In 1987 her debut collection The Good Thief was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series.[2] Her subsequent collections include What the Living Do (1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), and Magdalene (2017), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.[3] In 2024 W. W. Norton & Company published her New & Selected Poems,[4] while Bloodaxe Books published it's UK companion, What the Earth Seemed to Say, to critical acclaim.[5]
I grew up in the Catholic religion, in a large Irish-Catholic family. I was the oldest daughter out of nine children. All of my sisters had nine or ten kids, and all of my father’s sisters and brothers also had nine or ten kids, so I had literally over a hundred first cousins. It was a tribal childhood, and the Catholicism was at the center of it.[6]
In the 1960’s Howe enrolled in the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a socially progressive, parochial all-girls school, where the nuns centered what Theology has to do with “social justice, service, questioning, and authority.”[6] Howe would later observe that “it was there that I began to appreciate that spirituality could be rigors, imaginative and an essential part of living in the physical world.”[6] During this time she would spend “hours lying in the bathtub” reading from The Lives of Saints, which would become her first example of “women who were the subjects of their own lives, not objects.”[6]
Howe would later attend the University of Windsor, a historically Roman Catholic university in Ontario, Canada, where she earned a BA in English. She would subsequently relocate to Groton, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a journalist, and later a high school English teacher. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the Summer Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College, where she had applied to study Philosophy, but ended up enrolling in a creative writing workshop.[7]
In 1981 Howe relocated to Concord, Massachusetts. When reflecting on this time later in life, Howe would note that
Every day I would walk to the old North Bridge and visit Thoreau’s Grave and Emerson’s grave. I was so lonely, lonely, lonely. And I learned how to sit still. And how to sit in a chair and bang on a typewriter. You know. You have to learn how to sit still. I didn’t know how to do that. It took me a long time. I applied to graduate schools and I went. It was a miracle.[7]
She worked briefly as a newspaper reporter in Rochester and as a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. Howe did not devote serious attention to writing poetry until she turned 30. At the suggestion of an instructor in a writers' workshop, Howe applied to and was accepted at Columbia University where she studied with Stanley Kunitz and received her M.F.A. in 1983.[8][9]
Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.[12] In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems, What the Living Do; the title poem in the collection is a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: "I am living, I remember you."
Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. "John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely," she has said.[13]
In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.
Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.[14] Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.[15][16]
Marie Howe is praised for her poetry which captures the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of everyday life .[18] Her work explores the nature of the soul and the self through literary themes of life, death, love, pain, hope, despair, sin, virtue, solitude, community, impermanence, and the eternal.[19] Despite the strong themes in her writing, Howe subtly expresses these messages through the explanation of daily tasks and regular lifestyles in most of her poems.
Her first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was made philosophical and reflective with the incorporation of Biblical and mythical allusions. Margaret Atwood, who chose this book for the National Poetry Series, praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.”[18] Additionally, Stanley Kunitz noted, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” Such an esteemed review justified the selection of The Good Thief for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets.[20]
A year after the publication of her first poetry book (1989), Howe’s brother John died from AIDS. According to Howe in an AGNI interview, “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.”[18] Consequently in 1997, she published a second collection, What the Living Do, as an elegy for John which reflected a new style. Stripped of metaphors, her writing was described as “a transparent, accessible documentary of loss” by the Poetry Foundation.[18][19]
In 2008, Howe distanced herself from the personal narrative and returned to the spiritual style in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.[18] This is most representative of Howe’s style now, a balance between the ordinary and unordinary. It is best put by playwright Eve Ensler, who describes her poems as “a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.”[19]
Counting Time Like People Count Stars, (by Luis J. Rodríguezed, ed. by Spencer Reece, Foreword by Marie Howe, Afterword by Richard Blanco, Northwestern University Press, 2017) ISBN9781882688555
In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, (ed., with Michael Klein, Persea Books, 1995) ISBN9780892552085
