With Maceo, 1972. All photographs courtesy of Fanny HoweFanny Howe was born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a family of intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the middle child of three girls. Her mother was the Irish playwright and novelist Mary Manning, who founded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge and was a friend of Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey; her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a legal historian and Harvard professor descended from the Quincy family⁠—an anchor of the Boston Brahmin class⁠—who wrote the official biography of the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and was an open critic of McCarthyism. In The Winter Sun, her 2009 work of autobiography, Howe describes a childhood torn between the force fields of her two parents. Her elder sister, Susan Howe, is another giant of American poetry. Her younger sister, Helen Howe Braider, is a sculptor and painter. 

Howe’s immense body of work⁠—twenty-five books of poetry, twelve novels, two pulp romances, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, one book of prose rearranged from books past, six works of young adult fiction, and six short films—is infused with an awareness of the underdog, and a sort of existential wildness. “Bewilderment,” she writes in The Wedding Dress (2003), is both “a poetics and a politics”: “I have developed this idea from living in the world and also through testing it out in my poems and through the characters in my fiction⁠—women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.” Unlike many of her contemporaries, she does not see herself as belonging to a movement or group, and perhaps has more in common with a lineage of mystical writers and theologians, including her recurring subjects of Simone Weil and the existentialist philosophers. She has written movingly about her conversion to Catholicism and her relationship to the faith in books of poems like Gone (2003) and Love and I (2019); God’s Fool, a play about Saint Francis conceived by Martha Clarke, was produced in 2022.

Howe’s first book of poems, Eggs, was published in 1970, when she was living in Boston with her second husband, the Black and Mexican writer and editor Carl Senna. Poem from a Single Pallet (1980) and Robeson Street (1985) were written in the aftermath of their separation, as she was raising their three children, Lucien, Danzy, and Maceo. “Because it was finished, I was able to write about it,” she told me. She has lived for most of her life in and around Boston, where she taught at colleges for many years before moving to San Diego in 1989, for a tenured position that kept her in California for a decade. For years, it was only smaller presses that would publish her experimental work, and she has often stuck with them even as her renown has grown. Her Selected Poems (2000), published by the University of California Press, was a touchstone in bringing her work to a wider public. In the past several years, she has garnered particular attention for the five novels collected by Nightboat in the volume Radical Love (2006, reissued 2020)⁠—The Deep North (1988), Famous Questions (1989), Saving History (1993), Nod (1998), and Indivisible (2000)⁠—a loose sequence set between Massachusetts, California, and Ireland that she has called the closest thing to her complete biography. “I was a mother writing them, though I was still a child,” Howe told me. “You can’t be one or the other. You’re both.” 

Howe has a sparrowlike figure and a blue peregrine stare. We met for this interview every few weeks over the course of several months from fall to spring, as she was moving out of her garden-level apartment in Cambridge into an assisted living facility just down the road. I would arrive midmorning, bearing scones and coffee with extra sugar cubes wrapped in napkins, and we’d talk each time for an hour or so. Our conversations circled family, motherhood, failure, race, and faith. After we were done recording, we’d gossip about the poetry scene and the succession of Pope Francis.

INTERVIEWER

Can you identify a moment when you felt your poetics crystallize?

FANNY HOWE

I would say O’Clock (1995) was that. I wrote it in Ireland at a place called Annaghmakerrig, a great writers’ and artists’ retreat. 

INTERVIEWER

Have residencies always been useful?

HOWE

Generally, I wouldn’t want to be trapped with other writers, ever. All that conversation around publishers and money and where they hope to get hired ruins everything. But at Annaghmakerrig I just sealed myself off except to walk to the pub with everyone in the evening. It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment. 

 At right, with Susan and her mother, ca. 1941.

INTERVIEWER

With the environment?

HOWE

Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell. If you dropped me there blind, I would know I was in Ireland. The fuchsia, all the things that grow of their own accord there, became my company, which has been more difficult in America. In a general sense, the American person feels solitary and broken off from the landscape⁠—like in those wonderful paintings.

INTERVIEWER

Which ones?

HOWE

By the painters of the Hudson River School, where there’s a tiny little figure. Whereas in Ireland it just seems you are born in a landscape⁠—not even in a landscape, in a piece of land that’s always with you. I felt much more at ease writing completely cliché kinds of poems, little sayings and epigrams, which I’d loved since I was young. I had that lightness that I always get when I’m there, writing these strange little recipes. I left behind all the critical theories that were roaming around in my mind and fell back on that style, almost like nursery rhymes. 

INTERVIEWER

So it was both a discovery and a return?

HOWE

Yes. I think that style began in my fiction, in First Marriage (1974), which is embarrassingly childlike, and then it kept bobbing along like a bird on the water. But it tended to be put in motion by Ireland for some reason. My sister [Susan] has the same thing. We both had this kind of trauma⁠—happy trauma⁠—when we first went to Ireland as children, when I was six and she was ten. It was partly because it was the end of the war, and we hadn’t been able to see our grandparents or family over there before. The big shock was finding out that our mother had all these parts to her. I’m sure other children of immigrants have had this shock when they’ve discovered where their family came from and who their origins were. 

INTERVIEWER

The poems in O’Clock are an antidote to cynicism, I think.

HOWE

Oh, that’s true. But that’s been my job.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about that.

HOWE

If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.

INTERVIEWER

How do you find the balance in a poem between lightness and the weight of grief or pain?

HOWE

It’s just what you do. It’s almost like a religious action that everybody has, whether they like it or are terrified of it. There’s an impulse to preserve something original. It’s almost not possible to live without that. I didn’t know it, but when I looked back, around the age of sixty, I could see that was what I was after.

INTERVIEWER

Does poetry serve that purpose better than prose? 

HOWE

Yes, except there is an ecstatic prose, too, that I love to hit. At the beginning, I would write a novel and then some poetry, but over time, it’s become more and more this strange mix of poetry and prose, which is where I am now. Nod, for instance, is, to me, more of a poem than a piece of fiction. The Deep North is a novel, but it’s very disjointed, like a poem. Finding that style also concurred with my giving up smoking, and so breaking time into little parts was easier than writing long sections, if you know what I mean. I was still telling stories when I started writing serial poems, like The Quietist (1992). 

INTERVIEWER

In the author’s note to Radical Love, you write, “I hope this collection will contribute to a literary tradition that resists distinctions between poetry and fiction as one way to save history from the doom of duality.” What is it that you hope for in escaping duality?

HOWE

To avoid authority. Thinking of words as⁠—yes, as little figures escaping big figures, running away from judgment. Duality to me is the sign of the master coming. I would love to have a life that didn’t have all that in it, that was just, A free spirit arrived and left. Someone who almost doesn’t have a footprint. 

INTERVIEWER

That makes me think of the changeling in Nod. Or the girl in The Deep North, who’s trying to escape her family. Is family where judgment comes from?

HOWE

It’s there in my books, but how can I explain it in my life? I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. All families have their share of cruelty and competition, humiliation and failure, and mine wasn’t spectacular in those ways, but I was always afraid. It makes you wonder. 

Did you ever read Susan’s interview in The Paris Review? 

INTERVIEWER

I did.

HOWE

I was too weak to read it when it came out⁠—I thought it would make me feel like shit, because she’s such a queen.  

INTERVIEWER

I have a younger half sister, and I think I’m the queen in that way. 

HOWE

Probably. Oh dear, it’s such an immutable relationship. Everyone who has that has the same problem. It’s sibling rivalry. Plain and simple. I knew she was a genius. She was the biggest influence on my life. 

INTERVIEWER

Even with a playwright for a mother and a historian for a father?

HOWE

Well, them too. It was in the atmosphere. We were all incredibly moved by books and movies and plays, more than by real things. It was as if the afflictions of a character in a book were actually our afflictions. There was a lot of screeching about book discoveries, especially between Susan and my mother. And I loved going to my mother’s plays. I acted in them if they needed a child. She had come from years with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, so it would be Brecht, it would be Yeatsian kooky plays of fairies and screaming witches. She would bring her rehearsals into the living room⁠—no closed doors. When she’d choose to play this role, I mean, it went on day and night. My poor father. 

INTERVIEWER

Why poor him? 

HOWE

The two of them were not well matched at all, personally. My father was a very naturally serious, secretive man, and these theater people were always coming into the house. I did feel that he shouldn’t have married my mother, probably. But he hadn’t wanted to marry a Boston woman⁠—he was sort of repelled by that. The thing that bound them was that their families had read the same books in Ireland and in Boston, and so they had this shared vocabulary that made them laugh, mostly from literature. My father had this weakness⁠—he loved the Marx Brothers and he loved jokes. And my mother could make anyone laugh.

INTERVIEWER

And was she beautiful?

HOWE

No, she wasn’t beautiful. She was quite plain. She was brilliant and great fun, but a drinker, which didn’t make it perfect at all. Even though I hated her when she was drunk, I admired her complete lack of inhibition. She was very entertaining, very witty and cruel.

INTERVIEWER

Was she cruel to her children?

HOWE

She could be. Like, she said to me, “Some people have a child with a brain, a very good brain, and others have a child who has to use other ways to get attention.” I knew what she meant. But at some point I was sort of lucky being neglected. Susan was more entangled with her. My mother’s feelings about me were more that she expected me to be a free spirit, and whatever happened happened. I think that she let me go too wild too soon, but at the time, of course, I loved it. I was always laughing, unable to study, only happy alone or outdoors, climbing trees and looking at bugs. There were big gardens and parks in Cambridge where I would roam around. The minute I saw any animal, I feared for its life in the world. And so I would tear around, trying to make sure all the animals were safe. 

 Cambridge, ca. 1954.

INTERVIEWER

You weren’t a big reader when you were young?

HOWE

I can only say this⁠—here we go again⁠—that my sister was the one who was reading all the time. She never had her face out of a book. Even today, books are everything to her. They weren’t to me. I was a bad student, and I only read books that had horses and dogs and mysteries. Beatrix Potter⁠—her tiny little pictures of tiny little worlds. I’ve stayed with the beauty of what’s little a lot⁠—seeing the way little nonbullies survive, with ingenuity and by taking their weakness and making it into a strength. 

Cambridge in my high school years was much more vulnerable and broken and not ritzy. The folk music scene made a huge impact. And that era was different, because people read poetry, lots of people, so there were actual conversations in the street about E. E. Cummings. I loved his poems. The group that, of course, excited me the most was the Beatniks, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, Kerouac. 

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

HOWE

Everyone around me was a writer, and I vowed, Never, ever, ever, and then I did. I wrote a poem when I was eight or nine that I almost remember⁠—it was just a few lines about nature and then a comment on the state of the world, but it worked, weirdly. It was like⁠—let’s say pretend⁠—“Rain, oh rain, falling on the street. How you remind me of the soldiers in Iran.” That’s sort of the way I’ve always written, letting the top come down on the bottom. My father was so pleased by it, and that gave me a boost. Then when I was fourteen, I wrote a poem in my bedroom and thought it was magnificent and brought it down and showed it to everyone, and then I didn’t ever show any of them anything again.

INTERVIEWER

Why? Did they respond in a way you didn’t want them to?

HOWE

Probably. It became my secret, my world⁠—writing poems and thinking about them. That went on for a long time. Then at seventeen I left for Stanford, knowing no one. I was only admitted because my father knew someone who would do him the favor of taking me on⁠—it was shaming. But I began slowly peeking out and presenting myself. 

INTERVIEWER

How was your time there?

HOWE

California was mind-blowing, of course. That blast of light was both terrifying and good. I was one of the crowd of young writers who attended the better workshops. Ken Kesey was in a workshop I took with Malcolm Cowley, who used to turn off his hearing aid and sleep all the way through the class. It was fine⁠—we’d all go on, pass the papers around, and talk. I don’t know why they don’t do that all the time, just let the kids run the class. I studied Russian history and literature⁠—I was enthralled by those powerful, brutish men. There was some way I suddenly saw class division everywhere, and the literature I was reading, the Russians and the great Latin American writers, was fully conscious of that. But I dropped out three times⁠—I suppose my life pattern has been a neurotic fear of being stuck anywhere. The first two times, I got irritated by how complacent everybody was, the ones who didn’t go into San Francisco. You could go right in on the train and see great readings and jazz, and I met new friends that way, more political, radical friends. I went to one of the meetings of the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] at City Hall in San Francisco, and I was hauled out by a guard and thrown down the stairs, where the firemen were standing with their hoses. I felt I was outdoing my parents⁠—it was the real thing, and where were they? But then … it’s so pathetic. The third time I dropped out, I married someone.

INTERVIEWER

A fellow student?

HOWE

No, an older man. He was a New Englander, deeply New England. So I was clearly wanting to go home. For two years I dived into being a little housewife in Berkeley. He was a microbiologist, but he was very poetic and loved poetry, so he wasn’t that far from my own mind. He looked like Christopher Plummer. But there were neurotic things that I didn’t understand. I started smoking because of that man. He was contemptuous. Kennedy had just been assassinated, and I got swept up in that, and he was the way grown-ups were about anybody rebellious. “Oh, you’ll get over it.”

With her first husband, Frederick Delafield, at their wedding in San Francisco, 1961.

INTERVIEWER

Did the relationship make it harder to write?

HOWE

Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to have a genre. I couldn’t just write random stuff like that. He sent me copies of three “sweet nurse” books⁠—they were all about nurses who meet a man and fall in love, but there’s no sex⁠—and told me to give it a shot. So I sat down and wrote West Coast Nurse (1963). Vietnam Nurse (1966) was more demanding, because the war was still happening and I felt responsible for getting it right. After I moved to New York, I went to visit WACs at their offices in Manhattan and talked to them about what it was like. I learned a lot with those books about how you write a novel, like, What’s the subplot? What’s the top plot? I did it just by doing it. The editors never really even read the manuscripts, which is why I could get away with writing a Vietnam narrative where the Vietcong was the hero. 

INTERVIEWER

So you actually doubled down on the writing?

HOWE

I can only go backward to see that it was being a failure that made me do what failures do, which is to hide away and do things secretly and develop their own pride in their work so nobody can insult them or tell them it’s bad. I wrote one or two of the stories in Forty Whacks (1969) when I went to Reno because he wouldn’t give me a divorce. That was the only way a woman could leave her husband. You had to sign in at a motel in Reno, stay for six weeks, sign out, then go to a judge and show that you had been in Reno for those six weeks. It was totally sadistic. You had to check in every day. You were under the law. I was scared of the world, but writing made me happy. What else can make you happy except something that no one else knows about? 

INTERVIEWER

There’s a story in Forty Whacks in which the narrator is writing to a shrink. Did you go see one?

HOWE

I’ve never been a shrink person myself, but I did go briefly because I was ordered to. 

INTERVIEWER

Hence the irreverent tone. 

HOWE

Well, I never stopped wisecracking or trying to make people laugh, no matter whether I was holding a gun to my head. I think probably everyone goes through a breakdown period, where something ruins your confidence, and that can be an interesting place to retreat to. 

INTERVIEWER

What was your breakdown period?

HOWE

I had my breakdown in New York. I lived there for two years. That was enough. Did you live there for two years?

INTERVIEWER

I lived there for many years.

HOWE

Oh, you did. It was just terrifying to me. It’s a forest, and you enter it, and it eats you. You’re gone. Still, it has great offerings. I lived on the block on the Bowery next door to where LeRoi Jones, as he was then known, lived. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you know him?

HOWE

No, and I’m horrified. He was literally next door. I didn’t. And his wife. 

INTERVIEWER

So what happened in New York?

HOWE

Well, I had a menial job reading manuscripts for Avon Books, and I went everywhere with my dog. The New York scene was Warhol. Everything was Warhol, the city was full of his inventiveness, the way people dressed … There was nothing but that. That meant lots of drug taking and total pathetic failures all over the streets. It was really horrible, ugly, and sad. I think that’s when the feminine anxiety came into me, which I hadn’t really looked at before. It was about being not seen, being reduced to being invisible and weak, and the definite forcefulness of men that was going to win, whatever you did. I was dating a guy called Eric Emerson, who was in Warhol’s films, and he gave me a drug, probably in my coffee. I went berserk, basically. I never took another drug in my life.

INTERVIEWER

What drug was it?

HOWE

It was like LSD but stronger. My best friend took me to the doctor, who gave me a Thorazine and said it would take two days to sleep it out of my system. My father had to come get me. He found me a little apartment in Cambridge, and I got a secretarial job through a friend, and little by little …

INTERVIEWER

Did your parents have any kind of professional expectations for you?

HOWE

My mother loved me but she always called me poor little Fan, because I didn’t seem to measure up. My father was surprisingly supportive of my wanting to write, after I’d disappointed him so much in my career as a college student. He managed to muster up the faith in me. He wanted me to remember that Emily Dickinson never had an agent. After he died, I had these two books coming out of Houghton Mifflin, Forty Whacks and Eggs. The title Forty Whacks was based on Lizzie Borden, that woman who gave her mother forty whacks. You know, “When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.” My family read that, and they were so funny about it, that I would be so audacious. It became a family joke.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel you were onto something with the poems in Eggs? 

HOWE

Those were my sort of thrashing around with form. I thought if I could somehow get the right form, the right shape for the book, I could get something across. But it wasn’t a very generative period. I came out of it with maybe four poems I cared about. Forty Whacks had a little bit of impact because the stories were kind of sexy and all that, but Eggs didn’t do anything. It just lay there. 

With Carl Senna, 1968.

INTERVIEWER

When you look back at those poems, do you see aesthetic connections to your later work?

HOWE

I do. I see the flaws, too. Being too Romantic, or something. My rhythms were Romantic.

INTERVIEWER

But not your sentiments.

HOWE

Even those, although I did always have a mean twist⁠—but no, really, the rhythms irritate me now. I’d been reading Keats since I was fourteen or so, and I was just accepting rhythm as he used it, like Robert Lowell did. That put me in a very archaic sound. It was a repetitive sound. It’s like bad rock music, not Kendrick Lamar. Until Carl and I had children, I really was writing very bourgeois little things⁠—my work was very self-referential, female. Pathetic, to use one of Eileen Myles’s favorite words. 

INTERVIEWER

Will you tell me about your relationship with Carl? 

HOWE

That would be fine. Especially now that we’re both almost dead, it’s a good time to talk about what happened. Nothing was the same after we met. I mean, it was 1967, the civil rights movement was exploding. That was the heart of the heart, the actual breaking, in my life. Just being with someone as intelligent as he was, who was very conscious of what was happening, was a history lesson in the present. If I had just worked for CORE or done those obvious acts of resistance, it wouldn’t have been the same as getting that entangled in someone’s life. I became sort of frantically aware of the social value of writing. 

INTERVIEWER

How did the two of you meet, exactly?

HOWE

I was editing a little magazine called Fire Exit with Bill Corbett, and Jonathan Kozol wrote to me and said that he had just met a very good writer whom he thought we should publish. He said, “You probably better meet him, but don’t fall in love with him.” I thought, Why would I? Carl came out to Cambridge from Roxbury and met me in my family house on Highland Street. My father had died, and I was helping my mother pack her things and send them to Ireland because she was moving back. Carl arrived in the middle of all that chaos, and he met my mother. We instantly were able to talk⁠—intellectual, lively, political talk. That was our relationship⁠—it was based in conversation that we produced three children in four years. I could have gone on and had ten children, like Harriet Beecher Stowe writing at the kitchen table while the kids played. I wouldn’t have minded. There was life, not artificial life but real life with laughter and mistakes, though there always were the stirrings of problems with us. The house was in Jamaica Plain, at 1 Robeson Street, and Carl’s mother lived with us. She was basically like my second husband. And we had lots of people living with us and staying there. I had a pot of beans going all day, bubbling for whoever came in. I’m sure we all have such a point in our life, when it’s literally like a pot of boiling beans. But some people just didn’t know what to do with our marriage. Boston was a model of white supremacy⁠—reverting to some ironclad pride going back to the American Revolution. 

INTERVIEWER

What was your awareness of race and class, as someone who’d grown up in Cambridge?

HOWE

It was felt through my mother, because she was Irish, and that was not so highly respected. Sometimes when she answered the door, people would say, “Is Mrs. Howe here?” thinking she was a maid. She was so far from my father’s experience⁠—the Quincy family, which his mother came from, was upper-crust Boston. The money my father’s family had was very weak and fast disappearing, but they had a name, and a history, and that provided dignity. Boston has a kind of⁠—I can’t help but say Protestant rigidity, holding on to senseless traditions. My father had great faith in the proletariat, and he would take me to rallies and marches in Boston Common that really moved me. But all that was kind of theoretical until I had my own children. I remember one school said, He’ll have to go here because his hair is curly, and she’ll have to go there because it’s straight. Horrible moments like that, of inventive racism coming from the system itself. There were radical visionaries of parents who were laboring to make the schools better, and I was on the margins of that⁠—I was on school boards and helping to get a health clinic going in Jamaica Plain. The shuffle was to try to let our children lead us to a New Jerusalem and build school systems that were more mixed and compatible. My generation was very ardent, and there were all these local acts, but we burned out too fast, and I’ve never understood why. I think we failed how liberals fail. They just get tired of it.

With Danzy and Lucien in Dublin, ca. 1971.

INTERVIEWER

Were you worried about how to make a living as a writer?

HOWE

When I was still with Carl, we were lucky⁠—by chance we both went to teach at Tufts for a few years. I had no experience. I didn’t have even a B.A., and neither did he. He became an editor at Beacon Press, and then he went to work for newspapers. I made a day care in the basement for the neighborhood⁠—there were five of us mothers who all had work to do, and one of the women, who was a former schoolteacher, volunteered to run a little group. We all paid her. So I could do a little writing, two hours a day. But then I became a single mother, and my family didn’t have money to help. We lost our house. I remember walking down Centre Street sobbing because I had to go to the welfare office to start getting checks and I realized that wouldn’t be enough to live on. That was the crucible time for me, and I had to crawl out of it. I moved down to Connecticut to live next to my sister, to hide away. Maureen Owen lived nearby, and we were very close for a few years when we both had children at home. She was wonderful. I was in her magazine, Telephone, and she published The Amerindian Coastline Poem (1975), you know, in a book with staples. When we came back to Boston, I started writing young adult books to make money for the summers. It was always, I need a thousand dollars for us to go away for two weeks. The children would help me⁠—I’d get the plot and the characters ready, and then they would get them dressed in the morning, give them their vocabulary. Especially Danzy would come downstairs and have me read out loud, and she would tell me what I’d done wrong. I’d say, “Would she say this?” And she would say, “Never.” She started writing novels herself when she was ten.

INTERVIEWER

I’m curious how you felt about Danzy writing about her childhood and your marriage with Carl in her memoir.

HOWE

I haven’t read Where Did You Sleep Last Night? I felt the way the kids felt about me and my books⁠—don’t look.

INTERVIEWER

Did she give you the flag?

HOWE

She sort of sent out signals. With Caucasia, her wonderful first novel, I couldn’t help but read into the mother in that, whom she turned into a woman hugely tall and nothing like me physically. But still buried in the character was the same person. It’s easy to get hurt feelings. You’re not fully prepared for it, because you’ve all been hugging and kissing and laughing, and then suddenly you learn, That was a terrible day, what you did, and you can’t even remember the day.

INTERVIEWER

Were you more involved in the feminist movement after you became a single mother?

HOWE

I went to meetings with friends, but I always got mad at the women for being too suburban. In a way, the sexual revolution of Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, those suicidal women, made me recoil from the women’s movement from the beginning. I was repelled by it, for some reason. I think it was something to do with my home life as a child, my revulsion to women screaming and wanting attention. I didn’t believe that changing gender would make a better world, and I noticed that it was stealing a ton of energy from the civil rights movement and from Black Power. My friends still think I’m way too indifferent to women’s causes. Class, for me, is more powerful than anything. Money. You can’t really be a feminist and a Marxist. 

INTERVIEWER

Who said that?

HOWE

Lots of people. Marxism is about everybody⁠—humans as a mass, not as pockets of people. I belonged to the Fiction Collective, which was run by five Jewish men who were very Marxist, and that was sort of germane to my whole development of class identity. They published Holy Smoke (1979) and In the Middle of Nowhere (1984)⁠—they were probably the only ones around publishing experimental prose. Though, with them, Marxist became another word for macho. It boiled down to the same rough attitude. Those men were intensely bright, and neglected, so there was a kind of rage built into it. 

At right, with Susan in Guilford, Connecticut, in the late seventies.

INTERVIEWER

Is the rage of fiction writers different from that of poets? 

HOWE

Yes, much different. Fiction writers really expect to be heard. Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation. 

INTERVIEWER

Has anger been a productive state to write in?

HOWE

It has. It’s just part of being human, to be in a rage. And I do believe in political poetry. It has to be poetry first⁠—as depth and sound and rebounding words⁠—and I revise, fanatically, over and over and over again, but I’m very committed to certain ideas, however they come out. I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.

INTERVIEWER

Were you able to find a community of writers who shared your concerns?

HOWE

I didn’t ever become part of a group in a real way, because I lived in a state of failure that would always be subverting the joy of writing. I was waylaid by wanting to be a Language poet, because they were friends of mine and I so admired them, but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t good for my brain⁠—they were too highly intellectual. Bob Perelman was the first one I met, because he lived in Massachusetts, and I was astounded by his brilliance at analyzing stories and sentences. I met all of them piece by piece when I’d go out to Berkeley⁠—Lyn [Hejinian], Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman … They had a famous series of talks in San Francisco at 80 Langton Street, where they would invite you to come and then there would be a huge discussion about the work you had just read. It was scary, because they were so smart. When I went, I was dating Russell Banks, so I said, “Do you mind? I can’t read. I’m too nervous.” I asked him to read for me! So he did, and you can imagine everybody made fun of me for three years afterward.

I do still think that what the Language poets did was absolutely critical at that time in American poetry. They saw the dilemma of ego permeating poetry⁠—class and ego. The focus had been very much on Lowell and what I call iambic thinking. But it was a mixed bag. Half of it was critical theory and didn’t belong anywhere near expressive art.

INTERVIEWER

You can’t put poetry and critical theory together?

HOWE

It’s very dangerous. I’ve seen many students who came under the influence of Language poetry lose their spirit over the years, when they were originally full of life and romance. For some people, it was a crucifixion. Luckily, I was given a lot of muscle by the New York poets of the seventies. It took tons of boldness, what they were doing⁠—just, Fuck you, I’m coming. And that I stand behind completely. Bernadette [Mayer] was one of my great heroes. Maureen [Owen]. It was like a door opening. And then I had my John Wieners epiphany. 

INTERVIEWER

What was your John Wieners epiphany?

HOWE

I went to hear him at Boston College, and he arrived wearing a gold lamé jacket and gave the most beautiful reading I’d ever heard in my life. Here was this whole other scene being born, and here in Boston. Wieners’s poems were so emotional. He was born with some genetic trait that made him able to feel the rhythm of every thought he had. And that showed me where I really stood. I’d been sort of ashamed of the poems in Robeson Street, for example, because they were so domestic and I had the Language poets looking over my shoulders. But I still like those poems!

INTERVIEWER

How did you square that attraction to the lyric voice with your social activism?

HOWE

Those poets were innately political, Bernadette and Maureen. But it was Catholicism that took me around that corner. 

INTERVIEWER

Catholicism solved that problem?

HOWE

It did, and it still does. It’s very profound when you get hit by the truth behind all the idiocy in the Catholic Church. I was raised Protestant, or atheist, and I’d always felt sort of bereft in the world⁠—like, Why be here? Catholicism was a wonderful thing to come across when I was in such desperate straits. I do think that atheism is the great ground for it all⁠—that if you haven’t experienced atheism fully, you can’t grasp the shock of believing anything. 

Jamaica Plain, in the late seventies.

INTERVIEWER

Sometimes you enact that shock of belief in the course of a poem⁠—like in “Veteran,” where you begin with the line “I don’t believe in ashes; some of the others do. / I don’t believe in better or best; some of the others do …” and end with “the wind is what I believe in, / the One that moves around each form.” 

HOWE

Exactly. I think that was inevitable in what I was writing by the time I became a Catholic, although I’d always been looking for a revelation that would open the whole universe for me and make it all have sense. 

Simone Weil was my great guide through this. Carl had had a Catholic streak in him⁠—his mother was Catholic⁠—and he came home one day with Gravity and Grace and we both were crazy about it. It was an eccentric book that tied together many different thoughts we were having about political action and thought, what thought can do. I would go to Mass with my mother-in-law and see that there was the most profound connection between the teachings of the church and the political theory I cared about. Dorothy Day had been there a long time before I noticed it. There was Frantz Fanon, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, who was going deep into the meaning of the Gospels, and that was tremendously liberating, because I wasn’t really thinking about dogma at all, ever, when I was converting. 

INTERVIEWER

What were you thinking about?

HOWE

Truth and beauty. Jean Valentine was my sponsor⁠—we were teaching at MIT at the same time⁠—and she was as eccentric as I was about it. I don’t think she cared a bit about rules and laws and rituals. I had that with my friend Margo, too, who died. She was a pagan Catholic like me. 

INTERVIEWER

Does devotion have a role to play in your poems?

HOWE

That vocabulary doesn’t work for me anymore. A lot of the words, devotion and prayer, have been destroyed for me by the world we have now that’s creeping in. They seem sentimental and literally impossible. The thing I love about Continental philosophy, thinkers like Weil, is that it manages to face the problem and still stand up straight, without using the old hope-filled words. Agamben’s book on Saint Paul was mind-blowing and beautiful⁠—Agamben does have that mystical bent to him. Now I even love Saint Paul⁠—think he was a poet, and should be thought of only as a poet. 

INTERVIEWER

What about the Bible?

HOWE

That one’s good. Because it’s insane. I stand up for insanity. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you go to Mass now?

HOWE

I don’t go into a church, but I watch it on TV, the monks of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick. I went there in the late nineties, with a Buddhist friend, Susan Moon, and while I was there, I became totally happy in the company of the monks and the music, the whole ritual of life in the monastery. It was like when you discover a writer you love, so you read all of  Thomas Hardy’s novels and you see how they’re linked. Glenstal became like a perfect description of the world, and it let me in every time I wanted to go be in that world. I went every year for twenty years and lived with them all for a few weeks. They were great fun, the Irish monks. 

INTERVIEWER

Is poetry also a place in which you can work through your faith?

HOWE

I think Gone (2003) opened up the fact that doubt was my subject. A lot of that was suicidal thinking. I had been in love with a drunk, and that screwed everyone up. For me, the whole semi-hysterical confrontation with doubt is tied up very often with falling in love and having your heart broken, when something you totally believed in has managed to fail you. And that abyss you fall into is doubt plus doubt plus doubt plus doubt. 

I would think of poetry as a place where you connect your doubts to the things you don’t doubt. Free-floating doubt wouldn’t trigger the lightning that contradiction does. Because paradox really is deep. I’ve always been fascinated by the way Weil held that balanced position between her love of Catholicism and her utter rejection of the church. I feel her dilemma with her. She has incredible certainty in her way of writing, which drives some people insane. She can be clashing literally from sentence to sentence, like it’s an inevitable part of her thinking that things will end in an unresolved question. She was thinking about ideas all the time, not just trying to evoke a scene or an emotion. It’s sort of the highest thought, a paradox⁠—you come to it, and then it flies away. 

With Danzy and Maceo in La Jolla, California, 1990.

INTERVIEWER

In your later work, especially, there’s this marriage of ideas and the line. Does one come first for you?

HOWE

The trick is having them be intimately connected. It was always important to me that it should hold together like a toy car or something. I didn’t like Walt Whitman for decades, because there seemed to be nothing coherent keeping it together. Then one day I read “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and loved him. I could suddenly see the problem hiding in there.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always tried to build a poem like a machine?

HOWE

Or as a new formation of nature, where a wing somehow comes out of a tail. I do love the Surrealists. 

INTERVIEWER

Once you saw how a poem could be built, did you start building them⁠—

HOWE

Accordingly?

INTERVIEWER

Yes. 

HOWE

No. I’d rather return to stupidity and then go forth at another level of thought. But it is troublesome sometimes, the way my lengths are so uneven. You can look at Emily Dickinson from a mile away and know that’s her shape, and her length, and her size. It’s as if I have never found the right form for all my thoughts. 

INTERVIEWER

Would changing the length of the poem or the line change the thought?

HOWE

A lot of the revision happens around where I break the line⁠—and that changes which words can see each other coming and call out to the next sound, somewhere in the future. There’s a lot of surmising in writing a poem for me, more than an intention. They’re always living around me, the poems. I’ll keep drafts lying around everywhere and just lean over and change a word and then go on walking. Only when I am fed up and tired of them do I stop. It has nothing to do with the logic of the poem. It’s just built into my life patterns.

At the Irish poet and activist Fanny Parnell’s grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, 2018.

INTERVIEWER

Have there been exercises or prompts that you’ve found useful with particular poems or books? 

HOWE

I guess I cringe at the word prompt. Because it means teaching. I’ve always taught, and I don’t need to do it when I’m at home with my poem. I’ve never needed anything to kick it off, other than something like the wind or the smell of a loaf of bread. Even with my novels, I would just let the words start, let the words write the book.

INTERVIEWER

In the late eighties and nineties, you had a book out almost every year.

HOWE

I know, it was insane. Douglas Messerli at Sun & Moon would keep taking the things I handed him. He was the savior of so many really interesting poets⁠—Will Alexander, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Leslie Scalapino. And the writing just kept coming to me. It was almost no effort at all. I would just not get up out of bed and write, write, write, write, write. To stay in bed for too long is always a bad idea, but that’s sort of the spirit of writing for me⁠—you’re abject before the force of consciousness, whatever it is that abandons you when it feels like it, and you have to keep writing quickly to get it out. 

Looking back, I think California produced such an outburst of novels in me because I was away from home. I missed the children terribly, always, but I was away. It was kicked off with The Deep North, which is about the hypocrisy of the parents, and the child having to figure that out. I was still very focused on race. I’ve always had a peculiar kind of revulsion to my background, to my parents … not my parents. Where my father’s family came from.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel that the novels were autobiographical when you were writing them?

HOWE

I always thought I wasn’t doing that. I always felt I was writing about the person right beside me, not me but a sort of energy force that went through me, through my life. The girl in The Deep North … her family wasn’t mine. She was like a jinni, or some figure that runs along beside you, being a pest but also helping you go forward. I could understand suddenly her⁠—my dilemma by writing down hers. You have to create an airy other who runs, galloping along beside you. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you see that airy other in your poems?

HOWE

I think that they may be the airy other. I don’t situate the poems, like, you know, “She was going to the supermarket.” There’s no one really there in the poems. 

But you can see that other only retrospectively, anyway, when you say to yourself, Why did I do that? And Indivisible (2000) finally told my whole story as I understood it. That was the end of fiction for me. Finishing it really was an ecstatic moment. It was partly the joy of finding a way to end the novel, but also the meaning of the ending, of the child asking that question. I didn’t believe anything more was going to happen, because I thought I had resolved my family matters. But then, of course, they burst out again in poetry.

INTERVIEWER

What spurred you to write about your father in Manimal Woe (2021)?

HOWE

His death. 

INTERVIEWER

Even though he’d died decades earlier?

HOWE

It’s never-ending, the death of a parent. It triggered the memory of the whole picture of who he was and how I kept fucking up and not doing what he was advising me so lovingly to do. Writing Manimal Woe taught me something about the kind of failure where you feel like you’ve failed a person, and I was seeing it for the first time with a cold-blooded eye. Because when people would say, “You’re so lucky to have had such an interesting, brilliant father,” I would brush it off. I didn’t want to hear about it. It wasn’t really rebellion⁠—or maybe it was as simple as that⁠—but it became part of an argument of my own too. Now that he’s long gone, I see him from the perspective of his own struggles, and his own unhappiness with that job of writing about Oliver Wendell Holmes, which he didn’t want to do. He didn’t even like Holmes as a person, and he didn’t agree with his politics. I opened the biography seriously when I was writing Manimal Woe, and I was shocked that I was so blind, that I hadn’t paid attention. He just has the most fabulous style, poetry almost. Manimal Woe has a lot of his words. I had his papers lying around with me and I’d be dipping in and out of them and thinking about his ideas. I was cutting things out and moving them around, which was a way of writing I also did with Night Philosophy (2020). It was terribly crusty and difficult to write, but mainly because it was about him.

Ca. 2020.

INTERVIEWER

Did you see any resemblance between his work and yours?

HOWE

I could see a likeness. I can have ten versions of one line, and he seems to be like that too. The word I chose is perfectly good, but for some reason, it’s rarely good enough. I was reading about Hölderlin recently and how he did that too, rewriting and rewriting. It’s mystifying, the thing that keeps you going forward, ripping up, ripping up, ripping up. What are you looking for?

INTERVIEWER

There’s that line in “Q”⁠—“Creation was the end that preceded means.” Is endless revision a way of avoiding the end of a poem?

HOWE

It certainly is a sign of uncertainty. The end of uncertainty is death.

INTERVIEWER

Is there an element of faith in it? That eventually you’ll hit the right combination⁠—that there is a right combination?

HOWE

I would call that hope, not faith. It’s waiting for a miracle.