Fanny Howe has passed away. She was the author of 20 books of both poetry and prose.
She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1940 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She was the recipient of many awards in her life, including a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009, a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems in 2001, many awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Poetry Foundation, a fellowship from the MacArthur Colony—and the list of honors and awards goes on.
She lectured in creative writing at many universities, including Tufts, Columbia, Yale, and MIT.
She was a professor emerita of writing and American literature at the University of California in San Diego.
Poetry was the first love of my reading life. I used to write it, but I love it too much to write it badly. So I keep reading it.
Poetry remains the thing that makes me want to write—and read.
In an interview with the Kenyon Review, Fanny Howe once said this: “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.”
It’s such a simple idea—but it so beautifully describes the act of reading—poetry most especially.
“If someone is alone reading my poems.”
"If someone is alone."
I’ve always found so curious that Howe added that condition of aloneness.
Of course, we are alone when we read. And this is the denotative meaning of it—to do something without anyone else. To read.
But the connotations of aloneness are something else, too.
A lot of authors write about loneliness in ways that are implicit. Others take a more direct approach.
But there is one poem by Fanny Howe that I return to often for what it helps me understand—and appreciate—about this state of being that is quite natural and normal—indeed necessary— for a lot of us. That poem is "Loneliness."
The poem “Loneliness” by Fanny Howe is from the 2014 collection Second Childhood, published by Graywolf Press.
