Some writers sum up working with language as an act of finding the best way to express experience. What are your thoughts on language as the medium in which you work?

In my crib as child I could stand up and look at something framed on the nursery wall — the first “art” I remember — it held mystery and clarity at the same time. It was what is called a rebus story — a story (or a poem) told in text and pictures — and although I can’t remember what that text was about, or any of the pictures, I recall the physical feeling of looking at it, a warm rich feeling — private and public at once, and real. Real is the word — and the realness was between us — that framed picture/text and me.

Marie Howe
COURTESY OF Blue Flower Arts

Do you feel that many poets settle into a certain sensibility? How do you keep your own creative process fresh?

I don’t really know how you mean “settle into a certain sensibility.” Patti Smith has been wearing that white shirt and black jacket for years but when she opens her mouth — kaboom! I just heard her read and sing Blake last year at the Morgan Library and left dizzy and jubilant.

Emily Dickinson didn’t really ever change her style.

Sometimes someone finds a way — and through that way comes fire and light — for ever.

Sometimes, after some time, that way is closed.

I bang my head against the wall until I come to a place where the wall gives way to something else… it’s rare when that happens — and it hardly happens, and when and if it does — it feels like a miracle.

“Mary’s Argument” begins with the line, “To lead the uncommon life is not so bad.” This piece so skillfully expresses how the miraculous and the mundane are intertwined — if indeed they are not ultimately one and the same — and speaks of transcendence. What was the impetus behind this poem?

I’d write Christmas plays for my family and ask my brothers and sisters to be in them — we’d present them to our parents and any company that came over on Christmas Day. At first it was little kids with washcloths on their heads, secured with large rubber bands. In the 60s, angels appeared holding machine guns. When I was in graduate school I wrote the last Christmas play for my family of origin — “Mary’s Argument” came from that play. I’d been deeply influenced by W.H. Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” (from For The Time Being), a long poem where all the characters in the Nativity drama speak: not only Mary and Joseph, but the Shepherds, and Herod, and the three wise men, and the Star itself. Because Auden is a genius, each character speaks in a different meter. In this last play of mine I asked the characters to speak in iambic pentameter, if awkwardly. Mary in this little speech is talking to Joseph, trying to convince him to live an unconventional life with her.

What poets influenced you? Which works in particular have special meaning for you?

Every poet I’ve read has influenced me. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost have always been very important. Poets who write out of necessity and urgency — Rilke and Hopkins, and Donne, Herbert… The women writers who began singing into the public world in the second half of the twentieth century have been crucial — too many to mention all by name but as a beginning… Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrianne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Grace Paley, Lucy Tapahonso, Sharon Olds, Brenda Hillman…

What is your view on innovative poetry?

Innovative — the new. It loops around, doesn’t it? Marianne Moore was “sampling” and Muriel Rukeyser was putting charts and trial testimonies in poems over fifty years ago. George Herbert was writing poems in Shapes. All innovation is interesting — and necessary, as a correction to whatever’s prevalent. Once at Stanley Kunitz’s home in Provincetown, I was pouring through old Poetry magazines — he owned every single issue from the beginning. I was looking through an issue that seemed filled with perfectly conventional poems about Winter and Love and all of a sudden there’s “The Snake” by D.H. Lawrence! The force of that poem’s presence threw me back against the couch cushions. In another issue, among very conventional poems was a short one-page essay (essay?) by Ezra Pound exhorting poets to become musical. “Every poem ought to be able to be set to music!” he shouted from the page.

Bless the innovators, especially when they seem most strange and discordant — they bring life.