IN THE SPIRIT THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS: FOR FANNY HOWE

I so loved Fanny, loved every time I was in her company. I am so grateful I got to see her this past April. Whenever I saw her, I’d say, “Hi Mom.” I’m not sure she always liked it, but I did it anyway. It was a way of showing affection, it’s a Massachusetts thing: if you don’t tease someone a little, you don’t really love them. What can I say?

But there was something deeper, too. I called her “Mom” because, in some mysterious but real way, she was the mother of us all—the mother of a world she insisted must be lived through, in her words—radical love—the love she never lost sight of.

Fanny was at home with paradox and leaned into the reciprocal and radiant forces of beauty and fallibility. She never aestheticized the lowly; she places that humble truth inside us. Emotion isn’t on display in Fanny’s work; rather, it is revealed from within. I love the repeated acknowledgment throughout her writing that there’s something larger than what can be said—but what we say can bring us closer to it.

To me, it seemed she wore her nerves on the outside, like a small, fierce bird. That slight tremor carried into her poetry—the skipping cadence of her always surprising line, always uncanny mind.

It was like the skipping cadence of a heart preparing to go into battle.

Her work was always in a kind of contest with the world, with suffering, with doubt, with her own faith and yet she could express this contest through an enlightened childlike wonder—that to see and to be is an act of constant discovery as she wrote feverishly in every genre.

Fanny mastered so many forms in order to confront the unholy turmoil of the state of things. She wrote a lyric of reality that enacts a vital intervention with theology, motherhood, gender, race, and politics. We can take solace in the way her poems move fluidly from doubt to devotion, from salient political critique to the miraculous.

Hers was an embodied wisdom, articulate, brilliant, and precariously lived.

There is a dignity throughout her work—a dignity born of her affinity for the wild and ungoverned. She found grace in naming the crises of those outside the frame of power. That naming, that care, was her life’s project and from it, we come to understand the core of her true and heterodox Catholicism.

I grew up hard-core Catholic myself. Although I am lapsed, Catholicism was something we shared, a kind of sublime fatalism. But we could also laugh about it. She had a great laugh and took joy in irreverent humor. The bawdier the better. My favorite thing was to make her laugh uncontrollably. I might miss that most of all.

The kindness that she showed me when I was young I can never forget. I met Fanny in the late 80s when I was 27, just three months past a near-fatal heroin addiction. I was trying to move beyond the life of an addict on the streets of the Lower East Side. At the hospital, I’d been told I was dying of malnutrition; my liver was failing; I weighed 149 pounds.

I was tender in body, mind, and spirit, to say the least. She quickly took me under her wing and showed me great decency and without any judgement whatsoever. Implicitly, she understood where I was at and even found a grace in it all, telling me it was ok, even a good thing, that I took my death-seeking insanity all the way to the edge—that I had gone to the furthest extreme and could come back. She reminded me that the church’s greatest sinners were often their greatest saints. She showed me there was strength to be found in my ruin.

I had left the city and moved back home to the Berkshires to remake my life and devote myself to o•blēk, the little magazine I had started. We had initially met because of o•blēk. I wrote her to see if she had any work I could publish. From the very start, Fanny’s work was essential to that project.

During those few years before she moved to San Diego, I would come to Boston from time to time to visit, go for walks, go to the movies. From her insistence, I gave my first proper reading with her at a gallery there. After hearing my work, she took me to the Trident Bookshop and bought me the Selected Poems of John Wieners. She told me she felt that I would find an affinity with his work. We would often talk on the phone and when she asked me what I thought of the Wieners, I tried to bluff and said, “it’s great.” She quickly responded, “you haven’t read it.” I was busted. Of course, when I did pick that magnificent book up, I never closed it.

We would also send each other poems. Over the course of about a week or more, day by day, Fanny sent me a series. The opening phrases of it provided me deep comfort when I was first recovering and has carried me through dark times over the course of my life. I keep these words close like a kind of mantra or talisman:

“In the spirit there are no accidents, god is already ahead and waiting: the future is full.”

To live one’s faith doesn’t just help, it’s everything. The choice is real, and we choose to read Fanny Howe because her work has always spoken and continues to speak to the enlightened core of our being here, of my being here when I’m lost in her song: