Poetry is a way for humans to relate to the world. More than heard or read, it is to be experienced. The poetry of Fanny Howe, a 68-year-old West Tisbury resident, has for all her life been translating the human condition from words to feeling.
Last month the Poetry Foundation awarded the Ruth Poetry Prize to Ms. Howe, with its $100,000 award. It is given annually to a United States poet for lifetime accomplishment. In announcing the Lilly Prize, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, said: "Fanny Howe is a religious writer whose work makes you more alert and alive to the earth, an experimental writer who can break your heart."
The prize-winning author of more than 20 books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays, Ms. Howe was introduced to poetry at an impressionable age. She began writing as a teenager as a way to make a space for herself in a creative and accomplished Cambridge family: her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, a distinguished law professor at Harvard; her Irish-born mother, Mary Manning, a playwright and actress who played in the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, and was a founder of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge; and her older sister, Susan Howe, a poet. For her 16th birthday, she received an anthology of modern poetry from her sister, and still brightens at the memory: "I just fell in love with it."
The experience was a major theme in many of her novels and essays. With their three children (her daughter, Danzy Senna is the author of the just released fraught family history, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"), their struggles for racial equality and for financial survival, the tone of her poetry broadened. The couple eventually divorced, and Ms. Howe, who has lived in London and Dublin, spent time in a monastery in Limerick, Ireland. But in the everyday details and challenges, she found her voice as a poet.
Ms. Howe carries a notebook around at all times for jotting down glimpses, moments, fragments - the sound of bird's feet on stone. "[The moment] becomes meaningful because of my paying attention to it," she says.
"There is no way you could get rid of poetry in the world because poetry is in everything," Ms. Howe says, and there is something of the religious in the statement. "Writing just is my life. There is nothing else," she says. "It's just the way I live in the world. There probably wouldn't have been any other way for me to have lived."
It has been a long time coming, but Fanny Howe's perseverance has been well rewarded.
She is considered one of the most recognized of American experimental poets (most recent work, "On the Ground," 2004, "Gone," 2003, "Selected Poems," 2000), and has also published several volumes of prose, most recently, "The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken," 2005, and the collection of literary essays, "The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life," 2003.
A professor emeritus of writing and literature at the University of California at San Diego, Ms. Howe received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for "Selected Poems," the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, along with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, and the California Council for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony.
As this year's winner of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Award, Ms. Howe is certain to garner a larger audience, but the poet has modest aspirations for her work: "I would love for just one or two of my poems to survive and give some people in another world altogether some insight and some pleasure. That would be my wish."
Now a grandmother of six, Ms. Howe, who is currently completing a new book of poems, simply says, "The only thing I've accomplished is perseverance."
Justen Ahren is a poet and writer living in West Tisbury.
