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Marie Howe sees her work as an act of confession, or of conversation.
She says simply, “Poetry is telling something to someone.” According
to her mentor, the distinguished poet Stanley Kunitz, Howe’s ‘telling’ is “luminous,
intense, eloquent.”
Part of the urgency and importance of Howe’s poetry stems from its rootedness
in real life. Just ten minutes into her 1987 residence at the MacDowell Colony,
Howe received a call from her brother John telling her that her mother had had
a heart attack. Two years later, John died of AIDS, and her book What the
Living Do is in large part an elegy to him. It was chosen by Publisher’s
Weekly as one of the five best books of poetry published in 1997. Howe went
on to co-edit In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS
Pandemic.
Howe’s poetry is intensely intimate, and her bravery in laying bare the
music of her own pain is part of its resonance. Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan
Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, and poet and novelist
Margaret Atwood named Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief, for
the National Poetry Series. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting
Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.
Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and at New
York University.
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