Fanny Howe - classics whose characters wrestle with serious political and metaphysical questions against the backdrop of urban, suburban, and rural America

Fanny Howe, Radical Love: Five Novels, Nightboat Books, 2006.


NIGHTBOAT BOOKS is proud to present this historic volume, a collection of five critically acclaimed novels by Fanny Howe, originally published between 1985 and 2001. Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History, and Indivisible are out-of-print and hard to find classics whose characters wrestle with serious political and metaphysical questions against the backdrop of urban, suburban, and rural America. Howe s fiction has been praised by writers, activists, and social thinkers alike from Paul Auster to Alice Walker to Robert Creeley. For this new publication, Howe has revisited and revised her novels to present an arresting and poetic portrait of life in the late twentieth century.

“I have not the least doubt that her work is parallel to Paul Auster’s… or any other writer thus whose books are not simply products for the market–albeit the work can reach a very large number of potential readers indeed. In Fanny’s case these will range from contemporary fellow writers questioning ways and means in their art and all who find their enterprise of interest, to those who feel themselves confronted with deeply ingrained questions of religion, person, society, gender, politics, which almost anyone alive at this moment is trying to answer.”—Robert Creeley

1. While reading Radical Love I was living close to the ocean and swimming every day. One afternoon I was feeling sad so I swam out farther than usual, surpassing all of my customary stopping-points, until I was so far out that I suddenly doubted if I’d be able to make it back. I recognized in what I was feeling the preliminary symptoms of panic; racing heart, flushed cheeks, repetitive thoughts about the panic I was feeling which only succeeded in increasing the panic. I floated on my back, trying to breath steadily. The stretch of beach I’d walked on only minutes earlier was now impossible to approach, a landscape which in its brazen totality had become not only remote but imaginary.
2.  I realized that the ocean was terrifying because it was the opposite of lonely; it was abundant. By traveling so far from the shore I’d become an indistinguishable element of that abundance. The terror of my slow, lucid ego-death coupled with the necessity of moving my legs to keep myself alive was a stronger feeling than any kind of loneliness I’d ever experienced.
3. I arrived at Fanny Howe through an interview she did with Kim Jensen of Bomb Magazine.
4 . In the interview she describes her poetics as a reaching towards the ungraspable, the fragmentary, the bewildering. Her preoccupation is with the bentness of time. The freakish all-possible of moments, the vastness of living in simultaneity. How can two people be in two places at the same time? Or: How do we express actions occurring simultaneously?
5. There is a rare precision to her words. They scrape softly and insistently at a very particular feeling. In feeling it for the first time I realized it was a feeling I had always felt. A familiar estrangement. Like seeing a stranger in a dream for the second time.
6. The feeling is intimate with the abject. Between subject and object, the barely separate, like a limb cast-off or a corpse. It follows that many of the subjectivities in her novels are displaced and marginal; madwomen, children, monks. Kristeva writes that the abject inherently exists apart from the symbolic order of language, as a trauma irreconciliable with subjecthood. Fanny Howe makes a language for which abjection is immanent (a new subjectivity?)
7. A Sensual Metaphysics. There’s a body-depth to her narratives, a sense of being weighted, but not weighed down.
8. “She went to the caravan on her sister’s black bike through the dark and felt this way the happiness of being a hard sea animal that machines its way gracefully through the ecstatic interiors of the outside world.”
9. “She began to harden with the first baby. A firm heel slid across the palm of her hand, under her navel, now like a moonsnail with a cat’s eye at its apex. Her wastes, and the baby’s, moved in opposite directions from the nutrients. Her breasts tightened to tips of pain. She entered her psyche daily on rising…”
10. How do you write from inside madness? Most accounts of people going insane seem to come from after or outside psychosis, stressing the role of narrative as a stabilizing and ultimately redemptive exercise. In these texts there is more of a return to madness through narrative. No one is saved and everyone is ecstatic.
11. How I feel about Fanny Howe, in general:

12. When she was in her twenties she ghost-wrote a book called West Coast Nurse, which was supposed to be a pulp romance novel. However, according to the reviews, it was an “unsual brooding book,” “psychologically sophisticated,” and very different from other novels in the genre.
13. Heidegger describes anxiety as what happens when “dasein” or Being, turns away from itself. Anxiety, unlike fear, is fundamentally directed at “being-in-the-world” itself rather than at any definitive entities “within-the-world.” This particular feeling is what first gives us access to “the world as world,” the world existing purely as itself.
14. “Growing old is growing wild. Going mad is growing old too fast.”
15. I recommend the essay, On Bewilderment.
It’s a thorough and beautiful text on Howe’s process.
16. Radical Love is a collection of five of Howes’ novels.
17. “Every act is holy because every act is holy.”
18. Meister Eckhart was a 13^th century theologian-mystic-philosopher who wrote in one of his sermons:
“Back in the womb from which I came, I had no god and merely was myself. I did not will or desire anything, for I was pure being, a knower of myself by divine truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else. And what I wanted, I was and what I was, I wanted, and thus, I existed untramelled by god or anything else.”
“God,” according to Eckhart, is the totality of all that exists, while “god” as a human construct is a singular omnipotent being. What we should do is pray to God to release us from our belief in god because really we are all God and God is nothing if not everything.
19. Fanny Howe writes that “Memory is God.” i.e. the internet, as a rhizomatic, constantly updated and morphing database of collective human material, is God?
20. However, there is something startlingly un-virtual about Howe’s writing. “icicles from eaves, and down the steep cliff the rolling river, touched by brutish blocks of ice and timber, reminded her of the word RELENTLESS.” This is more explicit example than I would like to give, but what I mean is that reading this text was a lesson in immanence, in how words can bind with erotic, sensual experience, in how a piece of text can home somewhere or deepen into touchable space.
21. What is “female” gendered or sexed writing? What is the difference between speaking about one’s experiences as a woman and speaking as a self understood as Woman, and embedded in the lifeworld of Woman? If all language is coded by the Patriarchy, how does a woman write as a woman?
22. Radical Love brought to mind Dana Schutz. I just found out about this artist, and she’s wonderful. She makes metanarrative pieces on “decomposing” or abject subjectivities. Check her out.
23. Also, Robert Creeley, who writes an extremely positive review on the back of the book:
“…no one more actively employs the strategies and possibilities of language than she does. I think this work has no competing instance I’m aware of. It is unique.”
24. While on a plane back to New York an older woman sitting next to me pointed at my Fanny Howe book and motioned with her hands that it was very large. This led to an hour long conversation about spirituality, suffering and love. She had this rare positivity about her, this effulgence. We were namesakes. I almost started crying a few times during our conversation. She told me to never forget that I was young and strong, and that life was an unbearable, beautiful thing.
25. “After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.” - Alexandra Boggs

In “The Middle”: Plot Suspension in Fanny Howe's “Itinerant” Fiction by Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd

 

Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. Graywolf Press, 2009.

Beautiful essays by Fanny Howe, a poet praised for her “private quest through the metaphysical universe . . . the results are startling and honest” (The New York Times Book Review)

 

Fanny Howe’s richly contemplative The Winter Sun is a collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America’s most original contemporary poets.

Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, Howe shows the origins and requirements of “a vocation that has no name.” She finds proof of this in the lives of others—Jacques Lusseyran, who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II; the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abbé Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them; the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Brontë; and the fifth-century philosopher and poet Bharthari. With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a Progress rather than a memoir.

The Winter Sun displays the same power as found in her highly praised collection of essays, The Wedding Dress, a book described by James Carroll as an “unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman’s life, and, always, the redemption of literature.”

Fanny Howe’s richly contemplative Winter Sun is a memoir of unusual depth and insight by one of America’s most original contemporary poets. In it, Howe offers a rigorous exploration of her fascinating journey of intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development.
Howe recalls her childhood days in the now vanished world of post-war Boston, with blue-stocking aunts and a mother pre-occupied with the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge. From her lawyer father, labeled “pink” in the McCarthy era for his work defending so-called communists, she inherited a life-long sense of social justice. Feeling unable to compete with her beautiful and talented sister, Fanny sought the inner life, where language was a constant resource.
  Through a collage of reflections on the lives of the thinkers and writers who have influenced her, Howe provides a unique insight into the fabric of her own mind. She writes with great compassion about Jacques Lusseyran who, though blind, wrote of finding his inner vision while incarcerated in a concentration camp during the Second World War. She is fascinated with the life of Simone Weil, whose rivalry with her dominant brother perhaps resonates with her own sibling rivalry. And Howe writes with awe of the single-minded quest of the prominent Scottish nun Sara Grant who spent decades teaching and studying in India.
Winter Sun, is no less than an account of Fanny Howe’s passionate engagement with the questions of the soul. The honesty and intelligence she brings to these questions is a rare gift to us all.

“[The Winter Sun] is full of wondering, noticing and empathetic efforts to weave connections between events and individuals and the cultures they inhabit.”—Los Angeles Times

“The book changes the boundaries of biography, autobiography, memoir, and autoethnography.  It is all of these at once. . . . With the sun falling on the pages as a living presence, Howe has expanded our knowledge of what it means to write (auto)biography.”—Janelle Adsit

“Howe is a constant explorer, an asker of difficult questions (some of which remain unanswerable).  What she does in Notes on a Vocation is clarify, at least for herself, the role of the poet in an age of lurking cynicism.  She shows the rest of us what it truly means to invest oneself in a way of life whose rewards are often hidden.”—Brock Kingsley

“[Fanny Howe’s] superb writing never fails to engage the reader, especially as the book develops into a manifesto of a life thoughtfully and richly lived.”—The Georgia Review 

Fanny Howe, The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken. Nightboat Books, 2005.

                 

In this brilliant work that transcends genre--lyric essay, prose poem, philosophical fiction--Fanny Howe pursues her realization that keen metaphysical inquiry is radically essential to everyday life. Howe adds the stunning new coda Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken to her earlier work The Lives of a Spirit. 

The quotidian brushes up against the infinite in her ongoing effort to answer ancient quetions: "Little word, who said me? Am I owned or free?" "With extraordinary self-scrutiny and complexity--and unmatchable musical poise and beauty--Fanny Howe examines our relationship with 'other' worlds, purgatories of various kinds: genetic, historical, theological. --Jorie Graham

Fanny Howe’s The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken does a few clever things in one artful swoop: it re-exposes poetry readers to a text published in 1987 and hitherto out-of-print (The Lives of a Spirit, Sun & Moon Press); it juxtaposes those words with a fresh work (Glasstown); and it introduces the new nonprofit publishing venture, Nightboat Books, an organization that “seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk.” All of these things rather color the reading experience. Howe’s work is deserving of such “important” context -- it is weird, lovely, resistant.
The fact that an older text and a newer one are merged in this elegant package is owed, in part, I’m sure, to Nightboat’s secondary goal: to bring quality out-of-print stuff back to life. But I don’t think the book is a duo-collection. In fact, the demarcation between Lives and Glasstown is barely there. The two exist quite naturally together, nearly as one long poem with little parts marked by slight shifts in narration (what Simone Weil might call an “inanimate I” latent in the voices of the poem) and the real and true passing of time (1987ish to 2005ish). Someone told me once that the poet Charles Wright was actually always working on the same long poem, its pieces being lego-ed on book by book. I like that. Maybe the dwelling space of these texts is simply siblings sharing a room. This notion bolsters my feeling that Howe is not merely a genre-bender, “transcend[ing] boundaries”; no, she is trickier than that. Howe is poetry all the way. But her hot-tempered faith in poetry causes a real flurry. Howe is writing poetry that advances the cause of writing. The collision of this kind of goal with such heady, but cloudy material (the possibility of impossibility, “apparitions of perfection,” the ordinariness of eternity and vice versa, the ache for language to do something other than fail/be broken) makes for a damaging read. “Obedience, like habit, makes time into a thing that you use.”
By “damaging” I mean spiritually challenging. I mean: Fanny Howe (who supposedly is the tamer, more shackled sister of poetry wild woman Susan Howe) is shifting the range of language in order to reflect the life of a spirit. She’s messing with reality. With faith. With the patterns of an unknown universe. As someone who is more apt to atheism, this poetry rattles the mind. Howe’s writing suggests that while language is ultimately a failed communal attempt at expression (a kind of collective folly), it is, nonetheless, the mode most available to us. It will get us closest to expression. It will most closely resemble, mimic, stand in for, this wispy little creature called the spirit. And that thing is unwieldy.
I like that Howe writes about the spirit in a way that privileges narration over lyricism. But she’s full of delicate turns, as well. And the narration is never clean. “When she faked being a dog, it was always with her head down, her tongue hanging out, bruised and beaten from floggings. She climbed the padded stairs on all fours, panting. Explain why he distressed me so. Can anything cauterize these fears till they grow numb as air?” The poems (or the big old poem of the whole book) are (is) a place in which one can do some existing, some resting, some thinking. Few poets are generous enough to offer such a space. Most require you to follow the little bouncing ball through the lines, and sing along. Howe just opens her spiritual existence like a guest bedroom where you get to choose the view and the smell of the linens. - Olivia Cronk



Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life. University of California Press, 2003.                 

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century--she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.
Whether discussing Weil, Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

 

"Fanny Howe draws the reader into her meditations on spiritual illuminations with a simplicity and an originality of vision and style that I find in no other contemporary work dealing with mysticism."—Etel Adnan

 

"Here we reach the quick: the cutting edge between faith and fiction. These are not sentences, they are surgical incisions; the whole book a signpost for the new century."—Mark Patrick Hederman

 "The Wedding Dress is the precious end product of an unique sensibility that combines faith, wisdom, experience and an uncompromising pursuit of beauty and truth."—Piers Paul Read "This is an ax of a book, like Kafka's, breaking through the ice of received wisdom, fake attitudes, piety. An unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature. The sharpened edge is Fanny Howe's love of the truth, which (after cutting) does indeed set free."—James Carroll "Fanny Howe's latest book is a primer for the mind America does not know it has. Her prose is utterly simple and truthful yet rings with the formal elegance of past centuries. These pages are a dazzling handbook on the riddles of language, breath and speech. At every moment in the book Fanny is present, precise, mischievous, awesome, a companion in arms to her readers. When she turns with us to address the Unknown, she brings us face to face as no other writer I know can do."—Mark Jay Mirsky "This is, without exaggeration, an extraordinary book. The essays have the concentration and obliquity and suggestiveness of prose poems. The sentences are characteristically short and direct, grammatically simple and seemingly to the point. But so much thinking and responding and feeling have been distilled into these deceptively straightforward statements that they often have the tantalizing and paradoxical witchery of runes. There is no one else like Fanny Howe on the contemporary literary scene."—Albert Gelpi "An important book for anyone interested in contemporary literature and the role of the artist in the present. These essays on the art enact a vital intervention with race, gender, faith, motherhood, and poetry. Fanny Howe uses Doubt to smash conventional systems of belief and Bewilderment to investigate political injustice and to shape a humane response, displaying an embodied wisdom that is both brilliantly articulate and precariously lived."—Peter Gizzi "I have never before had such a physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual experience while reading one book. Fanny Howe makes words reality, thought beauty, and learning meditation. I went with her from 'Bewilderment' to agreeing that this book is 'a path' and 'like a plot--once formed, it seems to welcome and pull you into it.' And I am grateful."—Frances Smith Foster

 

Fanny Howe, Selected Poems. University of California Press, 2000.

One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.
Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.
Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.
The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:

Zero built a nest

in my navel. Incurable

Longing. Blood too—


From violent actions

It's a nest belonging to one

But zero uses it

And its pleasure is its own —from The Quietist

A Hymn

Fanny Howe by Kim Jensen

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle,” Fanny Howe explained in a 2004 interview with the Kenyon Review. Indeed, more than a subject or theme, the process of recording experience is central to Howe’s poetry. Her work explores grammatical possibilities, and its rhythms are generated from associative images and sounds.
Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). Critic Jordan Davis lauds the manner in which revelatory thought is presented in Gone: “Howe enacts what the South American poet Jorge Guinheime called hasosismo, or the art of the fallen limb, in which startling insights emerge and are subsequently concealed.” Critic Kimberley Lamm, discussing the poem “Doubt,” writes, “Fanny Howe’s work is unique in contemporary poetry for its exploration of religious faith, ethics, politics, and suffering.”
Her Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacDowell Colony. In 2001 and 2005, Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2008 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is also the author of several novels and prose collections, most recently The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and Nod (1998). She has written short stories, books for young adults, and the collection of literary essays The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003).
Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught for almost 20 years in Boston, at MIT, Tufts University, and elsewhere, before taking a job at the University of California at San Diego. She lives in Massachusetts. In 2012 she was the inaugural visiting writer in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. - www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/fanny-howe