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Articles by Fanny Howe
Richard Kearney's "Anatheism" | Fanny Howe
| BOOKS & REFLECTIONS | *** ANATHEISM *** By Fanny Howe *** The Montréal Review, July 2011 *** "Anatheism: Returning to God After God" by Richard Kearney (Columbia University Press, 2011) *** Richard Kearney's Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia UP, 2010) investigates the possibility of a God after God (ana-theos).
I won’t be able to write from the grave
I won’t be able to write from the grave so let me tell you what I love: oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter, cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace, the children nearby, poems and songs, a friend sleeping in my bed— and the short northern nights. Acclaimed poet Fanny Howe (American, Contemporary) died July 8, 2025, at the age of 84. Howe was a longtime resident of West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard.
Value City
Find and share the perfect poems. Under the marked-down dresses, we conjured trips to Oslo. Also to Lima. Mel says the game was my idea, hiding behind hundreds of hems, inventing trips to cities we knew only as pleasing arrangements of letters, places we’d likely never see. Mel says it’s how she remembers me: cross-legged, knotting lengths of licorice, traveling the planet under racks of final sales.
On a Night Never Seen
Sweep up your shadow But you can’t turn back. There is no other way Through the black glens Or the lens of an eye. A keeping, a stride, Into episodes that arise. Equidistant: The interior egg Until cracked open To stars some million Beats away. How did the chick With thanks to God Get yellow in the night Of its oval chamber. The fire of its colour Was not a colour yet. Now a green grenade Is tossed on the mighty Shannon floor. Ahead of its invention, before its time. I would like an answer To my answer.
A Poem for Ciaran
The stroll from my cell along the path above the donkeys past a door open, a door shut and a strong smell of wood and cigarettes ends where music helps white marguerites cut through the masonry. * Dark for words with a clicking wren a yellow tit and over the clover a shovel and a rustle of grain. He’s training calves with shouts and food to follow him to another field before the second bell. * Broom loops over the buttercups.
The Paris Review - Primrose for X - The Paris Review
By Fanny Howe May 16, 2023 Poetry William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen).
Remembrance: William Corbett -- A Poet of Landscape, Weather, and Consciousness
Some people fled William Corbett’s bravura; others stayed, laughing. By Fanny Howe William Corbett, poet and teacher, died this summer on August 10 in Greensboro, Vermont. Only a few years before, he left Boston and moved to Brooklyn to join his children, and there he had a wonderful time. But in his last weeks, he still called Boston “home”. Bill loved art and life, food and friends, the Red Sox and movies. His memory was phenomenal and his presence too.
A Story of Supernatural Kindness
In 1994, poet Fanny Howe was travelling in the UK and working intermittently. She spun this experience into London-rose, a poetic and philosophic meditation on alienation, labor, and everyday life. The book is being published for the first time this month by Semiotext(e). Below is a brief dispatch from her journey. —The Editors Been on the road for days—Hull, Sheffield, here—visiting liaison people, long drives through mottled Yorkshire snowing.
Indivisible, New Edition
From Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Last of a series of philosophical and personal Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty. Distributed for Semiotext(e) Endorsement Small Arrow “In hate with her husband and in love with God, Henny decides to have a life that really matters. Fanny Howe likes Catholicism for its contradictions.
Office Politics, by Fanny Howe
From London-rose, which was published last month by Semiotext(e). I’m embarrassed by the bitterness I am feeling. It’s as if I had been sipping poison for the past ten years and it was now beginning to work. It has something to do with my American self as a power-mad machine and even more to do with the disappointments of a life now reaching self-judgment. Something to do with family life—my own childhood.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Poet and activist Dawn Lundy Martin earned a BA at the University of Connecticut, an MA at San Francisco State University, and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her poetry collections include Discipline (2011), chosen by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Prize, and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), which was selected for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Margo
Find and share the perfect poems. Can she be planted where the corner of the garden’s rocks are down? I would like bleeding heart or fuchsia to redden the banks In their brief seasons. Rain, rain, Irish rain. Diamonds on the stamens when the sun goes blind. And sweet pea, pale pink, pale blue, perfume. Please, if you can, make sure there is an ash tree, young and tight and green. And bring back the smell of turf for the burning. Of her. Of me. Copyright © 2021 by Fanny Howe.
Celan’s Ferryman
This conversation appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Click here to read the rest of the Paul Celan folio. When I first met the poet and translator Pierre Joris as a colleague at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1990s, he was already deep into his engagement with Paul Celan’s work. He has now been wrestling with Celan for more than 50 years.
The Ascent: Out in the Cold
Rybak, the tougher of the two, knows their whereabouts, and Sotnikov, the weaker one, follows him. They go to a house Rybak fondly remembers for the woman in it and a night he spent with her. It is now ashes, ruin, the bed broken in the rubble. Rybak is a tender man who loves life as something under his control. Sotnikov is afraid of the world. Together they eat dried raspberries out of the cups of their hands. They walk on through the ever-deepening snow toward other houses.
October 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
Dear Readers, This is my last “Exemplars.” I’ve loved reading poetry books each and every day for my monthly column and reviewing poetry for more than seven years for the Independent. Thank you (and them) for being with me. ~ Grace Cavalieri Things come and go Then let them – Robert Creeley ***** Love and I by Fanny Howe. Graywolf Press. 80 pages. While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) by Raquel Salas Rivera; art by Mariana Isabel Ramos Ortiz. Birds, LLC. 96 pages.
"2011" A Poem by Fanny Howe
October 8, 2019 By Fanny Howe On the last bus from Dublin to Limerick Raindrops pelted the landscape And held little photos Of aluminum crutches in each drop Rolling down the glass. These were buildings built On phony loans that bankrupted The country. Pharmaceuticals And cheap hospital Industry styles and ghost estates. There were only two people on the bus Plus the driver and a baby In a cradle shaped like a quiver. Everywhere I look, my thoughts grow wild.
Poems | From ‘The First Church’
One dawn I crawled out of the gutter Into the public: just a woman in tears. A group of children was snoozing nearby. Don’t wake us up! They cried as if they were half-alive. I kneeled on my rug and swatted the air. Sandwiches and small canteens were spilled nearby. Flies delivering maggots gathered around I hate buzzing sounds I said to the kids. Shut up, a little boy cried, I’m dreaming. * * * Neon clothes hangers brighten the laundromat. One boy naps face up on a bench.
The Definitions by Fanny Howe
Monostich: a long sentence Sternum: a little chest Heart: upside down Location of the unconscious: Empty window seat Horizon: gone at night Thought: given Prison: a perversion — Our earth can’t live without holy rites. You can see this from the sky. Lots of hills to climb up and down. A straight ravine between. Snow figures engraved in stones. Show streaks of sun gone but The white rocks shrink and grow Grave at sunset. Turn to the right And you will fall to the left.
Night Philosophy, by Fanny Howe | Conjunctions — The forum for innovative writing
The clatter of rain has a personal meaning. This is the time to meditate or write down your dreams. But the lover can do neither, can only wander From room to room trying not to spill what’s so precious. Around the lover are myriad sounds Thoughts shine through like water. Forms, shapes, colors, stations are glorified in the morning. Indecipherable, almost transparent. Fear of loss takes root in the blood. Words form, interpretations. Miracles: no one there where someone was.
What Did You See? by Fanny Howe
I saw the shrouds of prisoners like baptismal gowns buried outside the cemetery. On the canvas frills exhaled singed wool and cardboard. The angels arrived as lace. Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue from a small cut. • The veil has been ripped from the skin where it was burned in. The skin is the veil, the baby-material, imprinted on, as if one dropped the handkerchief and it was one’s wrist. The cuff is frightening. Stuffed onto oil. Water-stains might fence its ghost in.
Bewilderment by Fanny Howe
What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics. I have learned about this state of mind from the characters in my fiction--women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
But I, too, want to be a poet to erase from my days confusion & poverty fiction & a sharp tongue To sing again with the tones of adolescence demanding vengeance against my enemies, with words clear & austere To end this tumultuous quest for reasonable solutions to situations mysterious & sore To have the height to view myself as I view others with lenience & love To be free of the need to make a waste of money when my passion, first and last, is for the ecstatic lash of the poetic line “But...
Near Miss by Fanny Howe - Poems | Academy of American Poets
I almost met you On a Saturday In Gloucester. The wind blew easterly. There was a jar of mums On a table near the window. Their yellows were calling To each other. Place-names Were put back In the pencil drawer Before I noticed your shadow. The author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, Fanny Howe received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her collection Selected Poems.
Paris Review - Tapestry
INTERVIEWER How did you feel about being classed as a minimalist? BEATTIE None of us have ever known what that means. Carver was incensed by it! If you look at what the term originally referred to, in painting and sculpture of the seventies, there is no analogy to what was going on in certain new writers of the time. Are my sentences like Raymond Carver’s? They simply are not, sentence by sentence, and I can’t see that any work is built except word by word, sentence by sentence.
Paris Review - My Enemy
By Carlos Fuentes Carlos Fuentes was interviewed on a snowy December day at his home in Princeton, New Jersey—a large Victorian house in the old residential section. He is a tall, heavyset man, dressed on that winter's day in a turtleneck sweater and jacket. The Fuenteses' house was lightly heated in the European manner, and felt chilly. A Christmas tree stood in the drawing room. His two young children were out ice skating with Mrs. Fuentes.
Unexpected women
Where are all the Catholic women? Women make up half the church. They are religious education teachers and altar servers, music directors and business administrators, vowed religious and mothers and wives. Women serve in parish nurseries, they lead Catholic universities, and they minister to college students. And yet, despite this, theologians, laypeople, and Pope Francis can all agree on one thing: We need to do better at recognizing the importance of women in the life of the church.
Loneliness by Fanny Howe - Poems
Loneliness is not an accident or a choice. It’s an uninvited and uncreated companion. It slips in beside you when you are not aware that a choice you are making will have consequences. It does you no good even though it’s like one of the elements in the world that you cannot exist without. It takes your hand and walks with you. It lies down with you. It sits beside you. It’s as dark as a shadow but it has substance that is familiar. It swims with you and swings around on stools.
Poetry - NYTimes.com
Muench’s brief fifth collection, composed of short poems all titled “Wolf Cento,” would not be out of place beside “True Blood,” “Twilight” (or Team Jacob, anyway) and other popular fantasies of escaped inner monsters.
Learned
And all the ancients are in it still. Both brain and heart need oxygen, one more extremely than the other. My fourth infant was an orphan who lived between my ears. Its cries could only be heard when it echoed around the pump. Another infant lived like an octopus fully exposed with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought. A heart is a brain that is only trying to think without any defense. The tentacle is a brain too. And its adaptable jelly’s just as intelligent as human blood.
The Ascent
Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko WINGS: TAKING OFF Of all the dazzlingly talented filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union, Larisa Shepitko has remained one of the least widely known. While many of her film school contemporaries, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov…
The Cenotaph
I want to leave this place unremembered. The gas stove is leaking and the door of the refrigerator stained with rust. The mugs are ugly and there are only two forks. The walls are black and soft, the bed a balloon of night-clothing. The stairwell sloped to a dragger’s pace. There are big windows with blind-slats dusty and gray. Street life goes all night and at dawn freedmen shout and laugh outside the kitchen. Where does life begin and end? In the lamb or the cotton? My pillow is my friend.
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