MY FANNY HOWE

It’s hard to write about Fanny Howe in the past tense, she and her writing seem so vividly present. She’s a shape-shifter, difficult to categorize. She had affinities and friendships within the second-generation New York School poets and the Language poets, but didn’t really fit in either of those groups. In fact, she was anti-categorical. The fact that she was so difficult to place may have somewhat obscured her importance. She was a lyric poet who also wrote novels, an unorthodox religious poet, a political poet, a nature poet at times, at times a love poet.

The persona she adopted in her poems was often a kind of wandering monk; sometimes a single mother with children and grandchildren in tow: “the neo-neolithic urban nomad school of poetry / is almost for lone mothers only.” I noticed only in typing this that it’s very nearly iambic. The cluster of n’s in the first line and m’s in the second is also quite audible. (I have often told friends that I think Fanny has one the best “ears” of any poet of her generation.) It’s also true that her focus on precarity and displacement (she always identified with the underdog) makes her an especially important poet today in this era of displaced refugees fleeing war or climate change, seldom welcome where they find themselves.

Of course, Fanny is not just running away in her poems; she is also seeking an absent lover (often) almost indistinguishable from God—as well as a mostly silent God Him or Itself. As she writes in “The Splinter” from Gone,

The word “up” there suggests that it may be God at the other end of the rope. I like the way she deflates the potential solemnity of that silence with the word “shinnying.” “Shinny” is what a child does climbing a tree or rope. It’s a bit mischievous. She’s pulling on God’s coattails. “Shinnying” makes her sound willful but small. The diminutive is another role she plays. And I want to point, once more, to what she does with sound—the way she makes near rhymes out of those two-syllable words with stresses on the first syllables: “homeless,“ “purpose,” and “silence,” each ending with an “es” or “us” sound.

In “Veteran” she writes,

I won’t belabor the sounds in those lines—though they are worth thinking about. I’ll just say that one can feel sympathy for the lost bird or pilot (the “wings”), but not for the “sweetheart of the iceberg” who is exactly where she wants to be, alone with the beauty of language—that wind that blows around each thing.

When I think of Fanny’s death, I would like to picture it as she did in “Some Day”: