Mary Howe weaves dreams with her words as she says, “Poetry is a human art…we have been doing it from the beginning …when we sat around the fires, when we were singing lullabies to our children….nobody had to go to school to learn to write poems.”…And that is how she brought poems into the hustle bustle of the city of New York as the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014.
She reads a poem on her brother, eleven years her younger, who died when he was but 28 years of age: “I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter the world would be the space my brother’s body made….”
Howe says of her compilation of poems titled “What the Living Do,” John’s death is a minor part of the book, it is more about his life. The way he lived his last few days was a great teacher…people who are listening to me would probably have lived through irreparable loss…and we become the person who lives on…the great thing is that then we contain the beloved and the beloved stays with us all the time…”
Howe says the last poem in the book is about Buddy, her dog, so that it ends with vitality…There is continuity there for she says the dog symbolises life…and without drawing another breath, Howe draws talks of the time she spent with her daughter on the play ground. “It is all international politics there…”
As she swaddles between life and death, Howe reads in a leisurely manner and is attractive, but her words, simple and straight tear at the heart.
Mary as person
She has a collection called the “Life of Mary”. Howe says, “I grew up going to Mass and the musicality of that ritual is very much a part of me…the parables bring out the musicality of conversational speech…I love the sound of people talking with each other…all together makes the music I hear when a poem comes through…they are my architects: Mary, Joseph, Moses, Noah, Isaac, all these wonderful characters. …Master Eckart said something wonderful about Mary as a person. He said, “Perhaps Jesus is the fruit of Mary’s enlightenment,” Remarkable thing to say.
Another thing he said was, “Each of us can become a Mother of God. Mary in this series of poems is a young woman who is not a mother, not a wife, but a woman who is bewildered, searching for somethng and sometimes she thinks she sees it…” One poem she reads begins like this: “Once or twice or three times, I saw something, rise from the dust in the yard, like a soul of the dust…rise and hover like a veil in the sun, bellowing…as if I could see the wind itself. I thought I did it, but I didn’t…”
Poetry is a flow…and so Howe’s words flow on…