Love and I
Fanny Howe celebrating her 80th birthday in her garden. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo credit: Christina Davis
Today, my dear Mercurius friends, I want to share some poems by Fanny Howe, an American poet who turned 80 this October 15, 2020.
Fanny Howe lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and welcomed a group of very close friends to her garden.
Fanny Howe is a great activist and fighter for Civil Rights, recognized as an enlightened, critical and reflective mind by her peers and friends, among whom are poets, artists, philosophers, musicians, academics, and the most important intellectuals of Boston, all of whom pass by her home to reflect on the times in which we live.
I leave you with a recording from the 2014 Miami Book Fair. In this video the poet talks about the relationship between poets and power. The poems that I transcribe come from her book: Love and I, published in 2019, published by Graywolf Press.
Fanny Howe
Born in New York in 1940, Howe’s father was a lawyer and her mother, Mary Manning, was born in Dublin and wrote plays and performed for the Abbey Theater before moving to the United States. Her sister is the poet, Susan Howe, and her daughter is the novelist, Danzy Senna.
Fanny Howe is one of the most widely read American experimental poets. She has taught at major educational institutions in Massachusetts.
Poems from "Love and I"
Allegories
I love so many of them
But they are only half a decade
Away from being disproved.
Remnants themselves already
Like polar-wolves
From the vortex.
It could be a nuclear site
But it's just a bar
With the bottles going dark
For the soldiers without uniforms
Its last model is reproduction.
Is love one-way?
Almost always
It catches on a kiss.
Holds still for a flash.
*******
When dawn mingles with air, things begin to take form as
planes and spheres.
They might starts as clouds of stars or rain or gods or spurts
of water.
Soon the filmy forms take an animal turn.
Androgynous, Emotive. We may never really know
Since now we see through lenses and probes.
Druids could not separate what they saw around them from
their thoughts.
Clouds were struggling to become gods.
Twigs and snow-prints were their words.
Nature was the name for everything that moved.
Nature was consciousness.
Poor universe. Self-sufficient. Nothing can be added.
Only returned.
*************
Give up wires, plugs, laptop, pills, water, cellphone,
passport, ticket and shoes.
Give up your water, your wine, your songs and stories.
Put your arms up, your feet down flat and face ahead.
You have not reached the end yet.
"What degradation to be thinking how to OD
technically infallibly, by choice.
To expect an answer to: Now?
Soon we will be standing in line with each other
at a relocation center
as if we wanted to be there where the meek
left their hiding places."
*********
In a faraway land
And a hotel I never visited.
There were ninety-nine hells
In a ghost book half-erased.
Like this I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature ( even mine)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the dirt to eat.
Other books
Eggs: poems, 1970.
For Erato, 1984.
The Vineyard, 1988.
The end, 1992.
Selected Poems, 2000.
On the Ground, 2004.
Come and See Poems, 2011.
Second childhood: Poems, 2014.
Love and I: Poems, 2019.
Night Philosophy, 2020.