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Fanny Howe

Born	Fanny Quincy Howe (1940-10-15) October 15, 1940 (age 83) Buffalo, New York, U.S.
Occupation	\n Poet \n novelist \n short story writer \n
Notable awards	2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Children	3
Relatives	Mary Manning, Susan Howe, Danzy Senna and R.H. Quaytman

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Fanny Howe

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Fanny Howe

Born	Fanny Quincy Howe (1940-10-15) October 15, 1940 (age 83) Buffalo, New York, U.S.
Occupation	\n Poet \n novelist \n short story writer \n
Notable awards	2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Children	3
Relatives	Mary Manning, Susan Howe, Danzy Senna and R.H. Quaytman

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By Johanna Skibsrud

\u00a0

\u201cPoetry is backwards logic. You can\u2019t have poetry unless you have some knowledge of, or taste for, this \u2018backwards\u2019 way of finding truth\u201d (6), writes Fanny Howe in the opening essay of her collection,\u00a0The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, published by Grey Wolf Press in 2009. These words are at the heart of Howe\u2019s explorations of her calling to what she terms the \u201cvocation that has no name.\u201d Beginning with an account of her early childhood experience lying alone in bed at night and feeling \u201cthe living presence\u201d of light as it entered the room\u2014a presence she \u201c(secretly)\u201d called God (6)\u2014the essays and reflections within\u00a0The Winter Sun\u00a0trace Howe\u2019s quest to retain a space within her life and career for the \u201ctruth\u201d she had, so palpably, sensed as a child. In early adolescence she began to articulate this quest more specifically as a desire to live the life of a poet. \u201cWhat this meant to me,\u201d she writes, \u201cwas a life outside the law\u201d (5).

Part memoir, part long poem, part conversion story, part prayer,\u00a0The Winter Sun\u00a0charts Howe\u2019s journey toward establishing her place and vocation \u201coutside of the law.\u201d This is a place that is, of necessity a deconstructive and critical place\u2014\u201coutside\u201d of the conventional limitations prescribed for language and thought, but the work made possible through the establishment of this critical space adheres conversely to that which it is impossible to deconstruct.\" As Derrida once wrote: \u201cJustice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists\u201d (243). It is toward this irreducible space, of critique and Justice, rather than language and \u201cthe law,\u201d that Howe\u2019s work moves\u2014and encourages us to follow.

...there are still those voices today willing to speak out against or \u201coutside of\u201d the law in the name of those ideals they perceive as forgotten or threatened by popular culture\u2014or by \u201cthe law\u201d itself. Fanny Howe is one these voices.

The two longer essays in the collection, \u201cBranches\u201d and \u201cPerson, Place, and Time,\u201d chart the development of this \u201coutside\u201d space directly. \u201cBranches\u201d sketches out for the reader a collage of early childhood influences, tracing their impact on Howe\u2019s early creative and spiritual development. The daughter of the playwright and novelist, Mary Manning Howe, and civil rights activist, Mark Howe, Howe\u2019s personal history evokes a fascinating cultural history peopled with such notable literary and cultural figures as F.O. Matthiessen, Samuel Beckett, and Liam Clancy. The founder of The Poet\u2019s Theatre, Howe\u2019s mother often held rehearsals at home\u2014and from time to time even called upon both Fanny and her older sister, the poet Susan Howe, to perform. This early influence on Howe\u2019s developing private and public persona is explored alongside the sometimes seemingly divergent influence of her father\u2019s social and political concerns. As an adolescent, it was her father\u2019s sensibility with which Howe aligned herself most strongly\u2014and the question she saw as fundamental to his work as a legal activist in the civil rights movement remains fundamental to her own chosen vocation: \u201cWhich is more valuable to protect\u2014liberty or equality? Are they, in fact, compatible?\u201d (47). A nostalgia (necessary at this point, I think, or at the very least refreshing\u2014and favorably reminiscent of that evoked by Tony Judt\u2019s later writing) for a democratic ideal now \u201cradically lost\u201d (25) permeates this essay. Indeed, F.O. Matthiessien\u2019s reflection, that \u201cIn a democracy there can be but one fundamental test for citizenship, namely: Are you using such gifts as you possess for or against the people?\u201d (25) may now seem, as Howe suggests, to resound from within a profoundly different age at a remove from our contemporary reality. But just as there was then, there are still those voices today willing to speak out against or \u201coutside of\u201d the law in the name of those ideals they perceive as forgotten or threatened by popular culture\u2014or by \u201cthe law\u201d itself. Fanny Howe is one these voices.

Inspired, no doubt, by the two major influences (literary and political) on her early life, Howe sought, and continues to seek, a way of living in the world that can be both contemplative and active\u2014that can sincerely pursue and explore, that is, both the practical realities of a subjective \u201cfixed identity\u201d as well as the more abstract \u201cReality\u201d of God. This \u201csplit search,\u201d Howe explains, \u201ccan only be folded into one in the process of working on something\u2014whether it is building, digging, accounting, painting, teaching\u2014with a whole-heartedness that qualifies as complete attention\u201d (51). Adopting this sort of process-oriented approach allows that while the work can be practical, your relationship to it can remain: \u201calways potential in the range of its errors and failures. You align yourself with some ethereal figure behind and ahead and above you; you call on it for help, realizing the vacillation and inadequacy of your acts, your words\u201d (51).

In \u201cPerson, Place, and Time,\u201d Howe explores the various strains and voices that helped to formulate\u2014and now reverberate within\u2014her current, albeit continually evolving, spiritual and creative identity. Again, Howe\u2019s emphasis on process in her adult life\u2014personal, spiritual, and creative\u2014is crucial; again, conversely, this emphasis serves to retain rather than move away from, her ability to conceive of, and encounter, that powerful and irreducible \u201cdisembodied presence\u201d she had sensed as a child. Lying alone, save for that powerful \u201cpresence,\u201d in her childhood bedroom, Howe became \u201chypersensitive to sound, smell, image\u201d\u2014developing a sort of internal synesthesia by which she perceived all the parts of her immediate environment held \u201ctogether as one\u201d (20). It is this deep appreciation and awareness of the sensual interconnection at the heart of experience that is also at the heart of Howe\u2019s \u201cbackwards\u201d pursuit of truth\u2014and thus the background of the spiritual and philosophical inquiry that is conducted within\u00a0The Winter Sun.

Howe\u2019s quest over the course of her life and career\u2014vividly illustrated by \u201cPeople, Place, and Time\u201d\u2014seems to have been to \u201cresist\u201d adulthood as she had first conceived of it. (\u201cPerhaps the self,\u201d Howe reflects in \u201cBranches\u201d, \u201c(like smoke) is spun from infinity with everything else and a growing awareness of its pending annihilation. The self opens up to its condition in stages and often because of its accompanying realization of adult hypocrisy. Childhood is the stage where a person either submits to or resists life as another adult. Why go on to become that?\u201d (22).) Rather than closing off her development at any \u201cfinished stage,\u201d Howe seeks instead to continue that development within the openness\u2014and natural critical state\u2014granted by the idea of childhood.

...Howe delineates a concept of the future that contains the past but refuses to be contained by it, a present that is liberated from the confines of either the known past (\u201cits condition in stages\u201d) or expected future (\u201cits pending annihilation\u201d), without disavowing the constitutive power of either.

It is perhaps this fear of arriving at a \u201cfinished stage,\u201d that leads Howe to develop her thesis on time, with which the collection both draws to a close and is brought together definitively as a whole. Walking one ordinary day beside a river in Ohio, Howe realized suddenly: \u201cthat the created world is here and finished. Now we are walking around on creation,\u201d she explains. \u201cAnd since it is finished, it is the site of eternity. This is why we can still make it glorious and productive while we wait and watch\u201d (164). Though this revelation as to the nature of time and eternity appears toward the end of the collection, it permeates Howe\u2019s thinking throughout the entire work. In the short title essay of the collection, Howe writes, for example: \u201cThe world\u2019s past is what stands before us and what we enter. It is as true as two plus two being four. As still and opaque as a finished painting\u201d (12). In \u201cPerson, Place, and Time,\u201d she asks: \u201cWhy do we always think history is full of stops and starts? The future is only the past turned around to look at itself\u201d (65). Indeed, though this collection concentrates in large part on narrating the trajectory of Howe\u2019s life to date, its momentum is very definitely toward the future\u2014which can otherwise be understood, it seems, as the continued generative openness granted by the present. By reversing our traditional conception of time (the future arriving from the present, arriving from the past) Howe delineates a concept of the future that contains the past but refuses to be contained by it, a present that is liberated from the confines of either the known past (\u201cits condition in stages\u201d) or expected future (\u201cits pending annihilation\u201d) (22), without disavowing the constitutive power of either.

But the limitations and \u201cinadequacies\u201d inherent to human concepts, actions and words are ever present for Howe. In order to deal with these inadequacies, she compellingly reflects upon the process of writing itself in many of the essays, including \u201cWaters Wide,\u201d where she recalls that for Walt Whitman poetic thinking requires that \u201cthe ideas that triggered the poem are never stated, exist only in the past, and are never introduced in the poem as its subject. Instead the poem arrives as an effect of the ideas and as a result of discarding many possibilities\u201d (163). This idea of revision and elimination as fundamental to a productive creative process is central for Howe. In \u201cPerson, Place, and Time,\u201d she elaborates the differences between \u201crepetition,\u201d \u201calmost repetition\u201d and \u201crevision.\u201d Where repetition, like religion, \u201ccomforts the memory\u201d\u2014Howe writes\u2014and \u201cmakes the objective world seem systematic and safe\u201d (150), \u201calmost\u201d repeating but not repeating \u201csuggests there is a margin of uncertainty around your thinking. It reminds you that there are echoes that bounce up and away and all is wildness\u201d (150). Revision takes that uncertainty further. The \u201copposite of repetition and religion,\u201d it is the process whereby language is stripped back \u201cto an unnaturally naked state.\u201d (150). \u201c [Y]ou want to see what is hidden behind each word,\u201d explains Howe, \u201cwhat intention, what fact, then cover it up with something else. Revision is suspicious of first words and assumes they exist only to signal something else, something deeper\u201d (150).

It is the principle behind revision\u2014\u201cthe opposite of repetition and religion\u201d\u2014that seems ultimately to govern\u00a0The Winter Sun\u00a0and Howe\u2019s \u201cvocation that has no name,\u201d but at the same time that vocation is deeply invested in religion (Howe\u2019s Catholic faith) and the \u201csystematic\u201d repetition that is the foundation of language itself. It is an impulse toward critique and revision, though\u2014the attempt to \u201cstrip away fraud and get to the uncontaminated first intention\u201d (150)\u2014that, as the motivating force behind Howe\u2019s writing, can be understood to constitute the true content of her faith. \u201cBy slashing the curtain of words,\u201d she writes, \u201cI might finally glimpse the words behind the words and the silence behind those\u201d (150-151).

Once again, what Howe seeks\u2014what is \u201cpresent\u201d behind every word of this collection\u2014is the passion with which she has conducted and continues to conduct a \u201csplit search\u201d for a life of both reflection and action.

In \u201cWaters Wide\u201d Howe reflects specifically on her conversion to Catholicism. It \u201cwas meant,\u201d she writes, \u201cto keep me safe from irony, to keep my childhood hope intact, to allow me to live with a certain schedule that occurred outside human time.\u201d This effort to protect herself from the \u201chypocrisies\u201d she sees as inherent in the \u201cadult\u201d world, as well as from customary conceptions of temporality, should not be misunderstood as a willingness on Howe\u2019s part to absent herself from human activities, language, or interpretations of time. Once again, what Howe seeks\u2014what is \u201cpresent\u201d behind every word of this collection\u2014is the passion with which she has conducted and continues to conduct a \u201csplit search\u201d for a life of both reflection and action. As she reminds us: \u201cNone of the words for time (past, present, future) have a reality beyond their usefulness for performing tasks on earth or in sentences\u201d (163).

Reflecting on the strangeness of the words, \u201cJedem das Seine\u201d\u2014roughly translated as \u201cTo each his own\u201d\u2014 inscribed on the gate of a WW2 German prison camp, Howe writes: \u201cTo understand what these words mean takes as long as it lasts to get back to the day when someone said them for the first time.\u201d Her advice to the reader for arriving at some understanding of these words and their complex (continuing) history can be read more inclusively as advice not just for approaching this book, but for pursuing any subject with the \u201cwhole-heartedness that qualifies as complete attention\u201d that Howe\u2019s work inspires. \u201cListen backward long enough and you will get there,\u201d Howe urges. \u201cBut try and stay with the present tense. It\u2019s hard!\u201d (101). But\u2014Howe inspires us to believe\u2014possible. Necessary, even.

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Fanny Howe

The Advance of the Father\n

The Angels\n

By Halves\n

The Cenotaph\n

The Definitions\n

Everything\n

Everything’s a Fake\n

Footsteps\n

A Hymn\n

Ice\n

The Law\n

Not as Much\n

One Night in Balthazar\n

Oxford\n

A Poem for Ciaran\n

Remember\n

Sheets\n

Slide\n

Three Persons\n

Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin.\n

Victory\n

What Did You See?\n

Yellow Goblins\n

You Can’t Warm Your Hands in Front of a Book but You Can Warm Your Hopes There\n

Author’s Note: On “Sheets,” after I.F. Annensky\n

Because He Was Flesh\n

“Buddhists Like School and I Don’t.”\n

Keepers of the Image\n

\"My Father Was White but Not Quite\"\n

Outremer\n

Second Childhood\n

\n \n Poetry Goes to the Movies\n

\n \n Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement\n

\n Appeared in Poetry Magazine\n All This Scratching and Erasing\n

\n \n Charms that Forestall Harm\n

\n \n Deep Descent: A Discussion of Two Poems by Fanny Howe\n

\n \n The Definitions\n

\n \n An Essential American Poet\n

\n \n Everything\n

\n \n Fanny Howe reads “The Definitions”\n

\n \n Feeling Like a Worm in Tequila?\n

\n \n Footsteps\n

\n \n Her Victorian Roots are Showing\n

\n \n Less Than Certain\n

\n \n Light in the Service of Loneliness\n

\n Appeared in Poetry Magazine\n Live All You Can\n

\n \n A Poem for Ciaran\n

\n \n A Poem for Ciaran\n

\n \n Poetry in the Aftermath\n

\n \n Pretend Heaven\n

\n Appeared in Poetry Magazine\n Six Books\n

\n Appeared in Poetry Magazine\n Warlords Are Not the Only Tyrants\n

\n \n What Did You See?\n

\n \n You're Always Moving Toward Silence\n

Bibliography

Fanny Howe\u2019s Followers (126)

\n \tFanny Howe\n

Combine EditionsFanny Howe\u2019s books

Topics Mentioning This Author

Early life and education[edit]

Work[edit]

Publications[edit]

Poetry[edit]

Fiction[edit]

Young adult fiction[edit]

Essays[edit]

Reviews[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Early life and education[edit]

Work[edit]

Publications[edit]

Poetry[edit]

Fiction[edit]

Young adult fiction[edit]

Essays[edit]

Reviews[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

\n \n All This Scratching and Erasing\n

\n \n Live All You Can\n

\n \n Six Books\n

\n \n Warlords Are Not the Only Tyrants\n

Combine Editions
Fanny Howe\u2019s books