Poet of the Unbearable: On Marie Howe’s “New and Selected Poems”

IN THE SPRING of 2023, I met the poet Marie Howe. I was in my last term at Yale Divinity School, and she was the speaker for a theology and literature series. I’d based my thesis around her Mary Magdalene poems and I was invited to have dinner with her. We walked across the street from her hotel for some pad thai, discovering that we were both “mostly vegetarian.” She wound her noodles on her fork and we talked—her work and mine, our daughters, our love of Etty Hillesum’s diaries. Her enormous hair spilled over her shoulders, just as it does in her many author photos.

I was a little frightened of Howe. In her work, she writes explicitly about sexual abuse at the hands of a father. I was afraid of what she’d been through (what she calls “the breaking”), but I was also afraid of her strength as a writer. How had she been able to speak the unsayable (“the man stumbling down the stairs again”)? And more than that, how had she been able to extend her father the lens of compassion? At one point, she looked at me with her piercing, dark eyes and said, “You keep talking about ‘my story.’” (I’d been referencing her traumatic past obliquely, trying to be delicate and deferential.) “I don’t have a story,” she said. Howe took a sip of her club soda with lime. What did she mean? She tried to explain it to me: “Have you heard of Father Greg Boyle out in California?” she asked. “He says, ‘Forgive everyone everything.’” Howe pointed to her chest. “I want to make T-shirts that say that, in a neat little cursive script over the breast.”

Howe’s first volume of poetry, The Good Thief, was selected as a winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood. Howe was 38 years old. It was a powerful debut—the collection moves between heart-wrenching portraits of her Irish Catholic family (Howe was the second oldest of nine children), poems exploring the lives of biblical women, and lyrical, transcendent lines on nature, as in “The Meadow”: “There will come a day when the meadow will think / suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own, // and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover.”

Stanley Kunitz characterized Howe as “a religious poet” in the 1980s, a characterization she has come to accept. “I’m obsessed with the metaphysical, the spiritual dimensions of life as they present themselves in this world,” she said in an AGNI interview. The title of her first collection, The Good Thief, echoes her complex relationship to the scriptures. “The Unforgiven,” from that book, references a pericope of Luke’s gospel, where a crucified thief, hanging next to Jesus, asks for mercy:

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at [Jesus], saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And [Jesus] said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

One obvious interpretation of the title is that the father is “the good thief.” She witnesses his brutal violations with visceral honesty, but, like a Christ figure, she withholds condemnation.

Howe’s latest book New and Selected Poems echoes her lifelong commitment to refusing simplistic and retributive solutions. She has written four collections over the last four decades: The Good Thief (1988), What the Living Do (1998), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), and Magdalene (2017). Her New and Selected Poems, released by Norton on April 2, is the first time the four volumes have been brought into intentional conversation. Looking at her work, the reader can see how Howe consistently sidesteps the Manichaean worldview that sees all life as easily divisible into good and evil.

In a recent lecture on the nature of forgiveness for The Point at the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Bruenig noted that the painful process of forgiveness often means “forsaking an emotionally salient set of rights or privileges one acquires when injured.” Howe yields these privileges, but not her stark witness to her childhood. She never justifies violence but instead seeks to understand where it comes from. And in finding a line of compassion, the poet, by her own suffering, is united with the suffering of the world. “Like everything alive I was meant to be split open,” she writes in a new poem, “Persephone and Demeter”: “to blossom, to be sucked, to be eaten, / to lean, to bend, to wither, / to die and die and die until I died.”

Yet transformation and hope lurk behind every ominous poem. In “Before,” she writes,

         The boulder once dust, will be dust again, 
         but today, so filled with its own heaviness,
         it can’t hear the grunts of the men who push and roll it
                                             to the mouth of the tomb

         and it can’t yet conceive how else it might be moved.

“Before” not only echoes an Ash Wednesday recitation, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”; it also precedes a kind of resurrection hope. The sealed tomb has an unexpected plot twist. Underneath Howe’s poetry combining myth and horror, there is a subtle strain of another song—healing is possible, hope is on the way, you can’t see it, but I’m telling you: it’s coming.

In her second volume, What the Living Do, Howe remembers her younger brother John, who died of AIDS at age 28. She looks back to their complex childhood and honors how John witnessed her and created space for her to heal:

         I know it hurts him [John]

         to rise, to knock on my door and come in. And when he draws his skinny
         arm around my shaking shoulders,

         I don’t know if he knows he’s building a world where I can one day
         love a man—he sits there without saying anything.

         Praise him.
         I know he can hardly bear to touch me.

Howe is a poet of the unbearable: the unbearable violence of this world, the unbearable beauty of it. “What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters / one after the other,” she writes in “Postscript.” She refuses to be morally superior to anyone. Instead, she looks for the higher ideal of mercy, for the end of all personal and systemic violence, and for the opportunity to change herself. “Well, we eat [meat,] don’t we?” she asks in “Practicing.” “And the shy octopus whose / brains are in her arms?” Many of Howe’s poems feature the noise of New York City, her longtime home. The poet is a part of the crowd, the melee of children and tourists. Her work emphasizes that we are all a part of “the sound of the human will: / the bluster of engine, the grind of a blade, the wheel” (“The Saw, The Drill”). Howe names the undercurrent of collective complicity in our culture. And then she focuses her attention on the tender silences that have been so healing for her, on what can grow out of a different kind of witness and space, beyond vengeance, like the one her brother provided for her. The poet imagines, in “Keeping Still,” being taken with “the drunken lilac, prairie purple, / blooming by the doorway, because you planted it.”

Howe’s new poems crescendo into a larger human hymn, one that “began as an almost inaudible hum” and ends in “harmonies we’d not known possible.” “Listen,” she confides to the reader of “Hymn,” “I too believed it was a dream.” Her poetry reminds me of an adage of Martin Luther: “simul iustus et peccator,” which means “simultaneously justified and a sinner.” Howe stretches this idea to its maximum. Do those of us who proclaim a way of mercy actually believe forgiveness could extend to the perpetrator? What does it take to end generational violence and cycles of wounding? What happens when we let go of our dualistic stories about good guys and bad guys? What happens when we let go of having a story?

Howe’s unblinking gaze at pain and beauty allows for new possibilities to rise. In one of her early poems, she wrote of an imaginary place, where she might care for “the small maple you brought here that must be tied / for the winter or die.” In her latest poems, the single sapling is now a stand of great maple trees. In “The Maples,” she goes under the maple trees behind her house and talks to them: “How should I live my life? / They said, shhh shhh shhh …” The poet takes the silence of the trees into herself:

         Stand still, I thought, 
         See how long you can bear that. 

         Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
         drinking light     breathing. 

In another new poem, “What the Earth Seemed to Say, 2020,” she turns to the reader: “Are you willing to take your place in the forest again?”

In “Prologue,” the opening poem of her New and Selected, Howe stands, like Dante, on the brink of hell. The family and poets and friends who defined her life are dead. “In the middle of my life,” she writes, echoing the first tercet of The Inferno, “I came to the edge / and I did not know the way.” Having survived hell, Howe goes to the edge again and looks into the abyss as a friend and guide. I imagine her handing the reader a T-shirt to consider and maybe even wear for the journey: “forgive everyone everything” is written in a neat little cursive script over the breast.

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