Fanny Howe Explained

Fanny Howe
Birth Name:Fanny Quincy Howe
Birth Date:15 October 1940
Birth Place:Buffalo, New York, U.S.
Children:3 (including Danzy Senna)
Relatives:Mary Manning, Susan Howe, and R. H. Quaytman
Awards:2005 Griffin Poetry Prize; 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Fanny Howe (born October 15, 1940, in Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1] [2] Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose.[3] Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.[3]

Howe has received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize[4] by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California.[5] In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize.[6] She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She is professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life, education and marriage

Howe was born in Buffalo, New York. Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe was then teaching at the state university law school. When her father Mark De Wolfe Howe left to join the fighting in World War II, her mother, Irish playwright Mary Manning, took Howe and her older sister Susan Howe to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Their younger sister Helen was born after their father's return from the war.) There the family lived through the children's childhoods.[7]

Her father became a colonel and served in Sicily and North Africa. After the war he went to Potsdam as a legal adviser in the Allies' reorganization of Europe.[8] Returning to peacetime, her father continued his work as a lawyer and became a professor at Harvard Law School.

Howe's mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin for some time, before coming to the United States in 1935. She also wrote several plays to be performed there and at the Gate Theatre.[8] Her maternal aunt was Helen Howe, a monologuist and novelist. Her sisters are Susan Howe, who also became a notable poet, and Helen Howe.

Later recalling her early ambitions to be a poet, Fanny Howe attended Stanford University for three years. She was briefly attracted by the political activism, and communism. In 1961—the year she left Stanford—she married Frederick Delafield. They had no children and divorced two years later.[9]

As a civil rights activist in the 1970s, she met and married fellow activist Carl Senna. They also shared the literary world. Of African-American-Mexican descent, he is also a poet and was one of the youngest editors of a notable journal.

They had three children in four years. Their middle child, Danzy Senna, became a novelist and essayist. She draws from her biracial family and her experience, exploring issues of race and class in the US. Howe and Senna separated when the children were young, and had a bitter divorce.

Writing career

Howe is one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. Her writing career began during the 1960s with two paperback original "pulp" novels, published under the pseudonym Della Field.[8] Known as "Nurse Novels", one book featured a nurse in the Vietnam War while the other was about a nurse living in San Francisco.[10]

These were not typical of her later works in poetry and prose. Some of her novels came close to her poetry in using experimental techniques and an abbreviated language. Howe had long studied the writings of Edith Stein and Simone Weil, and sometimes pursues questions similar to theirs. She converted to Catholicism at the age of 40.[11]

As Zack Schlosberg writes in Cleveland Review of Books, "Suffering and seeking are two major subjects of Howe's fiction...", which he also found in her novel London-rose, written in the 1990s but not published until 2022.[11]

Howe has continued to publish novels throughout her career, including Lives of the Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005). She has also continued to publish essays. Some of her essays have been collected, including The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003)

Poet Michael Palmer says:

Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the "city on a hill". As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty." Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof.[12]

Joshua Glenn in The Boston Globe wrote:

Fanny Howe isn't part of the local literary canon. But her seven novels about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and '70s.[13]

Howe's prose poems, "Everything's a Fake" and "Doubt", were selected by David Lehman for the anthology Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present (2003).[14] Her poem "Catholic" was selected by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 volume of The Best American Poetry.[15]

Howe's Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. On the Ground was on the international shortlist for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. Howe received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.[4]

She was a judge for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Howe has taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University.

Publications

Poetry

Fiction

Young adult fiction

Essays

Reviews

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: Zimmer, Melanie . Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History : A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, Volume 2 . Fanny Quincy Howe . 427–430 . https://books.google.com/books?id=agfvVQnBu9MC&pg=PA427 . Byrne . James Patrick . Coleman . Philip . Jason Francis . King . ABC-CLIO . 2008 . 978-1-85109-614-5.
  2. Web site: 2005 Shortlist - Fanny Howe . 2011-06-27 . The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
  3. Web site: Foundation . Poetry . 2022-07-13 . Fanny Howe . 2022-07-14 . Poetry Foundation . en.
  4. Web site: April 14, 2009 . Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko Receive Major Literary Awards from Poetry Foundation . 2011-06-27 . The Poetry Foundation.
  5. Web site: Fanny Howe. National Book Foundation .
  6. https://thebookerprizes.com/node/4394/ "Fanny Howe"
  7. Web site: Fanny Howe . The Poetry Foundation . 2011-06-27.
  8. Web site: Fanny Howe on Race, Family, and the Line Between Fiction and Poetry - Literary Hub. November 2016 . 3 November 2016.
  9. Web site: Fanny (Quincy) Howe . encyclopedia.com . 2012-06-14.
  10. Interview with Fanny Howe . 2023-02-21 . The White Review. 29. October 2020 . Fiona Alison. Duncan. en-US.
  11. Web site: Out of the Seeming Blue: On Fanny Howe's London-rose. Schlosberg . Zack. Cleveland Review of Books. 8 Dec 2023. 8 Oct 2024.
  12. Web site: Fanny Howe . 2011-06-27 . The Academy of American Poets.
  13. News: Bewildered in Boston . The Boston Globe . Joshua . Glenn . March 7, 2004. Subscription required.
  14. Book: Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present . Lehman . David . 2003 . Fanny Howe . Simon and Schuster . 978-0-7432-2989-0 . https://books.google.com/books?id=RzunYckU4woC&pg=PA135 .
  15. Book: https://books.google.com/books?id=58J6YcsJuloC&pg=PA110 . Catholic . The Best American Poetry 2004. Hejinian . Lyn . Lyn Hejinian . David . Lehman . Simon and Schuster. 2004. 978-0-7432-5757-2 .
  16. Web site: Little Gods. Boston Review. 2015-10-20. Howe transfigures our quicksilver hungers and contemporary condition into an art true to "the secular rule of life." If Howe's voice is that of the escaping nymph managing our shipwreck, we might not be safer than in her tote, finding our hope in the empathy that is imagining.. October 20, 2015. Treseler. Heather.
  17. Web site: Books . 2024-04-25 . ARROWSMITH . en-US.

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