AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Charif Shanahan in Conversation with Marie Howe

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Marie Howe:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Persephone 3”)

My mother is a god; she wanted to spare me.

But my nature is nature.

Charif Shanahan: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Charif Shanahan, guest editor of the magazine. Today I have the profound honor of speaking with Marie Howe, who joins us from New York City. Marie is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently, Magdalene. Michael Cunningham called the book “lacerating, sexy and profoundly compassionate.” It imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman alive now, hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Marie also coedited the book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets poetry fellowship, and from 2012 to 2014, served as the poet laureate of New York State. Today, we’ll hear new poems by Marie from the May issue of Poetry. Marie, welcome to the podcast.

Marie Howe: Thank you, Charif. I’m overjoyed to be with you.

Charif Shanahan: Me, too. It’s such a joy and such an honor. I thought we could start by asking you to read one of the poems that will appear in the May issue, and I thought we could start with “Postscript.”

Marie Howe: Okay, I’m happy to. I’m a rustler, and I—it’s sort of nice to think that there’s actually paper involved.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Marie Howe: Even though, you know. I don’t think poetry has done that much to hurt the trees, compared to other things. And it’s interesting to think that we’re looking, we’re reading off a tree.

(READS POEM)

“Postscript”

What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.

What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.

What we did to our daughters, we did to our sons
calling out for their mothers.

What we did to the trees, what we did to the earth,
we did to our sons, to our daughters.

What we did to the cow, to the pig, to the lamb,
we did to the earth, butchered and milked it.

Few of us knew what the bird calls meant
or what the fires were saying.

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.
The air turned red.    The ocean grew teeth.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: When I first reached out about including some of your work in the magazine, you mentioned that you were working on a new and selected, which I was really excited to learn. And in “Postscript,” this stunning poem you just read, and in some of the more recent work we’ve seen—I’m thinking of “Singularity” or “What the Silence Said”—you engage more directly than you have in the past with questions of interdependence. Not of the human and the human, per se, but of the human and the natural world, the human as natural world. Which leads to concerns of human influence on the earth, environmental devastation, the climate crisis. And it feels to me like an inevitable arrival, in a way, as the earlier work contended with human to human interdependence and influence, we might say. So, could you talk about this development in your work and how you think about it?

Marie Howe: Well, you just, you’re so articulate, Charif. What you just said is so beautiful. I mean, many of us, of course, are coming—have come and are coming to understand that nothing lives alone, that we live in a web of interdependence and have always lived so. Humans seem to be the last to know about this. And of course, we’ve done such damage to the web of interbeing on our planet, and also, of course, probably extending beyond our planet, given the radio waves that are traveling across the whole system and the toxic substances that are wafting off our planet. What we didn’t know we didn’t know. I don’t know why we didn’t know it. We could talk about that long and long. Why, why we came to this belief that we were sovereign over the other living beings, that we are sovereign over the Earth itself. But clearly, we’re coming to understand that we are not. And that in fact, we are maybe the virus that’s affecting the Earth itself, inadvertently. My students and I have been living with and writing within the ecopoetic tradition now for about seven years, too, so, at Sarah Lawrence where I teach. And that has been a profound experience for me, you know, reading and writing with my students from within the living world, and trying to move off center from it. And that, of course, given everything we’ve witnessed and know, not only recently, but for centuries, how women are treated, how people of color are treated, how we treat the other animals, how we treat the earth, it’s all connected. So, this sort of came just out of that overwhelming understanding, coming probably far too late in my case, but, so that’s why it’s called “Postscript” as well.

Charif Shanahan: Well, you know, it raises another question for me what you’ve just said, which is, what the role of the poet is today, and how you understand that in the face of the enormity of climate crisis, COVID-19, a racial pandemic, right, everything that we are navigating as a species. What is the role of the poet within that or in the face of those challenges?

Marie Howe: This is a very complex question. And it has as many answers as there are poets. I’m very concerned about, how do I say, oh, just, I feel like I need 20 minutes of silence before I triy to answer this question. Because I don’t know the answer, really, Charif. Everyone must write what she or he or they need to write. And, honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing every single time I sit down to write. I have no idea. It’s always into the unknown. I don’t have any theories, no agenda, nothing. This came out of, you know, Black Lives Matter, watching so many different young men be beaten, calling, literally calling out for their mothers. You know, and all the daughters, of course, who starve themselves and hurt themselves. I mean, it just came out of my life. But I am concerned that we become programmatic or, I mean, always, always the self who is writing has to be implicated. And the interior life of each writer is where this poem, the poems come from, you know, which is of course, in constant discourse with the culture we’re living in. But I’m very aware that I’m an American poet right now, North American, United States of America American poet, living in a first—still a first world country for some of us, not all of us, and safe from the kind of war the people in Ukraine are living with, or the earthquake that people in Turkey are living, you know, trying to dig out of. That I’m still writing from a place of privilege. This is a long way around of saying that each of us, I think, has to find within ourselves a new understanding of who we are in relationship to the living world and what it is that our particular soul needs to discover. Poetry is always a discovery, I guess what I’m saying. We don’t—we’re not here to teach anybody anything.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. That’s such a beautiful way of answering that question, that there are as many answers to that question as there are poets, right, that there is something profoundly individual in each contribution, even as we are, you know, as you were saying earlier, interdependent, connected, beholden to one another, right?

Marie Howe: Yeah. Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: You know, the, the answer that you just offered, you know, it makes me think about an aspect of lyric poetry that I am very drawn to, which is its capacity to hold the unsayable, that which cannot be said. And for me, it’s one of the most gratifying elements of experiencing a poem. And part of what astonishes me about your work, Marie, is the means by which you reach the unsayable, that ineffable thing. It’s transparent, fully accessible language. There is often an emphasis on the completely mundane. And yet this takes us to a place of profound mystery, a clot of knowing or unknowing. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about how you think of the ineffable. And also your aesthetic orientation to it, an aesthetic that appears increasingly in my reading, accessible and more porous in presentation on the page.

Marie Howe: Well, once again, Charif, what you just said is so beautiful. And I love that you bring in the cloud of unknowing. I was just thinking about Henri Nouwen. Sorry, this is a bit of an aside, but he was talking about when Jesus was in the desert and was tempted by the devil. You know, and the devil says, you know, turn all these stones into bread and feed the world and do this and do that, he tempts him with three possibilities. And Nouwen translates the story into three temptations, which is the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be powerful, and the temptation to be fabulous. I think all of those temptations must be rejected. Because if we have any, if we’re—and we are tempted to towards all those things, but if we’re too tempted toward those ends, we, we forget that, as you said, what a poem can do is to hold what cannot be said by anyone. That is this (PAUSES) silence that is in the center of our own being, that must be—be can be honored. The silence in the face of a dog, you know, I just saw a dog this morning, I can’t stop thinking about her face. That that’s what’s to be honored. I can tell you the poets I think who approach that, that I read when I, from the very beginning of my reading life.

Charif Shanahan: Who were they?

Marie Howe: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, many of the parables in what we call the New Testament. Rilke, of course, who spoke about this so beautifully. And then later on, you know, I think Seamus Heaney can do that. I think there’s a lot, a lot of poets who do it. But I just have been reading Jiménez, Juan Ramón Jiménez—you must know his work, and I just love the silence in the center of his work. So many, so many people.

Charif Shanahan: Marie, can you speak to the means by which you approach this thing in your own work, the transparency, the accessibility of the language,

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: the emphasis on the mundane?

Marie Howe: Well, I don’t know what that word mundane means.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Marie Howe: I really don’t. I was thinking on the way here, there are birds singing in New York City this morning. It’s a dreary, cold, rainy morning. Nevertheless, I heard so many birds singing. And I was thinking about what Meister Eckhart said, that every creature is a word of God. And I was loving walking down the street listening to these robins and saying, “Okay, I’m listening, I’m listening.” So the mundane—what is the mundane? The robins singing, the dog I bumped into as I was coming out of, down my stoop, named Tulip, this beautiful dog.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Marie Howe: Or the elders stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door. That’s my aunt Dorothy, you know, when I went to visit her in the assisted living place. There she was, 10:00 in the morning, about 25 people in wheelchairs stacked outside the lunchroom that wasn’t going to open till 11:00. All of their heads bent down. You know that’s, that’s, that’s our life. You know, that’s, there it is. That’s just life.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. I think of the cheese and mustard sandwich in “The Gate.”

Marie Howe: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) That, for me, is what I mean to say with the mundane. I don’t mean it pejoratively or critically,

Marie Howe: Oh, I know.

Charif Shanahan: but the, the ordinary, the everyday the that which is always around that we might not even notice. You know?

Marie Howe: Well, it’s luminous. It’s all, it’s what we have. It’s, it is our life. And when you mentioned that poem, I mean, you know, my brother John, who was in What the Living Do and who was my dear friend, his partner, his beloved Joe is a Buddhist and John absorbed a lot of that, you know, this is what you have been waiting for. What? This. You know, stop waiting. There is, maybe this is heaven on earth. This is it, you know? The rain, spilling my, as I did this morning, my tea over my hand as I tried to fiddle with my umbrella. I mean, this, this really is it. And, and it may be a door to a greater understanding. But, you know, one day, as Jane Kenyon so beautifully said, it will be otherwise, you know. I won’t be walking along East 4th Street going, “Oh, they’re the pillars, you know, David told me about. There’s the building, I’m going in.”

Charif Shanahan: You know what was so beautiful to me about what you just said, Marie, the tea, spilling the tea on your wrist when you were trying to open the umbrella. It immediately took me back to your poem, “What the Living Do,”

Marie Howe: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Charif Shanahan: and the speaker walking on the wobbly Cambridge sidewalk.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: Coffee’s spilling down her sleeve, right?

Marie Howe: I’m sloppy.

Charif Shanahan: Well, or you’re human. And the experience that you have touched, you know, in that poem, and that you’ve just expressed sort of anecdotally now, has continuity, consistency, there is meaning in that, in the identification and the isolation of that gesture or that image.

Marie Howe: Yeah, how many other people were trying to open their umbrellas and spilling something today? Probably a bunch of ’em.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) You know, regarding the ineffable, you know, I wanted to ask you, you know, we know when we’ve encountered it as readers. I feel I know when I’ve encountered it as a reader, because we feel it in our bodies, right? We understand that something is happening to us, that we’ve encountered something real and resonant. How do you as a maker, a maker of poems, know that you’ve touched it in the drafts? You know, that you’ve pursued this subject enough that you’ve arrived at the bone?

Marie Howe: You know, Rilke said this so beautifully. He said, “Poems are not merely feelings,” you know, those we have easily enough. They are experiences. I think he was referring to the journey one takes when one begins to write into the unknown, and that when we have an experience ourselves, and when I have an experience myself in writing the poem, that is, if I’m changed, somehow, by what occurs, there’s a possibility that that could happen to someone else. Because I truly do not write the poem. I mean, I want to make this perfectly clear. I feel like I’m there. And so many times, I write and I don’t have an experience, or nothing happens. I mean, many, many, most of the time. But then, I don’t mean to sound—I feel like whatever moves through me is what’s trying to speak. And that I use what I’ve got, you know, I’ll use the wheelchair, my aunt, beautiful aunt Dorothy, or I’ll use a man calling out to his mother or young women I know and love, but, or I don’t even know that I use it. Some—my psyche uses it. But something else is really trying to speak. And when I’m listening, I have an experience. But I don’t know, for a long time, and I don’t show people things for a long time. And then I show them to my friends. And say, “Yes, no? What do you think?” And then my friends helped me.

Charif Shanahan: Would you say that, in that process, that when you are listening, and that you don’t know, and I hear you describe yourself as a channel or a conduit of whatever that ineffable source is, right? Something is coming from the silent center that you named earlier, through you, into language. Does that feel like an egoless state? Does it feel like Marie has stepped to the side and there is capacity within you to work the language and receive but that you are not fully present?

Marie Howe: Well, that’s the best,

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Marie Howe: Yeah, I mean, that’s the best feeling in the world, to lose oneself.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe: I mean, I was just—Jim Moore, a wonderful poet, you know, who lives in Minnesota, he’s been my sort of poetry sponsor secretly for the last few years, because I’ve been really having trouble just getting to the desk. And he writes me every Sunday and says, “How’s poetry this week?” And sometimes I have to say, “Mm, not much here.”

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Marie Howe: But he was talking about, in a recent letter, about the joy of writing is losing oneself, forgetting oneself. And you know that feeling, Charif. I mean, painters, cooks, anybody who does something they love, you know, planting flowers, working in a garden, whatever, the joy of it is that you forget yourself. And then suddenly you realize, you know, an hour’s gone by or, or whatever. Forgetting oneself in the service of something else is one of the greatest joys I know. I’m sure you know what I mean?

Charif Shanahan: I do, I do know what you mean as a maker of poems and as a reader of them.

Marie Howe: Well, that’s why we read too, right, to forget ourselves.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah, you know, that you, you somehow, through entering the subjectivity out of which the lyric poem is built, you enter the subjectivity of another, you lose yourself, right. But there’s, there’s some tether beneath the particulars, beneath concrete details of the life and of the singing voice that, that makes us, in my belief, one again, connected again. And it’s brief. It’s, you know, for as long as you are inside the poem, and then you walk away and you go wash the dishes, or you start responding to emails, or whatever it is, but that commune happened through the poem.

Marie Howe: Charif, you should be writing a book of essays. I hope you are.

Charif Shanahan: I am. (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: Good. I’m so glad to hear it, because, you know, what you’re talking about is so important. I remember opening Muriel Rukeyser’s book, The Life of Poetry, you know that book?

Charif Shanahan: Yes.

Marie Howe: And she says something like, what’s one of the sentences she says right off, like, people are afraid of poetry. The fear of poetry. And I was like, “What are you talking about?” Like, you know, and I sort of shot the book. And it took me years to understand what she was talking about, which is very possibly the thing you’re describing, which is what we long for, and what we fear, which is the loss of self for a minute or five minutes or, and the fear of that too, the fear of feeling, of connection of, I mean, the whole complex relationship we have with existence when we enter in the subjectivity of someone else.

Charif Shanahan: Yes. Yes.

Marie Howe: I’ve been reading Elizabeth Stroud, who I’m in love with. I mean, I read these stories Olive, Again. Do you know Olive Kitteridge?

Charif Shanahan: I don’t know.

Marie Howe: Oh, my god, Olive, Again, these stories. It’s almost unbearable. Like I have to just look up and I go, “Ah, it’s unbearable” Because she holds everything in the stories, everything. I mean, you can tell I’m just, I’m so in love with her as a writer right now. I sort of missed the first Olive wave going through, and I’m catching up. And I see why. Because her writing is so transparent. Her herness is not there. You know, and I’m not saying—I love painterly writers, too, where the surface of their work is, you know, really rich. So, I’m not, I’m not saying I prefer one thing over the other. But in this case, her characters are just there. And they’re walking around and they’re so like us, they’re so ordinary. They’re so admirable, not admirable, but it doesn’t—none of that matters, they’re alive. I’ve just been thinking about the joy I feel losing myself for hours in these pages.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe: And feeling at the same time, so connected to the person who can apprehend these people, who can stand there—you know what it’s like when you’re standing next to someone you love and they go, “Look,” and you look, and you go, “Yeah.” You know? It’s like, (LAUGHING) oh yeah, that’s it!

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS) Yes.

Marie Howe: Yeah, I see.

Charif Shanahan: Marie, I was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to you because I knew that we would get to the rich and the meaningful and the deep and the profound. And so, I wanted to stay with the idea of spirituality, the unknown, the unsayable. And you know, you have been called a religious poet in the past, and I know that you don’t abide that designation. And I completely understand why you don’t. You know, as much as your work draws on biblical figures and parables, the essential aspect of the poems, to me, is rooted in a spirituality that is nondenominational, of the metaphysical world, the world we cannot see, the world inside the world, which must be available to all of us, regardless of our faith tradition.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: And so this, this spiritual orientation of your work is something that I cherish and have been drawn to and inspired by endlessly. And so, I have some spiritual questions for you that are admittedly enormous. And we might laugh after I ask them because they’re so big.

(LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Charif Shanahan: But I come to them through your poems, right? There’s a way that your poetry has opened up these questions or returned me to these questions which were already inside me. And so can we try? It’s a few, a handful of them.

Marie Howe: Sure. Sure.

Charif Shanahan: Would you talk about the relationship, as you understand it, between poetry and God? However, one understands or names that. Ether, universe, spirit, Allah, whatever you call it, the relationship between poetry and God.

Marie Howe: Well, in the beginning was the word. In so many traditions, speaking calls something into being, right. What I was saying earlier, this robin, Meister Eckhart, “every creature is a word of God.” You know, God is—I wish we could come up with a new word. But whatever is going on here, you know.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe And of course, here is so minute compared to the minuteness of the here for us, when we look at the vast universe, whatever’s going on here is way beyond me. And I love Meister Eckhart, because he, he says that too. He says, you know, we cannot understand what’s happening. But that, I bow to the source from which all this comes, the deepest thing I know is that bow.

Charif Shanahan: Mm.

Marie Howe: Because truly, that’s, now there’s probably a lot of reasons for that. I have a daughter who is a scientific mind. She’s secular, utterly. And it’s, we look at each other, like across this, this, I mean, we’re very close. But she’s very secular. And I look at her sometimes, I’m dumbfounded because I couldn’t live in an only secular world. So very possibly, someone could tell me that I’ve created this illusion to be able to walk down the street. But I’ve always loved the poets who are in discourse with this mystery, you know, with Hopkins and George Herbert and John Donne, and Jane Kenyon. I mean, Jane really helped me to become less embarrassed about my concerns. I was embarrassed, and kind of wanted to be cooler than that, you know, back in the ’80s. And Jane was so unashamed of her spiritual questions. And I loved her and her work so much that she was, had a huge effect on me.

Charif Shanahan: I really appreciate hearing you mention Jane Kenyon. Because I was about to ask, are their contemporaries of yours that you feel are invested in this or whose work touches this?

Marie Howe: Yeah. I mean, in very different ways, Jorie Graham, you know, Jane, a lot of women, Brenda Hillman. I mean, Brenda’s had a huge effect on me.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. Was it Death Tractates, was that the book?

Marie Howe: Death Tractates and Bright Existence, you know, boom, changed my life.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Marie Howe: Louise Glück. You know, I mean, Wild Iris. I mean, God is talking possibly, you know, I mean, all everything is talking. I think that, you know, there’s just so many women. I mean, Jane Hirshfield. Jean Valentine.

Charif Shanahan: Linda Gregg?

Marie Howe: Linda in a whole different way, you know, absolutely.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Marie Howe: All of these women are my sisters in this world. And their work has just meant, you know, quite literally the world to me. I mean, I was so lucky, Charif, because I started taking my own writing seriously in 1980. I think Sharon Olds’s first book came out right around then, Satan Says.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe: And Sharon, you know, along with Adrienne Rich and Rukeyser, and, you know, Jean Valentine, you know, just kicked the door open to so many possibilities. So, all these, all these people, yeah.

Charif Shanahan: Beautiful. Okay, so the next spiritual question. In your poem, “Singularity,” you name home as “a tiny tiny dot brimming with/is is is is” which we all once were, right, the the river was the mountain was the ocean was us. And we were this undifferentiated thing. The poem imagines an origin and calls home, in that imagination, what I’ve just described. In your life, in your everyday here and now, how do you think about home? What is home? Where is it? What is it? I told you they were big. (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: Well, just to speak to the “Singularity” poem. I mean, Maria Popova is responsible for that because she had done these amazing events, The Universe in Verse, and I had been reading, like so many of us, had been trying to understand. I’d been reading physics and, you know, different scientists who’ve written books that are accessible to people like me, and I was really trying to understand the Big Bang and Hawking. But home of course transcends time and space. I mean, time and space, as we know, may not even exist. But I think it’s that, I mean, in the, in the poem, you know, if there was a singularity that blew up into the whole universe then we are literally, everything is everything. And that’s physicality and energy. Within myself, that’s a different question. I mean, within myself, I think it’s that silence we were talking about deep within oneself, which is where oneself doesn’t even dwell anymore, but I truly don’t know. That’s as close as I can get to it.

Charif Shanahan: Beautiful. Thank you. One more of this series of spiritual questions.

Marie Howe: So you should have—not only you should write a book of essays, but you should just have your own podcast.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: And it could be asking outrageously large questions.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: I would totally listen.

Charif Shanahan: I’m game, I’m game. I would totally do that.

Marie Howe: Totally.

Charif Shanahan: So, in a favorite early poem of yours, in one of my favorite early poems of yours, “After the Movie,” the speaker and her friend meditate on or argue about the nature and the definition of love.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: And I think we’re now about 25 to 30 years after the publication of that poem. And so I’m wondering, from your current vantage, how you would answer this question. What is love?

Marie Howe: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: Oh, God knows. You know, that poem, that’s so funny, because, you know, the Michael, I’ll whisper this, the Michael in that poem is the writer Michael Cunningham. And I dreamt about Michael last night. So he’s with, he’s with us here. And we are, you know, and the movie was The Talented Mr. Ripley. You can love someone, come to a day when you’re, what is it. when you want to kill him? Anyway.

Charif Shanahan: You can think him or me.

Marie Howe: Him or me, and think him.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. Yep.

Marie Howe: I don’t know what love is. I feel like, the heart, back to that silence at the heart of us, I mean, and it might, you know, when you say these years, Charif, I have to shudder. I cannot believe all that time has passed. I cannot believe it. That’s a whole other discussion, growing older. Oh my god. The years have passed like a minute a minute a minute ago. But I think finally, I am beginning to learn to sit still. I mean, beginning to learn to sit still. We’re talking 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I’ve just been so restless my whole life that this home place that might be, you know, in this egoless place deep within, where we don’t have to be an I, we can just be part of the is, is, is.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: So, I’ve got one more question for you. But I was thinking maybe we could hear “Persephone 3” from the May issue.

Marie Howe: Yeah. Persephone, not, I’m going to shift through some papers.

(READS POEM)

“Persephone 3”

My mother knows all about the under-dark.

She needn’t have pretended to be appalled.

The seed must break open and rise;

put too deep the rot sets in.

My mother is a god; she wanted to spare me.

But my nature is nature.

Like everything alive I was meant to be split open,

to blossom, to be sucked, to be eaten,

to lean, to bend, to wither,

to die and die and die and die until I died.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: So, switching gears away from the spirituality questions, I’d like to talk to you about teaching and mentorship. You know, you’ve worked as a teacher of poetry now for a long time. And you also have this really funny story about coming to poetry. You did this fellowship at Dartmouth on the recommendation of a friend, and you weren’t sure you wanted to take the writing workshop and you attended the first day but said you weren’t staying, and when your teacher proclaimed that she was writing her spiritual autobiography you said, “Well, I want to do that.” And she told you to stay and you stayed. And we’re all, of course, very glad that you did. And I know that Stanley Kunitz was enormously important to you, and you’ve called him your true teacher. So what I wanted to ask you was, what made Stanley your true teacher, as opposed to another kind? And what is the responsibility that we have as poets to those coming up behind us?

Marie Howe: Oh, it’s good to talk about Stanley. I met Stanley when he was 75. And he became my teacher and friend, until he died at 101. Stanley was alive every minute. Everything, he was the most present person. When I sat next to him during the first workshop at Columbia I took, he was holding the paper between his fingers. And he was sort of feeling the paper with his fingers. He was, and I just looked over and I said, “That man can feel the paper between his fingers right now.” And I just thought, “I want to stay right here next to him in every workshop.” He had an ability as a reader to see when you—he had an ability to see, how do I say this? He could see us. That’s really it. He could see, he could see each of our voices, if you will. And so he, he encouraged us. I mean, I say “us” because I think of so many of us who worked with him, Lucie Brock-Broido and Sophie Cabot Black, and just so many people. There’s a great story about Stanley, can I tell you the story?

Charif Shanahan: Sure.

Marie Howe: Which really speaks to his ability to see. And when he could see, he could say, “There you are.” And when you went off and faked it, the thing about Stanley is, you would go to Stanley’s apartment, and you’d hand him a bunch of poems, and he would read one poem silently for like 10 minutes. And then he would go, “Uh-huh.” And then he would take his hand and he would point to the one place in the poem where you fudged it a little bit. And he wouldn’t say anything, he would just go, “Here.” And you’d go, “Damn.”

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Marie Howe: “Damn, yes, you’re right.” He was asked to be the judge for the Yale prize, of the younger poet prize, which everybody sent in a manuscript, you know, for their first book. He agreed to do it if he could come to Yale and be given an office and read every single manuscript. And they said, “Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Kunitz. You don’t want to read every manuscript, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and we choose 30. And you read just those.” And he said, “No, I need to read every single manuscript. Just give me an office and put the boxes, you know, in the office, and I’ll go through them.” And they said, “Sir, really, there’s so much that you don’t want to read, we will.” And he said, “Well, whatever, just give me the boxes,” and they said, “Okay, we’re gonna put them in order, we’re gonna say, you know, the first box is 50 of the best and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth, so to speak.” He said, “Okay, whatever you want to do, just put them in the office. And when I’m done, I’ll put the boxes outside my door.” So he spent days reading through these manuscripts. And every single—he was the judge for five years. Every poet he chose came from the fifth box.

Charif Shanahan: Mm.

Marie Howe: The ones they thought weren’t, weren’t worth looking at. And those poets were Robert Hass, Carolyn Forché, Olga Broumas, the first, you know, out lesbian poet. Oh, what was his name? A man who wrote about Vietnam. I’m so sorry, I can’t remember the other two, forgive me. But what I’m trying to say is, he, he was able to see a voice that nobody else could see.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. And so he saw yours.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: The only one who could see you.

Marie Howe: Well, he did see me. And I trusted him, because he was so discerning. And he didn’t waste words. But he also saw Lucie Brock-Broido, who was my good friend, who was such a different writer from me, and we couldn’t have been more different. So he didn’t have an aesthetic that he was pushing, you know?

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. Yeah.

Marie Howe: He was just listening for a voice. And he was really able to do that and to show you where you kind of wavered off into your will, you know. We used to all joke, you know, lend with an image, don’t explain. You know, you come in, and I mean, for years, I would just bring a poem in, and he would just say, you know, take off the last five lines.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe: I mean, it’s the stuff we all know now, you know, like, don’t, cut off the ending, cut off the beginning, let the poem just be there as itself as a—you don’t have to explain anything.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. So, what about the second part of the question, the responsibility, if that’s the right word, that we have as poets to those coming up behind us?

Marie Howe: Well, I think our job is to mirror back to them what their power is. A lot of young poets come in, and when I say young, I say beginning, I wasn’t—I was 30, but, you know, just to show them where their power is, and to encourage them to go deeper and to go, to become themselves enough to disappear. It’s that paradox we were talking about earlier. So much of making art is forgetting oneself and letting the self-consciousness drop away. I mean, a workshop is not the best place for young poets in many ways, because you’re so worried about what your peers are gonna think.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Marie Howe: And in fact, you gotta forget about it all and not care and embarrass yourself, and, you know, anyway, but I want to say two things. One never knows what a writer is going to do. I’ve had, worked with people who it seemed like they were nowhere near being able to write a poem, and then something lets go and everything changes, and they begin to write work that’s so powerful. So, the other thing I think about being a teacher is to treat every student with respect and belief that they can write something that will become an experience for them, and therefore an experience for us. And that this is available to anyone who truly longs for it.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah, beautiful. Thank you, Marie. So I know I didn’t ask you to bring earlier work. But I want you to know about ”Prayer.” That poem is actually above my writing desk.

Marie Howe: Aw, the one about

Charif Shanahan: About every day, I want to speak to you and every day, right, about I am getting up from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence, because it is a reminder, you know, that the avoidance in my own practice is not uncommon, you know, and that there are folks whose work I really admire who share that experience.

Marie Howe: What, I mean, we could talk long and long about what that avoidance is, we touched on it earlier, but why we avoid that which brings us so much joy, I don’t know.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. I think it’s, it’s unbearable to inhabit, to really stay there. You know?

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: Unfamiliar, discomforting, even as it’s pleasurable, even as it opens something in us.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: So maybe—I feel a little funny reciting your poem, but maybe I could recite that one since you don’t have—

Marie Howe: I would love it.

Charif Shanahan: Okay. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Marie Howe: Because, you know, I, I, I forgot my earlier books. I just brought these new things. I would love to hear it.

Charif Shanahan: Okay, so this is definitely one I’ve got by heart. So, all right.

(RECITES POEM)

“Prayer”

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: I have read that poem to so many writer friends. (LAUGHS) I have shared that poem widely. I think if you know me, you know that I love this poem and you’ve probably heard me read it to you.

Marie Howe: I wish we all lived together in a big house. And we could all go into our rooms and, I mean, I’m so moved to hear you read it.

Charif Shanahan: Mm.

Marie Howe: I feel that way every day.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: To close today, Marie, let’s hear the poem “The Gate.”

Marie Howe:

(READS POEM)

“The Gate”

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: A big thanks to Marie Howe. Marie is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Magdalene. You can read three new poems by Howe in the May 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. Special thanks to W.W. Norton and Company for permission to feature the poem “Prayer” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and “The Gate” from What the Living Do. This show was produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)