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Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Marie Howe
00:58:39
Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of religious myth. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Marie, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. Marie reads several poems, and together, they discuss Mary Magdalene as complex everywoman, the “eternal energy” of dead loved ones that fills Marie’s life and work, and her current efforts to listen to what the Earth is saying to us. We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.
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- [00:03]
A
Hi, friends. Padre Gautuma here. Thank you very much for tuning in again to poetry unbound. Season 10 starts on Monday 12th January. But in advance of season 10, we are bringing you what we're calling Poetry Unbound in Conversation. We'll have loads of these coming out over the next year. Today you'll hear the luminous Marie Howe. We'll hear her discuss and read from New and Selected Poems or which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. This was part of the Greenbelt Festival, an annual festival of arts, activism and belief in England. Greenbelt has an online component too. For this conversation. Marie and I were both in New York. A special thanks to Paul Northup, Jane Cookson, Joanna Booth, Stream 7, Christian Aid, and all the volunteers and staff and audience members at the Greenbelt Festival. Thanks too to Marie Howe and her publishers, to W.W. norton and Bloodaxe Books. So welcome to Poetry Unbound in Conversation. Here I am talking with Marie Howe.
- [01:08]
B
We're going to talk today about a whole variety of things. Saints, sex, time, love, the life of a woman, war, yearning and ecology, all in a single simple hour. So I wonder if we could start off with a poem of yours that you published recently, but that you've given a timestamp from 1968. The letter 1968.
- [01:31]
C
Well, first I want to say hello to you, Padraig, dear friend. Hello to all you people out there. I wish we could squeeze through the zoom to just sit with you there on the lawn. So great to be here. Very honored to be with you. And I'm so happy to be talking with my dear friend Padraig. This poem. Oh, I must tell you too, I lost my eyeglasses. So I'm going to do my very best to read without, you know, falling apart here. This is a poem called the Letter. And it's, it's. It was to celebrate 1968. Anybody? Anybody there still alive in 1968? Maybe a couple of people. Yay. My friends, my brothers and sisters. Back in 1968, as you might remember, we didn't have Internet, we didn't have. Phones were attached to the wall. We were embodied in a way that we are not as embodied in the same way when we communicate. So in many ways, this poem is a celebration of that embodiment and our relationship to physicality and to time and to space. The letter 1968, that he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue and pressed it closed so I might open it with my Fingers that he brought it to the box and slipped it through the slot so that it might be carried through time and weather to where I waited on the front porch step. We knew how to wait then. It was what life was, much of it. So when the mailman came up the walk and didn't have it, he might have it the next day or the next when it bore the mark of his hand who had written my name. So I might open it and read and read it again and then again and look at the envelope he'd sealed and press my mouth to where his mouth had been.
- [04:04]
B
Thanks, Marie. What a beautiful poem. Why was it, if there is a reason that you think that this poem took the time it took, you know, there's that lovely line. We knew how to wait then. It was what life was. Much of it. You also have to wait for this poem.
- [04:21]
C
I don't know. I've been thinking so much about the loss. The machines have helped us so much. I had three machines going at once this morning. You know, I had the dishwasher, I had the pot, the electric water boiler. And I had another machine. What was it? Oh, I turned on the electric oven. So all three things didn't used to be. And these are small machines. These aren't the Internet and the phones and all that. But I just felt. I feel this longing really to be back in time and space and embodied the way we used to be when the space between things was palpable. And I miss that space sometime. I mean, of course we still feel it. We're lonely, we miss each other. You know, we can't wait to get there. But there's a way that we lived in time very differently.
- [05:20]
B
One of the. One of the languages you write in is the language of the body. And that's so evident in this poem, you know, right from the first line that he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue. You know, there's the sensuality of the body and the attention to it, too.
- [05:37]
C
Yeah.
- [05:39]
B
Do you do that deliberately, or is it just where your. Your kind of attention is drawn? So you give attention to where it's naturally draw.
- [05:46]
C
I don't know what I'm doing when I write a poem. The poem has me, you know, I'm in its service. I mean, it comes. It comes down. I'm dimly aware, you know, but, you know, I've heard. I've. I've received some letters in the last 15 years from an old love. An old love Who. You know, there are some loves that you approach and go away and approach and go away and approach and go away and approach, and you never really touch. And so I've been getting letters from him, and so, you know, I can have him, you know, in my older age. But also, I'm thinking of back in the day when I had. I would have a boyfriend, and it would be a long distance. And letters, letters, letters, letters, letters were just so sure. And the physicality of the letter, you know, I mean, because he. He did it, he made it, he wrote it, he licked it, you know, I mean, his body was there.
- [06:43]
B
Yeah.
- [06:45]
C
There's that marvelous sense now. I mean, people meet online now. Right. They don't meet physically for the first time. Yeah, we meet through these texts.
- [06:56]
B
Yeah.
- [06:57]
C
It's just. And what we do without bringing our bodies with us. Oh, no, I don't. I think that's not such a good idea.
- [07:08]
B
There's. I mean, I think another language that you write in poetry is the language of deep attention to what's right in front of you. And that the idea that what's right in front. The physicality, perhaps, or what can be observed, whether that's in nature or in the actions of another person or your own body, that what's observed sometimes is as profound as we need to be. Rather than trying to think, let's go underneath the surface. Sometimes. It seems to me that you're interested in what's on the surface.
- [07:37]
C
Well, what's the surface and what beneath? I mean, these are interesting questions. You know, we were just talking before we. You guys, before we came on, when we got to see you, I was just. I was just. I'm a little addicted to the Instagram, mostly to look at animals, but every once in a while, a physicist slips on there. And he was reminding us last night that the local reality, as they call it, that we think we see isn't really real, that we. We make it by our perceiving it. So I've been thinking again about the surface of things, or what we think is the surface. And I don't know, what does a bird think about what that man said? I mean.
- [08:26]
B
Yeah.
- [08:27]
C
I mean.
- [08:30]
B
Well, we'll keep on talking about that for the rest of the hour, I think.
- [08:33]
C
Yeah.
- [08:34]
B
You're from a Catholic family of nine children and you're educated by nuns. What was it about the lives of the intellectual lives of these women with whom you were in such proximity for those years, formative years as a childhood? What was it about being around those women that Influenced you in terms of the life of the mind, the life in the world, the life of limitation and the life of possibility.
- [08:57]
C
Well, I was raised by wonderful nuns first. They were the madams of the Sacred Heart. And they. This isn't a privileged education. I don't mean to do that. But many of them had advanced degrees. They were thoughtful people. They were independent, too. Independent thinkers. You know, I came of age in the late 60s, as you can tell from the letter. I came of age with the Beatles, I'm happy to say. And have you all read John and Paul yet? The amazing book about the Beatles, John and Paul. So amazing book, but. So these were women who were not married. They were not defined by a relationship to a man. That was radical. They had their own subjectivity. And like every Catholic girl, I longed to be a nun when I was younger because it seemed as if it was the way to paradise, because I did believe in paradise. I believe one went to heaven, and if one just followed, if one just prayed and was good and didn't commit any sins, you could go right to heaven. Now, I believe heaven might be right here and who knows where else. But. They were ahead of us in terms of thinking about justice and peace. We were. They were much more radical. And by the time I went to college or university, I was studying with a nun who was actually secretly married to one of the Berrigan brothers, who were radical priests who were hiding underground after being arrested and, you know, sentenced to jail. So the radical Catholic left was a kind of refuge from the more. How do I say, this parochial or childlike Catholicism I grew up with in my early years, you know, it was more the Catholicism of Thomas Merton or.
- [11:14]
B
Yeah, there's a way in which religion kind of comes into your work. Not in any way that you're asking that people should be religious, but somehow you make use of the religious landscape, the religious imagination, so straightforwardly. And I wonder if you could read one poem that just gives a demonstration of that. I was thinking of the Snowstorm. That's on page 125.
- [11:37]
C
I'm so glad you said that. So there's a monastery up on the Hudson river just north of New York City called Holy Cross, and it's a wonderful monastery, Benedictine, I guess, because they welcome everybody. And I'm just trying to find. Oh, there it is. And one wonderful. I often used to go there, the days between Christmas and New Year's, those beautiful days where nothing's expected of you. A few minutes, and we were all snowbound. A huge snowstorm came and we were snowbound over New Year's Eve. It was the best New Year's Eve believe I've ever had. And the next morning I walked down this great hill and through after the snowstorm, so I'll read this. The snowstorm. I walked down toward the river. And the deer had left tracks deep as half my arm that ended in a perfect hoof. And the shump, shump sound my boots made walking made the silence loud. And when I turned back toward the great house, I walked beside the deer tracks again. And when I came near the feeder, little tracks of the birds on the surface of the snow I'd broken through. Put your finger here and see my hands. Then bring your hand and put it in my side. I put my hand down into the deer track and touch the bottom of an invisible hoof. Then my finger in the little mark of the J.
- [13:36]
B
That is such a. There's a whole variety of reasons to love that poem because of the location of it. The shump, shump sound. What a great. What a great onomatopoeia to bring into a poem the presence of the deer and the jay and the feeder and the way that seamlessly we're brought into the story. That is toward the end of the Christian Gospels when Jesus of Nazareth is reappearing somehow after death and saying to the character, Thomas, put your hand into my sight with no announcement. You go from the snow and the deer and the birds to that and then back to the snow and the deer and the birds.
- [14:13]
C
Well, it's the body of the world, right? The beautiful body of the world. And here are the so called wounds, you know, that the deer make into the snow. And. But the. I was so moved by the feeling of that. I often think I should have said, Jesus said. Because I think a lot of people don't understand the reference. You do, and you folks probably do, but that it's. I was just very moved by. By the. By the. How I break through. You know, the snow, the deer pierce through and the birds barely leave their little marks on the surface. The different gravity, the weight of everybody. And yeah, it just seemed very. And it was. Yeah, it was a beautiful, beautiful morning.
- [15:04]
B
For a long time. I felt like I was a failure as a poet because whenever I'd read something about Orpheus or Persephone, I'd be like, I don't know who they are. In the last number of years, I've been reading some of those. I started off with children's books, but what I did have was a repository of extraordinary Mythology from my religious childhood. But I felt embarrassed because I thought, oh, this is gonna seem like I'm preachy, or I'm thinking, everybody should know this. And you, too, went through a phase where you were encouraged, you can tell the story to make use of those mythologies, too, that you had.
- [15:36]
C
Yeah, I did. I did. I was. I was embarrassed. Stanley Kunis, when he. Who was my mentor and great friend for 25 years until he died at 101, wrote a quote from my first book saying, marie Howe is a religious poet. And I was shocked. But I understand now, and I understand what he means. And there was a poet, Jane Kenyon, who was a friend and a great poet. Maybe some of you have known her work. She was married to the poet Donald Hall. And Jane was unembarrassed about her religious or spiritual, but she would say religious associations. And she really freed me. Her poems, which I loved, really freed me because it is the mythology of my life. It just. I mean, I think of them. I think everything. I mean, ever almost, you know, as everything's included there in those. Love, loyalty, betrayal, doubt, you know, agony, joy, fear. All of it. You know, there.
- [16:52]
B
You mentioned earlier on about the nuns and how in some ways, their vocation, in some ways, was an amplification of their possibility as intellectual women, as women with work and women with things to do. And at the same time, you've also talked about how sometimes women are caught when they're associated with religion, into an idea of, you know, are you the maiden, are you the mother, are you the loose woman? Where there's these very particular categories, not just in religion, but also in religion. And in many ways, it seems to me like your book Magdalene, which came out in 2017, I think, was an exploration of the. Every woman through the lens of Mary Magdalene.
- [17:34]
C
Yeah, well, like many, many women who grew up in this tradition, Magdalene was always close to me. From the very beginning, I knew that she wasn't what the early church fathers had described her as, that she just. That she was so much more complicated. Now, of course, I could never know the real Mary, but. But I intuited that the patriarchal world had divided women into the virgin and the whore. And most of us women know that we are neither and we are both, and we are all. And that there's no whore, there's no virgin, there's no. There's just humanity. And that there's a way that our sexuality, our erotic life, whether it's, you know, the eros of loving a tree outside or, you know, a child or, you know, I mean, Eros is so much deeper and bigger than mere sexuality. But anyway, that, that, that, that there had not been a woman. Anyway, Magdalene presented herself to me as a woman who could speak to. To the different aspects of herself. And because I grew up in the 60s and 70s when freedom was suddenly available to women in a new way, to certain women, I have to say, privileged in many ways. But the hope of integrating all those things into one voice was made possible.
- [19:18]
B
I was wondering if you could read a couple of poems. I had. I have a few in mind. But of course, you might want to think of others. I was wondering about On Men, Their Bodies, as well as Magdalene. The seven devils.
- [19:28]
C
Well, those are the two that started everything off.
- [19:32]
B
I don't think I knew that.
- [19:35]
C
Well, I was thinking about Mary Magdalene, who was, who has said very little, as you know, was said about her in the Gospels, except that she had been. She was. Had been possessed, but she possessed seven devils. And I was literally walking down the street in Cambridge, Mass, one day thinking, what are devils, actually? And just trying to find her. And.
- [20:00]
B
Page 130.
- [20:01]
C
Thank you. And I was thinking, I have devils. What am I? You know? What, what, what, what. What are contemporary devils? What does it mean to be bedeviled, you know, and then to be released from these devils? So I don't know. That all sounds very reasonable. It didn't come out reasonably, but, and, but. So here's. Here's Magdalene and the seven devils. And there's a. There's a little quote from Luke. Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out. The first was that I was very busy. The second, I was different from you. Whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that. The third, I worried. The fourth, envy disguised as compassion. The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid. The aphid disgusted me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. The mosquito, too, its face. And the ant, its bifurcated body. Okay. The first was that I was so busy. The second that I might make the wrong choice because I had decided to take that plane that day, that flight, and before noon, so as to arrive early, and I shouldn't have wanted that. The third was that if I walked past a certain place on the street, the house would blow up. The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing. The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living. The sixth, if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm. And if I touched the left arm a little harder than I'd first touch the right. Then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even. The seventh, I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive. And I couldn't stand it. I wanted a mask. I hate this word. A cheesecloth to breathe through that would trap it. Whatever was inside everyone else that entered me when I breathed in. No, that was the first devil. The second was that I was so busy I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this? The third was that I couldn't eat food if I really saw it distinct and separate from me in a bowl or on a plate. Okay. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list. The second was that the laundry was never finally done. The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did. And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them, then what was love? The fourth was that I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong to anyone. The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn't know. The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling. The seventh. The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying. The sound she made. Her mouth wrenched to the right and cupped open so as to take in as much air. The gurgling sound so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it. And then I couldn't stop hearing it. Years later, grocery shopping, crossing the street. No, not the sound. It was her body's hunger finally evident. What our mother had hidden all her life. For months I dreamt of knuckle bones and roots. The slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath the. Underneath. That was the first devil. It was always with me. And that I didn't think you, if I told you, would understand any of this.
- [24:42]
B
What? A poem. There's the form in that poem of counting up to seven and going through all those devils years later. Now, after you've written this. Which are the ones that surprise you in terms of what they say? Marie?
- [25:00]
C
Well, all of them surprised me as they were being written. And all of them were familiar. So maybe some of you out there know what I'm talking about. Although I have read sometimes to audiences and perhaps more peaceful parts of the world in New York City. And somebody raised his hand and said, what is this? Busy? Why are you so busy? I live in New York. I don't know. It's the contemporary malaise. Maybe urban folk, but that's the mildest of them all. Of course. But. But, yeah. I mean, it's just interesting to think about devils in that way. And I. I. The whole poem surprised me. And I began thinking then about Mary and how she was. She was depicted as this prostitute. But then I was thinking about maybe being a woman of a different generation, where you might have known a lot of different bodies and you weren't a prostitute at all. But I do remember the first time I read this on men, their bodies. And I thought I would faint, actually, after I read it. So here's Mary Magdalene again, talking on men, their bodies. One penis was very large and thick. So when he put it inside me, I really did say, wow. One penis was uncircumcised. And I love to grip the shaft and pull down so the head popped out like a little man. One penis was curved, so I had to move in a different way. One penis was so friendly, I was never afraid of it. One penis was so slender, I was startled. One penis was blunt and short. One penis couldn't harden until he stuffed it soft inside me. One penis came as soon as I started to move. I'm sorry, he said, I have a problem. But I didn't care. I loved that boy. One penis pressed against me hard almost every morning. But I got out of bed as if I hadn't heard a word it had said. One penis was so dear to me, I kissed it and kissed it even after I knew it had been with someone else. One penis I never saw, but my hand came to know it from the outside of his jeans. One penis loved the inside of my mouth so much it sang, it sputtered. One had a name. One was a mouse. One, he explained to me, had very tiny crabs, so we couldn't have sex for a while. One was orthodox and wouldn't touch blood. One had a mole, a hard little dot just under the rim. One penis was extremely patient without making a big deal about it. One penis had a great sense of humor. One penis had herpes, but I didn't know that word yet. One was a battering ram. One was a drunk staggering, a lout, a bully. One slept inside me comfortably at home.
- [28:33]
B
That's part of the Magdalene sequence. Also, you said that you thought you might faint the first time you read that.
- [28:39]
C
Yeah, it was just scary to read. I mean, I think it's a litany. I love litany. But, you know, I was afraid I might offend.
- [28:49]
B
Yeah. And that seems to me to be part of your interest in taking texts very seriously. Not with the desire to offend, but to take them seriously. That you bring them into serious conversation with everyday life, with sexuality, with thought, with independence, with resistance.
- [29:08]
C
Well, the whole notion of desire and self sufficiency and, you know, I mean, all these things in love. And then she meets this teacher, Jesus, you know, And I love, I mean, I remember once going to a meditation retreat and arriving late and I went to the meditation hall just to see what it would be like the next day. And everybody had brought their pillows there to save their space. And I could see that everybody, the really people who. There were people who got their hours ahead of time so they could put their, their, their mats right up front. And I felt that competition, that sense of getting beyond everybody else to be closest to the teacher. And I understand that, of course, you know, and so Magdalene, of course, had to deal with that too. Wanted to be close to him. Everybody wanted to be close to him. Who would he be? You know, he was actually friends with some people, not friends with other. I mean, the whole thing about the politics of a teacher, you know.
- [30:15]
B
Yeah. The way that this character of the teacher shows up in Magdalene, there isn't this idea that the character of the teacher is God incarnate, but just, you know, the, the subject of interest and curiosity and intellectual and emotional affection and.
- [30:33]
C
Attraction and a devotion. Yeah. I mean, she loves him. I mean, maybe some of you there have read the Gnostic Gospels. You know, many people believe that Jesus and Mary were very, very close, you know, perhaps intimately close, which was, who knows? But, but, but I just know from my own experience of life, you know, how much one, one, one wants to be devoted to someone, you know, and one wants to be, to learn from someone and to, and also feels people feel competitive with each other when getting to someone who's charismatic and, you know, and she had to contend with the apostles, those guys, you know, there's something.
- [31:26]
B
So interesting in the way that even just there, you know, you're talking about contending with each other. And on the one hand we're thinking of these Gnostic gospels you're talking about, and on the, the other hand, thinking about that retreat that you were at where people had placed their pillows early hours early, in order to be closer to the teacher, it seems to me that with certain ancient texts, you know, whether it's poetry or religion or culture or meditation, that the closer you become to those texts the more your own life becomes seamlessly intertwined with those old texts that, you know, they don't have mobile phones, but somehow they have the human condition. Has that been your experience as the closer you've looked at Mary Magdalene, for instance, and some of these other texts? Absolutely.
- [32:08]
C
I mean, she. I feel like she's. She's. She. Every. Every woman here, every person who identifies with a woman. I mean, you know, she's. I also love with that she's learned in what we. What we Christians call the Old Testament, but let's say we'll call it the Torah. The stories of Moses and the other. The other great, great teachers, you know, so that. And she struggles. I mean, she struggles with. Again, integrating. Well, here's this poem called the Disciples. I suppose it's always like that with the teacher. Everyone wanted his gaze as if it were water at noon. But it was women who made the food, women who opened their homes to us, their quiet daughters standing in the doorway, the little ones being told to let them rest, let them eat, and they hadn't cooked a dish. It was still the old way, although they all talked about the new way. The new way, for me it was different. I knew that even when he seemed not to be looking at me, he was. But of course I was wrong about that too.
- [33:28]
B
That's a devastating final line. Marie.
- [33:31]
C
I love her. I love it. She said, you know. You know what it's like when you really like someone and you think, and you. And you might be right, that he's not looking at me, but he's looking at me. You know, that wonderful feeling, you know. But I want to read the other poem about the teacher because I love what she. She begins to see about his effect of being in a room. So this one's called the Teacher 1:43. And it brings up when Moses pleaded. I love the story of Moses pleaded. And Yahweh agreed at last to let the people hear his voice. It said that he allowed each person to hear what each could bear. To the very brim of that and no more. Afterwards, the people said, please, Moses, from now on, you listen. We don't want to hear it. You do the talking and listening. Now, being with a teacher was a little like that, as though he were a book too difficult to read. So I thought I had to become more than I was, more than I had been. But that wasn't. Seemed rather that something had to go, something had to be let go of. It wasn't that I saw something new or saw suddenly into him, not that not ever. But the room itself, whatever room we might be standing in, assumed an astonishing clarity. And the things in the room, a table, a cup, a meowing cat.
- [35:27]
B
One of the things that featured in my childhood was litanies of the saints and ways within which they got to know all these saints. And I know that you and your family had the lives of the saints. And something that I think that you've done very interestingly has been to take that idea, idea of the litany of the saints and to pay attention to that in the everyday way of the people in your life who have died and how you call on them. I wonder if you could read my Dead friends on page 94.
- [35:54]
C
I was thinking about that earlier after I received your Zoom link. Padraig94. Oh, yeah, I'm conjuring them all now. My dead friends, Tony, Richard, Lucy, Lucy, Jason, Stanley, John, Billy. My dead friends, I have begun. When I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinions. And the answer is often immediate and clear. Should I take the job, move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age? They stand in unison, shaking their heads and smiling. Whatever leads to joy, they always answer to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were. It's green in there, a green vase. And I asked Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says yes. Billy's already gone through the frightening door. Whatever Billy says to do, I'll do.
- [37:32]
B
What is it about the intimacy and the immediacy of those very tender conversations that is so trustable and knowable? Marie?
- [37:41]
C
Well, I feel that we don't die. I don't even know what I mean by that, but I just know that we don't die. Somebody, a cynic, could say that's the way you comfort yourself, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I really do believe we do not die. And that love never dies. Love never dies. Love is energy. It's eternal energy. So we never die. Love never dies. And I think that's an extraordinary thing to know. It's so powerful to know.
- [38:16]
B
I was going to see if you'd be open to reading what the living do as well, and maybe tell a bit of the story of that book and that particular poem.
- [38:24]
C
Of course. Of course. So in the. As, as Padraig has said, I'm one of nine children. I'm the second oldest. I'm the oldest girl, as we like to say. And my brother John was the second youngest and he was a beloved in our family and a charismatic, shiny, beautiful, loving man. Also had many devils. And what happens to devils? Again, you can be. What was the word? Magdalene's devils were what that they were.
- [38:58]
B
They were cast out.
- [38:59]
C
Cast out? Yeah, these devils were cast out eventually. But he. He contracted AIDS in. In the 80s and lived with that illness and died in 1989. And he was my dear friend and a spiritual teacher, really. He was 11 years younger than I, but a radiant person and dear friend. And I wrote him often. We wrote many, many letters to each other. And whenever I wrote a poem, I called him and read it to him. And he was just essential in my life. And I thought, how in the world can I live without you? So after he died, I wrote a book, many poems where John figures. And he said stories about him and his beloved Joe. Really love poems to him and Joe and how John dealt with that illness and with pain and with being alive until he died. So one day I was trying to. I was working on three or four poems at once and none of them were working. Hours and hours went by and finally I pushed everything aside and I said, I'm just going to write John a letter like I always did. And I always started a letter to John with what was actually happening. So this started and then it became something else. Well, it always stayed a letter to John, but. And it's called what the Living do, which is what eventually the book was titled, so what the Living Do. Johnny. The kitchen sink has been clogged for days. Some utensil probably fell down there and the drainer won't work, but smells dangerous. And the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber. I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again. The sky is a deep, headstrong blue and the sunlight pours through the open living room windows because the heat stuck on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking, this is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again and again later when buying a hairbrush. This is it. Parking, slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning, what you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call. A letter, a kiss. We want more and more. And then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say the window of the corner video store. And I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep from my own blowing hair, chapped face and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless. I am living. I remember you.
- [42:49]
B
I was giving a talk once and somebody came up to me and told me that her brother too had died of HIV related complications many years previously. And she spoke to me about how that poem of yours had given her an opportunity and a language in to continuing without shame to tell people about her everyday conversations with her brother. And it is so moving to hear how the clarity with which you write to your brother has been a gate for many people to write to their beloved people especially where there was such public narratives of silencing and erasure and shame around hiv.
- [43:30]
C
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, the gate I'd love to read. We have time. I'd love to read the Gate. Because there's a lot of things I didn't know until. Until Johnny died. The gate. I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made. He was taller than me, a young man, but grown himself by then, done at 28, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water. This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I would say what? And he would say this holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I would say what? And he would say this sort of looking around you've been waiting for.
- [44:41]
A
I love there.
- [44:42]
B
There's, there's, there's attention to, to the everyday contours of speech. I remember you and I were talking about poetry once and talking about form and talking about elevated language in poetry or all kinds of different things. And you were saying that you're very interested in listening to how an American voice sounds and paying attention to the contours of that on the page of a poem and just finishing there with sort of looking around and cheese and mustard sandwich. You know, it sounds. They're very precise images and language you choose, they seem casual, but it often seems to me that they're anything but because of the precision of your attention to it.
- [45:17]
C
Well, yeah, Robert Frost, you know, really helped me a lot. He loved the way people spoke to each other and what they didn't say and what they did say and the silences between and the misunderstandings between them. I mean, so much of our. Just our conversations are bewilderment, you know, and don't know what each other means. I just. Yeah, I love the way people speak.
- [45:47]
B
In recent times, people have spoken about your work and said that, you know, your more recent work has been a turn to eco poetry, to ecological considerations. And I remember for another interview that I did with you preparing for that and reading through all your work and going, but animals are actually everywhere. Right from the first book, perhaps some of the focus has changed. If that's true, you can talk about it. But even in what the Living Do, I had always thought that the poem that you read there, what the Living do, was the final poem in that collection. But actually, the final poem in that collection is about a dog, Buddy.
- [46:21]
C
Buddy.
- [46:22]
B
And so even in that book, the final poem is close attention to the question of the dog and what it is that the dog knows. So I'm not meaning to get distracted about beautiful Buddy, although I'm sure he was a gorgeous dog. But I would really like to talk about your lifelong interest in nature and ecology and I suppose the urgency with which you write about that in more particularly recent poems.
- [46:49]
C
Well, you know, I have been so fortunate to have taught what we call eco poetry for about the past 10 years. And one of the first things we do is think about our language. For example, the word nature. When we say nature, that's a problem because it separates us from it and we are nature. So we spend really quite a bit of time as students, and I thinking, what can we call all this? And often we call it all this. We call it the living world. And we also decided early not to call the other animals animals, because we're an animal, too. And whenever we say the animals, we separate ourselves from them. And there is. So that sort of permeated my life early on. I don't know why I never thought of. I mean, it feels to me that everything is in relationship to everything else, all the time, every sentient. And what's not sentient? I mean, then there's that everything seems to be sentient to me, but. Yes, so. But lately the students and I working together, it's really brought it to the forefront. Although it's so painful, it's hard to keep one's day. Is there something you want me to read?
- [48:19]
B
I was wondering. I mean, there's a few in my mind, but I was wondering both about what the earth seemed to say as well as the singularity. I think you have time for both of those. And if you want to Say a few things. What the Earth seemed to say is page 20.
- [48:32]
C
Yeah. And it was written during the COVID pandemic, when we were all separated from each other. And thinking now about borders and how much borders matter to governments and to wars and to. And how this was a. The Earth really was just saying, really, you know. Can you see this now? So it was time of listening. Listening to what the Earth was trying to say to us, it seemed. And the Earth, meaning everything alive. Because the virus, too, is the Earth. The virus too, is another animal like we are. So what the Earth seemed to say 20, 20. Do you still believe in borders? Birds soar over your maps and walls and always have. You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires traveled on wind you couldn't see wafting over the valley and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill. Did you not hear the other animals howl and sing? Or hear the silence of the animals no longer howling? Now you know what it is to be afraid. You think this is a dream. It is not a dream. You think this is a theoretical question. What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life? The water grows clearer. The swans settle. The swans settle and float there. Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? To become loam and bark? To be a leaf falling from a great height, to be the worm who eats the leaf and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky. Are you willing to be the sky again? You think this lesson is too hard for you? You want the timeout to end? You want to go to the movies as before, to sit and to eat with your friends? It can end now, but not in the way you imagine. You know the mind that has been talking to you for so long, the mind that can explain everything. Don't listen. You were once a citizen of a country called, I don't know. Remember the boat that brought you there? It was your body. Climb in.
- [51:20]
B
That poem speaks to somebody or to a voice or to a listener that's frightened and speaks a certain kind of reassurance without certitude that seems to be one of the driving impulses of that. Climb in and be attentive to the body without giving any particular certitudes apart from the reality of, well, this is what we have.
- [51:43]
C
We are the apex predator on this planet. Everything, every animal, we are the apex predator of it. I learned this when my daughter was, like, in third grade. And all the kids had to say, who the apex predator of these different Animals were. And human was on every single one. And we also think that everything eats everything else. I mean, everything. I was just in the ocean. I was staring out in the ocean going, it's all eating and shitting out there. That's it. Everything is eating everything. And this whole thing, you know, we think we're somehow. I think, oh, no, I'm not like I'm separate from all that, you know? But, yeah, it's. It's something. What we're part of. Wow. Right?
- [52:34]
B
I feel like we've taken a journey through some, not all, but some of the themes that have enlivened your life as well as enlivened your work and enlivened your public reach and your poetry. And it could be great to finish off with the Singularity before Green Belt and poetry Unbound thanks you profusely. But you might want to introduce the Singularity and then bring us to an end with that.
- [52:58]
C
So I don't know if any of you there are aware of Maria Popova. She. She has an online. I don't know what to call it, really. What is it?
- [53:07]
B
It's like an online magazine of thought, I suppose.
- [53:09]
C
Yeah, an online magazine of curated thought and. Extraordinary, really. And she for years offered a great event called the Universe and Verse, where she brought scientists and writers together and people wrote poems, people read poems that also had to do with scientific discoveries and understandings. So I was trying to understand the Big Bang. I was trying to read different books. There was a great one called Astrophysics for People in a hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and there was a Stephen Hawking's book, of course, and different books. And I was really trying to grok it, as we used to say in the 70s, really try to understand that this really might be real, which is very difficult to understand. There's so much stuff in the world. How could it have ever been one hyper dense, tiny bit of matter that blew up into all these galaxies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But Stephen Hawkins had just died, and so this is poem that original matter that according to Hawking blew up is called the Singularity. Was called the Singularity. And this poem is called that, and it's after Stephen Hawking. Do you sometimes want to wake up to the Singularity? We once were so compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember, there was no nature, no them, no test to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English or French or Farsi. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth and animal was energy and a rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it what once was before anything happened no I no we, no one no was only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is all everything home.
- [56:25]
B
Marie Howe on behalf of everybody at Greenbelt and Poetry Unbound, listening now, listening live and listening later. Thank you very much for the gift of your poetry.
- [56:49]
A
Marie Howe is the former Poet Laureate of New York and the author of five collections of poetry including Magdalene, the Kingdom of Ordinary Time and what the Living Do. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry poetry for her 2025 New and Selected Poems published in the USA by W.W. norton. The same book is published in the UK as what the Earth Seemed to Say by Bloodaxe Books. Deep thanks to everyone at the Greenbelt Festival, Stream 7 and Christian Aid for hosting this conversation. Poetry Unbound is Andrea Provost, Carla Zanoni, Daryl Chen, Sparrow Murray, Chris Heagle, Bill Siegmund and me, Padre Gotuma. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. These episodes were made in New York City on unceded Lenape land. Special thanks to Will Salwin, Nave Yan and Adam Morell at Digital Island Studios in Manhattan. Thanks as well to Frederick Courtright of the Permissions company. Poetry Unbound is an independent non profit production of the On Being project founded and led by Krista Tippett. This season of Poetry Unbound is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Our other funding partners include the Liana foundation, the Bidale foundation and Engaging the Census Foundation. Poetry Unbound will be nothing without the listening community. Thanks to all who listen, who read and give through our weekly Poetry Unbound substack or directly to On Being.
- [58:22]
B
For links to the substack and to.
- [58:24]
A
Find out more about Poetry Unbound books and events, visit poetryunbound.org.