Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe Poems

Fanny Howe Biography

Fanny Howe (born October 15, 1940 in Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She has written many novels in prose collection. Howe was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize,presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. She was a judge for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her father was a lawyer, and her Irish-born mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin for some time. Her sister is Susan Howe, who also became a poet. Fanny Howe grew up with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She attended Stanford University for three years, and in 1961—the year she left Stanford—she married Frederick Delafield, whom she divorced two years later. As a Civil Rights activist, she met and married the activist Carl Senna in the 1970s, who is of African-Mexican descent and is also a poet and writer. They are the parents of the novelist Danzy Senna, who writes about growing up biracial in the 1970s and 80s in her novel Caucasia. Howe and Senna also had two other children, Lucien Quincy Senna, and Maceo Senna. She has taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University . She is professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Currently she lives in Boston.)

The Best Poem Of Fanny Howe

Three Persons

The fields are infertile
as far as I can tell.
Their winter systems
sparkle like the diamonds
that pelt Neptune.

Limpid silvers
reflect in the dark
museums and theaters
back in town.

To them we run
to elevate our eyes
to a well-shaped ethics.
Colors are supplied
by our nervous minds.

•

Towards a just
and invisible image
behind each substance
and its place in a sentence
you must have been walking.

Well-defended, best
when lost from wanting.

Be like grass, she told me,
lie flat, spring up.

•

We drop the shadows where they are then
return to them
when the light has grown heavy.

You'll take your time lugging the weight into our room.
Or stand over there in the shade.

We've never been too sure that we exist as the earth does.
We're most at home in water
that soaks up the letters in our brains.

It could be we have been dry too long.

A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it.

•

I see them through the slats
and crack of the open window.
A cold rain. Leaves flipped
and palsied.

The river is brown near
the sand, loose banks and twigs
stick at the edge and a lilac's
silhouette of a child I love.


How in the dark hole can I hide
if   I can't get outside?


Then I won't remember
what I did to deserve it.


That arch and bridge
will form a shape of repentance.

If  I'm hanging,
then judgment has been passed.

And I am hanging

upside down
head swinging towards the moon.

Years of  inversion.
A face in a mirror displaced
by its position outside silver.

And so?
Next will come muscle,
a little grief   but no shoulder.

•

You're learning how to be a unit
with an infinite in its attic.

It's not difficult.

Light is the last message.


White streaks like oil paint
are the first to appear along the wet railing.

Next similar colors
correspond by chance.


We would rather be (die) with total strangers than with partial ones
we realized in the elevator going down.
It was the only time that day that we were as alone as we were awake.


Sensing a just
and impartial ghost
close to each living thing
I could see the genius

of  institutional religion.
Examine your conscience.
Confess in darkness
and take away a task.

Soon you'll wash off flesh
scented by its parallel past.
What were your feet thinking in their hurry
to connect the parts?

Get the children to the other side!
What children? You were the one running.

There was never any other.

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