R.I.P., Fanny Howe. Here are some quotes from the marvelous poet, novelist, and short story writer:

“After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”

“The person looking for ‘me’ (a fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) ‘God.’ This split search can only be folded into one process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention.In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or grace…. Your work is practical, but your relationship to it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead and above you.”

“People who are destabilized by historical forces are more intelligent than the secure ones who have got the formulas in place. The safety of received tastes and opinions, confirmed in furniture and inherited artworks, stops the true brain, the brain of the seeking blind. When people are uprooted and insecure, their tables are alive with the conversation of prophets—philosophy, music, literature, God. But when the people are safe, the repetition of a formula goes around and around.”

“Why was I chained to these language problems that I myself had created? Why all this scratching and erasing?”

“I have never been sure of the need for it, the use of writing at all, the value of any completed poem, or the idea that writing might lead somewhere.”

“Why write if it is not to align yourself with time and space?”

“But wherever I step I am stepping into a place that was just finished at the moment I arrived. If I freeze here, one foot poised to go forward, to land on the path, I will at least be living in the present and the past will know it.”

“Name the things whereby we hope / Before the story scatters.”

“If this world isn’t good enough for us then an afterlife won’t be enough.”

“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.”

“There’s an impulse to preserve something original. It’s almost not possible to live without that. I didn’t know it, but when I looked back, around the age of sixty, I could see that was what I was after.”

“What else can make you happy except something that no one else knows about?”

“Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.”

“Well, I never stopped wisecracking or trying to make people laugh, no matter whether I was holding a gun to my head. I think probably everyone goes through a breakdown period, where something ruins your confidence, and that can be an interesting place to retreat to.”

“I stand up for insanity.”

“Fiction writers really expect to be heard. Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation.”

“It’s just part of being human, to be in a rage. And I do believe in political poetry. It has to be poetry first⁠—as depth and sound and rebounding words⁠—and I revise, fanatically, over and over and over again, but I’m very committed to certain ideas, however they come out. I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.”

“I would think of poetry as a place where you connect your doubts to the things you don’t doubt. Free-floating doubt wouldn’t trigger the lightning that contradiction does. Because paradox really is deep. […] It’s sort of the highest thought, a paradox⁠—you come to it, and then it flies away.”

“A lot of the revision happens around where I break the line⁠—and that changes which words can see each other coming and call out to the next sound, somewhere in the future. There’s a lot of surmising in writing a poem for me, more than an intention. They’re always living around me, the poems. I’ll keep drafts lying around everywhere and just lean over and change a word and then go on walking. Only when I am fed up and tired of them do I stop. It has nothing to do with the logic of the poem. It’s just built into my life patterns.”

“It’s mystifying, the thing that keeps you going forward, ripping up, ripping up, ripping up. What are you looking for?”

“I guess I cringe at the word ‘prompt.’ Because it means teaching. I’ve always taught, and I don’t need to do it when I’m at home with my poem. I’ve never needed anything to kick it off, other than something like the wind or the smell of a loaf of bread. Even with my novels, I would just let the words start, let the words write the book.”

“I try to let the words write the words, not interfering, until a meaning begins to reveal itself to me. It emerges from the random mass of words facing me as a mind that happens to be mine for that moment. I think what I am always after is discovering the interrelationship between the parts that are given, because I don’t see, or want to see, any conflict between mind, body, context, intelligence, memory, stars, weather, and emotion. I really want to understand consciousness in the end. To pass under the ‘gates of wrath.’ To feel how the mind takes form.”

“The sound values determine the way the words are finally placed. I usually begin with a pile of random thoughts, observations, strange forgotten thoughts, and as I look at this heap of words, it is the material I see, just texture and surface, and not much content. The words then attract other words to them, in the second stage of this process.”

“When I am alone, working, I never think of my readers. And in terms of what I am after, I don’t think of them either. I think about the problem I am creating for myself as I go along. The problem is, as you describe it, the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms. I think a lot about my readers when I am giving a reading and hoping that they can hear the subliminal logic behind the music of the speeding words. If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.”

“For me, a sustained set of sentences in a prose piece is necessary to the breath-length of a thought. […] A thought to me is an emotional assemblage that includes multiple angles and images, influences from above and below and to the side. To capture the rhythm of a thought is to tune into a complex universal pulse. A line of prose is sustained on a series of short breaths.”

“It is a matter of survival, knowing that you can be known and that you can know someone else. It is that recognition which is the condition for sanity. You don’t know who will open the bottle when you throw it out to sea, but if someone can read the message, it means you are not insane.”

“I was always aware that I am a person in the west living in acute privilege compared with the rest of the world, and that there is an excess of information that creates mental suffering. It is almost as if it is created in order to counterbalance the luxury. […] In the old days, a brain was freed by education and information. Now this process has turned on itself. And one must select from all the words the ones that are openings.”

“The end of uncertainty is death.”

“What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. [….] Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics. Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. [….] Bewilderment circumnambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.”

“For myself, a poem emerges by itself, like something developing in a dark place. First I receive the impression of a time period as an experience of pure language, glimpses of actions, emotions and weathers. I jot down whatever comes through—in a rush of words.
Then I begin to see what is being said and to see it as it unfolds, as if from afar and sometimes I actually stand at a distance from the words that are there. Spotting word-associations and what their sounds suggest and prove about the ‘point’ of this emergent
poem forces me to remove my body from the action; to let the words write the words.
Letting the lines cohere on their own volition is crucial. [I]t is like watching someone else take form in the dark and I am weirdly disassociated from the action, an observer, a voyeur, though all the objects in the room, and the body, are familiar, are even ‘mine.'”

“Listening is existing in the future of all utterance. So the future is full of listening, wanting, and understanding. But what a speaker intends to say is rarely fulfilled in the sentence; and if it’s attention is over intended, it losses its capacity for arousing attention in the hearer. Part of the force of speech comes with its emotional risk. One hears units or tones more than particular words or facts and attends to these. It is possible that people want to hear poetry whether they like it or not. Their brains and ears want it.”

“Well, I am sort of ashamed of my way of working, it’s so scrappy. I don’t need a room at all. I know people I admire enormously who have rooms that they go to each day, where they construct their poems like paintings; it’s imagination and literature at work together, and it’s amazing to see that process in action if you are the complete opposite. My room is the road.”

“I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.”

“The sending out of words to a blind future is what any writer does. It is a simple occupation (nothing special, chosen, or justifiable) that replicates the sending of messages without envelopes, speech traveling forward to a listener. It reproduces the sensation of being all mechanics and body, loaded with events, and projected onto a blind No One. It echoes the turning around of Orpheus in the underworld, because he wouldn’t have been a poet if he hadn’t turned. Why should he have trusted anything but his instincts? Everything is there while everything is Orpheus.”

“I write in a sort of echo state where the sentence passes through me and around in a circle and hits something out there and then comes back in again. It’s like the spiral that I keep talking about. I suppose that it’s like an ear, and I’m inside of the ear and outside of it at the same time.”

“I only trust people who are funny, men or women, or who admit to having made horrible mistakes.”

“It has never been more difficult than now when life lasts so long.”

“The mind is an organ of the soul.”

“To be saved only means to matter. You matter. Your life has meaning.”

“What will rise to the surface or take form is truly anyone’s guess. We are complete mysteries.”

“[C]all it improvisation. We each have our rhythm of attention, of how far we can go on our own brainpower. Then something else takes over. The words, the sound, the materials themselves. The struggle that the writer creates for herself is to make a place where she can get lost without fear.”

“I prefer to be alone. I’m scared of people. I haven’t been with anyone at all for ages, years, decades. I think I am a monk in a world without a monastery.”

“It’s the presence of something else wanting to be born. It’s like a figure that we are rushing for, both to touch and to save. It flies ahead—and we rush after it. We reach for it. Everyone has glimmers of beauty, but a lot of people don’t have time to study it because of troubles, trauma, torpor . . . So that becomes a responsibility of artists and writers—to make time to study it.”

“I usually write in a place that’s alien, that’s not home, like a bus stop, or waiting room, so that what comes out is already unhinged when I read it later, and I just accept it—there it is. Then I do a turn of looking at it and picking it apart, and that’s when I let the music and the words call to each other across the scribble of sounds I’ve put down. So, that’s when I’m doing the composition, but it is a thing of discovery of something that was already there.”

“The weirdness of revising is that you don’t know what you’re looking for. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know when it’s right? That already puts you in a trance-like state, where you’re unearthing something that you don’t even know what it is. So, how do you recognize it? Recognition is a puzzle. Something I worry over.”

“When I feel the poem is done, it’s both that I’m just sick of it and tired of it, but also that I’ve made the discovery, I’ve found the thing that I didn’t even know I was looking for.”

“There’s always some concealed social type you are meant to be. Psychoanalysis, religion, manners, business… each and all have a model of achievement. If you can keep your objectivity, it is interesting to see how these things work either from the bottom or the middle, the amount of lying and self-deception that’s involved.”

“Privilege is the guarantee of blindness to your own conformism.”

“[T]he term ‘experimental’ for poetry may have begun with experimental drugs, or with the infiltration of the sciences into popular culture. But like most words it probably has a hidden meaning to do with marketability and job security. That is, an experimental poet would be someone who is taking a chance on being obscure and unemployable. In any case, it is probably the case that all poets write in hopes of discovering something they didn’t know before, something that only the words, let loose, can reveal. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, every day was an experiment in survival for poets. Now the term means ‘inaccessible by ordinary means,’ marginal.”

“Being called religious is embarrassing. It suggests a certainty that is far from true. The path one follows is always a question of words and birth. One either understands math, or doesn’t; abstract logic or not. The world is not made of just one type or the other. The vocabulary of theology, philosophy and the sciences are quite separate from each other. But the architecture of each depends on revealed structures and a very particular vocabulary. To be religious is to follow a ritual that is pointed towards revelation. Theoretical physics also meditates on the limits of time, intersections with eternity, and the flight of truth. The family you were born into both historically and genetically, will probably largely determine which method of thinking you choose. The most important thing is to be open to surprise.”

“But in my poetry the basic purpose (intellectually) is the same as always: to capture a thought on the fly, to pin it down to the place where it emerged, and to study it from several dimensions, feel it and let it go. My purpose is to document days of being-here at as many levels I can. Only once in a blue moon, do I catch the thought that is to me most beautiful and just, a hint of something beyond, a paradox.”

“It’s this idea of errancy. You’re going along with a story but then something happens out on the street or someone calls you that interrupts the way you thought you were going and that puts you on a slightly different path. I really believe in holy coincidence, that things drop in your path and you have to be aware of them. It’s mad, but it works!”

“Generally, I wouldn’t want to be trapped with other writers, ever. All that conversation around publishers and money and where they hope to get hired ruins everything.”

“I suppose that is how artists live. They never just have an ordinary day; they’re finding clues or secrets or new colors.”

“I think it’s very important to create, and to take that time alone.The weirdness of it is that you are looking for something that isnt there. You have to tame something that doesn’t even exist.You practice a lot.Creation is always a complete paradox, because, what is it that you are trying to get perfect? There’s nothing in front of you. It is very strange. Especially when you are revising a piece of work that you wrote hastily. What are you looking for? Is it a sound?Is it an image? It’s a very mysterious but grounding kind of thing to do. Starting out though I definitely wouldn’t not show it to anyone for quite a while. No matter how much you admire it. When I do show my work to someone, what hope for…is just silence.”

“Public intellectuals and writers are important. But it’s now teachers that are the purveyors—the most important citizens for change. It is so important that they are supported and given injections of energy to keep on going. Teaching you can convey ideas and change people’s minds, more so than as a writer. You know, if you have a classroom then you’ve got people right in front of you. Teaching remains a noble profession.”

“There’s no one really there in the poems.”

“I wonder, will our imagination
remain a temple burning with candles

against all odds?
Behind a nipple and a bone?

The simplest of glands laid in a circle
around skin and liquid

that stirs up imagery
winged and prismed, as if blood
were a wine inducing visions.”
—From “A Hymn,” by Fanny Howe

“A word is a vibratory presence.
I think a sentence is a long word.
Are words to sentences what letters are to words?
What have I been doing all these years?
Why does this matter unless it reveals something about the structure of the universe?”
—From “Forty Days”