (2026), published this month, reads as something of a second instalment after her Selected Poems (2000). Presented as a single long poem, it weaves together extracts from most of her published books since the turn of the century. Despite being prepared in the final months of Howe’s life, it rarely slips into an elegiac mode. The reader is drawn, instead, to a rough mystical edge, cresting and breaking, full of epiphany and doubt. Her language – almost always as simple as brown bread and salt – is delicate but firm, even stern sometimes, wise in the way any reader of Howe will recognize. Some poets never write a line that sticks; Howe did it all the time: ‘I have humiliated myself / so I can participate in the city’; ‘Is a rose already pink inside its idiot dirt’; ‘Love is the movement towards pity.’
The book has no narrative as such, but moves through a series of positions both complex and simple. The opening introduces a boy and his grandmother, sitting in bed together reading about war. The grandmother – clearly a surrogate for the poet herself – is anxious, distracted:
She keeps getting up to look out.
What she sees horrifies her.
That’s why she pulls the curtains
To protect the love she can’t carry down.
Is the poet supposed to stay at the metaphorical window, studying the atrocities outside, or is her duty to shield her vulnerable charge? The syntax seems frail, cautious, conscious of the acts it can and can’t perform. No longer strong enough to carry the child ‘down’, the poet has her arms full with the world of suffering that the child will soon join. The tone is close to fairy-tale, sealed by the lines that bring this prologue to a close: ‘Let’s pull down the shade then. / Open this poor book and read.’
But soon Howe’s lines have lengthened, gathered strength. In the space of two pages she casts her gaze on war, ‘battered women’, tyrants, nationalism, ‘pornography and murder’. She makes reference to the Soviet film-makers Larisa Sheptiko and Elem Klimov, whose anti-war film gave Howe the title for her collection Come and See (2011). The passage climaxes with a surge of righteous feeling:
Where did people get the idea of justice in the first place
if not from the losers, the wheat-carriers and the wounded who could not believe
in an earth without heart? The ones who worked the earth
and lived from it through famine and drought –
wolfing down the bread of heaven at night.
The correspondence of ‘earth’ and ‘heart’ has long been irresistible to poets. Here it recalls Genesis 6:6, ‘And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.’ But Howe threads another term through the vowels, eventually turning to ‘bread’ with the help of the ‘losers’, ‘wounded’ and workers, her trinity of class-consciousness. This is Howe’s vision of sacrament, grounded in social justice, ‘a god I can swallow’, as she later puts it.
In a recent essay, Patrick Pritchett outlined Howe’s restless, contradictory theology. ‘Hers is a poetry of suspicion and doubt rather than affirmation and praise’ eschewing ‘simplistic platitudes about God or faith or suffering or redemption.’ This is as true of This Poor Book as anything else she has written. Whether it ‘works’ as a single poem misses the point. You can start anywhere, read it forwards and backwards, and the spiritual struggle is clear. At one point I tried, pencil in hand, to keep track of Howe’s questions, but soon lost count. Sometimes she provides answers – as in the teasing ‘What is shorter than a step? / An inward breath.’ – but more often than not the interrogative position is restated: ‘What is one life worth without money? / This is the question of the century.’
I was especially glad to find extracts from the short sequence ‘Forged’, first published in 1999. It dates from a period Howe spent working in Britain and Ireland, one of her creative highpoints. She wrote her masterpiece O’Clock (1995) while resident in Newbliss, County Monaghan, and stayed regularly in the secluded community at Glenstal Abbey in Limerick. Divided Publishing, who have published This Poor Book in Europe, recently excavated the mercurial prose narrative London-rose (2022) from a similar era. In that work she comments on the ancient Irish philosopher Eriugena: ‘He seemed to understand that the world was as strange as it was recognizable.’ This seems like a good summary of Howe’s poetics at the time.
‘Forged’ drops us straight in:
I always knew I had no right to be
Eating filling becoming wept
Sold by tickets to this trip myself
A fiction as fixed as the crucifixion
or tracks hammered into banked quarters
where logic can carry you to hell
but gives a spatial unity that is in essence emotional
The ballad pulse gives Howe the freedom to do things like rhyme ‘hell’ with ‘emotional’, and stretch and condense her meanings. In the line ‘tracks hammered into banked quarters’, she plays on the sense of ‘quarter’ in at least three ways: as a city district, a coin, and a unit of the financial calendar. Her dextrous verbal music – her ‘ecstatic lash’ – is as intimate as the things you carry in your pocket, alien as skyscrapers. She chips away at the relationship between essence and appearance and our ears twitch in response.
In twenty short poems, Howe stomps around London (‘Made tracks to King’s Cross / Bricks stretched to breaking’), misses Mass at Westminster, goes to Brick Lane, takes note of Parcel Force vans, cafés, Christmas decoration. Blake is her compass here: the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ of ‘London’ give the poem its title, and at one point she seems to draw on the longer visionary poems:
London’s seven prisons
for seven sins in seven days
Several unrecorded yelps
each spent like the flap
of a bird taking off claws shoved up
over Wandsworth Brixton Latchmere
Belmarsh Holloway Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs
Which ‘poetic line’ does Howe belong to? In her critical study Rewriting the Word ‘God’ (2025), Romana Huk situates her in a tradition of poets whose faith went hand-in-hand with a commitment to experimental writing. But Howe’s leftism is distinctive. She seemed to gain a whole generation of new readers in the aftermath of the Occupy movement. In the end she can’t really be pinned down. On the bookshelf she might be placed with Richard Sieburth’s translations of Hölderlin; somewhere near Robert Creeley and John Wieners; maybe beside a volume of ballads, as that is the metre she so often stretches and bends, pushes against and falls back on.
If This Poor Book belongs anywhere, perhaps it is with a tendency identified by the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark. In his poem ‘Poor Poetry’, he writes: ‘persisting on the margins / a neglected, threadbare, hedgerow school of poetry […] not given by the culture but passed from hand to hand.’ Howe is always drawing our attention to the edges: ‘The huddling April buds / before a cherrypicker’, ‘a weary sub-zone / At the level of wood.’ At one point she declares, ‘Down here is the worker zone. / Over there is management.’
Over the New Year I found myself reading ‘Forged’ every day. The Palestine Action hunger strikes were approaching their critical point, from HMP Bronzefield to Pentonville, Peterborough to New Hall, Wormwood Scrubs. One of Howe’s legacies is her theorization of what she names bewilderment, ‘a politics of the little and the weak . . . grassroots in that it imitates the way grass bends and springs back when it is stepped on.’ Howe’s metrical feet might, in this metaphor, be flipped – thinking of the ‘sprung rhythm’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins – to a motion of downtrodden resistance. The poetic essay where she outlines her thinking closes with this ferocious axiom: ‘After all the point of art – like war – is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.’
This Poor Book ends with Howe’s final, previously uncollected long poem, ‘Wood’, tired and beautiful, full of feeling for the outcast and abandoned. Her lines remained intricate and frequently dazzling: ‘Black-row of bristles and bird-broken snow’. Words to take with you into the new day.
Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Good Mistakes’, NLR 146.