COVER Feature

COVER FE ATURE 90 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2016 Over the Years, Listening and Talking, with Marie Howe By Richard McCann About the writing of the poem, she says: Don’t hold back. She says: Write into things. Shine a light into the underlit places. About the writing of the poem, she says: The hard part is getting past the blah blah blah. Past the I think I think I think. Once, one New Year’s Eve in Provincetown, Heidegger, she says. Vorhanden. Objectively pres- maybe in the late 1990s, a bunch of us were back- ent. Present-at-hand. ing back home down Commercial Street in the Over the years, we have made an unintended snow. Mark Doty. Tony Hoagland. Maybe Nick habit of talking about poetry by talking about Flynn. Marie. And me. The snow had started to that snow. fall while we were huddled in a restaurant, laugh- She says: The things of the world don’t need ing and talking. As soon as we stepped out, we our language. Not in order to become more than could feel the winds pick up. The snowstorm was what they already are. turning into a blizzard. I’ve never had a mentor, not as a writer, except We had to link our arms, just so we could make maybe for Tillie Olsen, who used to tell me stories it down the street. from her life. Walking back one night from a lec- Then Tony called out, I know how each of you ture about the stages of grieving, for instance, not would write about this snow. He said: Mark, you’d long after her husband, Jack, had died, Tillie told see it as another sign of the transcendent. me, “All this big talk about grieving—but when One by one, Tony told all the rest of us, except Jack was dying, I felt like I was falling in love with Marie, how we’d write about the snow. I don’t him all over again.” remember what he said to Nick. Or to me. I’ve never had a mentor, that is, who taught Hey, Marie said. What about me? How would me about writing by talking about craft. I see the snow? But we’ve been talking now, Marie and I, for How would you see the snow? Tony said. Marie, more than twenty-five years, since first meeting you’re the only one who’d see it as snow. You see at the MacDowell Colony in June 1987. Not long the snow as snow. after her arrival, she was summoned during din- Later that night, she whispered to me: Is that ner to the shared pay phone in Colony Hall to supposed to mean I’m stupid, that I see the snow learn that she had just been selected by Margaret only as snow? And then again, some years later, Atwood as a winner of the National Poetry Series when we were in a café, recalling once more that for her first collection, The Good Thief. snowy night, as from time to time we do, she And a few nights after that, she was summoned said: The snow doesn’t have to be a metaphor. to the pay phone again, this time to learn that her Isn’t the snow already brimming with the full- brother John had been diagnosed with AIDS. John. ness of itself? Johnny. The younger brother whose dying she wit- And then again, just a week or so ago, talking nesses in such steady and unflinching detail in together on the phone: Maybe the snow is like her book What the Living Do. Reading those poems, Marie and Jack, 2015, Rhinebeck, NY PHOTO BY GRACE INAN HOWE PROVINCETOWN ARTS.ORG 91 with their pained and loving attentiveness, spoken in a plain language without swag, without increase or diminution, it’s hard not to think of Just Now what Roethke wrote: “I recover my tenderness by long looking.” Most dinnertimes after that call, she sat in the cramped phone closet, talking with doctors or her family. I carried her dinner to her My brother opens his eyes when he hears the door click on a white china plate. open downstairs and Joe’s steps walking up past the meowing cat That was the summer I got sober, white-knuckling it alone in my studio in the woods, each day rewriting the single paragraph I’d man- and the second click of the upstairs door, and then he lifts aged to produce. Sometimes after dinner, Marie came to my studio to visit. Had we already recognized then what we’d become for each other his face so that Joe can kiss him. Joe has brought armfuls later? The Irish-Catholic almost-twins, born less than a year apart. The good brother and the good sister, raised in semi-matching postwar sub- of broken magnolia branches in full blossom, and he putters urban houses, with crucifixes and religious prints over the beds: “The in the kitchen looking for a big jar to put them in and finds it. Coronation of the Virgin,” “The Light of the World.” Somewhere—on the living room mantel, perhaps—prominently displayed: The Infant of Marie Prague. Michelangelo’s Pietà, the pierced, dead body of Christ cradled And now they tower in the living room, white and sweet, where in his mother’s lap. Deo vobiscum. Adeste Fidelis. John can see them if he leans out from his bed which I asked her one afternoon at MacDowell if she wanted to take a car ride. No plan. No destination. We were both ready to escape ourselves he can’t do just now, and now Joe is cleaning. What a mess for a while. We drove west on NH-101, with Mount Monadnock in the distance, you’ve left me, he says, and John is smiling, almost asleep again. through small New Hampshire towns, Dublin, Marlborough, where the ponds and lakes—broad and flat and deep—hugged the roads. When we —from What the Living Do finally stopped at one, we removed our shoes and rolled up our pant legs before wading into the water. For a while, we just stood there. I remember I wanted a drink, though I knew I couldn’t have one. I looked at Marie, who was remembering that John had AIDS. Each of us more than a little shell-shocked. A Once, Marie and our friend Michael came down to D.C. from New little more than lost. York to visit me in the hospital bed I’d been occupying for long time, A passenger jet flew overhead, a small speck, bound to elsewhere. recovering from my liver transplant surgery. Then Marie said: Here we are. Standing ankle-deep in silver water, We come with gifts! Michael said, pulling shut the curtain that with a jet flying overhead. separated my bed from the one beside it. Yes, we’re here, I thought. What more was there to say? They opened a plastic bag from which they began withdrawing the Years later, speaking of the poem, she says: It’s in the silence between things they’d bought. A small papier-mâché mountain, fitted with a people where things occur. plastic tunnel through which an HO model train could pass. A string She says: At the heart of the poem, there’s always something that’s of white Christmas lights. A Plasticville farmhouse. A small box marked unsayable. It’s not unsayable because it’s secret or taboo. It’s unsayable “HO Gauge Realistic Trees.” because it can’t be reduced. I closed my eyes, as they requested, so they could assemble it all before me. A few minutes later, Michael said I could look. And there it was, a tableau vivant, arranged atop my overbed hospital table: Into the papier-mâché mountain they’d stuffed the white Christmas lights, which glowed from deep inside the tunnel. Beside the tunnel, just a stone’s throw, they had erected the tidy, yellow farmhouse. Beside the farmhouse, in two rows, they’d set the HO gauge trees. “This is where we live together,” Michael said. “Yes,” Marie said. “This is where we live together, by the illuminated tunnel, in the yellow farmhouse, with six realistic trees.” What was it she once told me? She said: Let the poem itself become the field of experience. It’s not something you can figure out and then write. Of the writing of the poem, she said: I want to capture what is irreducible. But the irreducible can’t be wrought. It can only be held in the poem, this nest of words, a bit of time that’s stilled but not stopped. RICHARD MCCANN is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems. He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and The Best American Essays 2000. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. This article was published in a slightly different form in the Honest Pint, a subscription (left to right) Martin Moran, Marie Howe holding her daughter, Grace Inan, Richard McCann, series from Tavern Books edited by Matthew Dickman. Donna Masini, and Tony Hoagland in Provincetown in 2003 92 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2016 FEATURE Marie Howe’s Later Work By Liz Rosenberg MANY YEARS AGO, Marie Howe was attending a reading with a friend—she was then herself a schoolteacher, teaching high-school English—where the woman at the podium declared Mariethat she was writing her “spiritual autobiography.” I want to do that, Marie whispered to her friend.

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