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Interview: Marie Howe

Marie Howe is originally from Rochester, New York, and is the author of four poetry collections, of which the most recent is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), a musing of the channeled voice of the Biblical Mary Magdalene. The oldest girl of nine siblings, she did not seriously write poetry until the age of thirty. Howe, whose brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, has said: “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely.” Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I’m so excited to get to speak with you: Irish Catholic grade school commonality! Oh my, the stories! Reading your poems cues me in as to your own immense, lingering remembrances of an American Irish Catholic upbringing, grade school, and family. Your collection of the death of your brother—

Howe:

What the Living Do—

TFR:

Yes—I’ve taught that book—it resonates so much for me personally, and now I have the chance to ask you how your most recent book, Magdalene, came about.

Howe:

I feel fortunate to have been brought up in a tradition that had a very strong symbolic world. I was the oldest daughter of nine children. I’m the only one who went to a convent school, Sacred Heart in Rochester. I first went to parochial school, then this convent school. From a very early age, the gospels, and what we call “the old testaments,” and of course what the

Jewish tradition calls the Torah—the stories meant a great deal to me.

TFR:

In what way, specifically?

Howe:

Well, they felt archetypal and deeply poetic as there were so many silences in them.

TFR:

Silences?

Howe:

Yes, silent space where they could be inhabited, and of course in the Jewish tradition there’s midrash, a critical explanation where the Torah is considered a living document, and the rabbis imagine into those silences, and continue to create the Torah. I always loved those stories and the spaces one could inhabit within them—all those stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the Jewish great dilemmas, or debates as they’re also called.

TFR:

I studied the Kabbalah in an undergrad course on world religion and love that aspect about Judaism—the intellectual debates with the sense that the faith is in a state of evolving. I like this idea of “silences.”

Howe:

Yes, exactly. And the silences, well, Moses was a stutterer—I was a stutterer as a young person, and I identified. Really, so many of the stories, right up to the New Testament, I was able to identify with, and those stores still mean a great deal to me. Some people grow up with the Greek myths, or other some other kinds of symbolic worlds, but that was the world I grew up in, the Biblical one.

TFR:

At the side of my nightstand when I was a child, I had a huge children’s Bible storybook with the most amazing illustrations. I still have it. I feel the stories helped create who I am. It’s not that my beliefs are the same as when I was a child, but as a writer, they’re so foundational when you hear them at a young age. Do they always find a way into your work?

Howe:

Not always, I mean there are many poems where they don’t, not really, but like any interior world they are there, somewhere, always in the background. They were for many people, for many writers, like Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. You know, he spent years writing about the Abraham and Isaac story.

TFR:

In Fear and Trembling—

Howe:

Yes, and for me, always of course like many girls, it was Magdalene’s story that appealed to me. I knew from a very young age that how she was depicted was wrong.

TFR:

I always questioned the Cain and Abel story, why an all powerful being would prefer a lamb over wheat. It always bothered me. Mary Magdalene too, I always thought of the scene where the crowd was going to stone her.

Howe:

I knew it, always, I just knew it. And then later, when studying the New Testament and the early Church, I studied with Elaine Pagels, actually, who wrote a book about the gnostic gospels, and how the church fathers created that persona of Magdalene we came to know. [The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, 1979].

TFR:

This is why I love your book—you’ve given her the voice stolen, and let her take advantage of the empty space left.

Howe:

We’ll never know, as much as we want to know about the historical woman, and as a woman I can identify with a her searching for meaning and for her own subjectivity outside the norms that existed for her then.

TFR:

That is sad, really, right? I mean all the women of the Bible, and there are so many! Their voices have been filtered, right? We only get to hear the redacted male versions. When did this idea come to you, to focus poems on her? Is this the first you wrote of her?

Howe:

I’d been trying to write in the voice of Magdalene for thirty years. I think trying is the key word there—for me it was a kind of receptivity that had to occur, I think I had to grow up!

TFR:

I get that. I’ve had to move away from the religion of my childhood, and then sort of dance with it through the years. Or maybe I should say break up with it, and reconcile, and then do it all over again. It feels like it will be a life-long process. As a poet I’ve written in the voice of Eve, Noah’s wife, stuck on that boat, questioning her husband’s sanity, and recently a piece where I envisioned Adam going through a divorce in twenty-first century Florida before heading off to Vegas. I never thought about Magdalene, really, and now I feel a bit bad about that. I did do an ekphrastic poem based on a de La Tour painting before I knew of your collection. I’m interested: When you found yourself exploring, felt her voice coming out, would you say you were channeling her? That’s how I feel they come to me, as if I’m the receptacle and I let them speak.

Howe:

Well, it is and it isn’t, I mean in the book she’s me, she’s you, she’s a contemporary woman, she’s a woman who’s still in history.

TFR:

“Still in history.” Could you speak to that phrase a little more?

Howe:

I mean every poem, of course, for me is different. Some are more like just me wearing a mask of Magdalene, but sometimes it’s like everything is there, and I feel she is me, she is you, she’s the woman over there. That what was taken from us, from us women, was our commonality of her—she was turned, by men, into a repentant prostitute, who was closed off to us. I feel she’s the female principle trying to integrate herself.

TFR:

I wanted to ask, how you feel about it—that she’s the one who always had to be forgiven for something, or Eve, right? These voiceless women who’ve been reduced, in so many ways, to objects in need of forgiveness.

Howe:

According to the story, it might have been her, or it might not have been her. A lot of those female figures were combined in the gospels to one kind of object, a female representational object for men.

TFR:

To fit into their narratives.

Howe:

Right. Have you read the gnostic gospels and the gospel according to Mary Magdalene?

TFR:
No, only the old and new, the little blurb-version in my Catholic Bible.

Howe:

The gnostic gospels were outlawed by the Catholic Church, and we had no access to them until they were found in the late 1940s in a cave in Egypt—

TFR:
The dead sea scrolls?

Howe:

They were found along with the dead sea scrolls, but they really were the Gnostics, the early Christian communities who called themselves the Gnostics, and there is a gospel according to Mary Magdalene. There’s a story that you can get, though the original scroll was tattered and there’s a lot of empty spaces, as it’s ripped up, perhaps missing some pages.

TFR:

A physical object that was found then. Is there an idea when she wrote it?

Howe:

There’s also many different ones, gospels, thirty or forty of them. As Elaine Pagels notes, there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and in it she is “a character.” Whoever she was, the early communities split off into different kinds of communities, you know, then someone dies, a leader or writer, and arguments arise: He said this, she said that, they were all priests at that time, it was circular, both men and women, in a circular community that was eventually outlawed by the hierarchy of the patriarchal central church that determined priests and bishops should be all male, with no women in even perfunctory roles.

TFR:

Which of course left us with two thousand years of patriarch-diluted history.

Howe:

Yes, oppressions of female history!

TFR:

This book, this collection, I feel, on oppression, is quite timely. On the other hand, when wouldn’t it have been? It’s two thousand years in the making. What do you want to say to young female poets, with your own revelations, about what we’ve always known of as sexual harassment?

Howe:

The key thing we’ve always known is that women know women who have been beaten down, drowned, burned, killed, beaten to death by men. I mean, I love men, but the patriarchy has to end. That’s the political feeling I have, as a poet. I feel Muriel Rukeyser’s great poets’ voice of [German artist] Käthe Kollwitz in the poem of the same name, comments in her poem, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I feel we need to tell the truth about our lives. and we’ve been telling the truth all along, but no one would write it for us. There were a few women writers, but they’re almost invisible. We have to tell the truth about our lives. So I would tell young female poets, “Tell the truth about your life. Whatever that means.” All of our young women poets need to tell the truth in such a way they become transformed in the telling, which is what poetry does. Mere complaint doesn’t do it, mere witness doesn’t even do it. Something has to occur in the telling that’s transformative to the writer.

TFR:

Thank you for that. I find in some contemporary poetry it’s men and women ranting, and the ranting doesn’t do it.

Howe:

This is a very mysterious aspect of art, right? That somehow through language and style, silence and metaphor, and musicality, and writing into a subject, not merely about a subject, but into what you don’t understand about it, about the subject, then one becomes transformed in the act of writing, and one discovers something one doesn’t know, and that is what art is for. There’s nothing wrong with witness, we need it, but art transforms the maker. Art transforms both the poet and the reader.

TFR:

Do you feel once the poem leaves you it becomes the reader’s?

Howe:

That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn’t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can’t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around—that’s what I’ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn’t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world—this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.

TFR:

I tell my students I probably only appreciate about 30 percent of the poems I read, and of that 30 percent there are only a few I love, but those poems help me live. I take them with me when I try to go to sleep at night after a horrible day. In your book, What the Living Do, you endured the death of your brother. I had a younger brother who died at forty-three of alcoholism.

Howe:

I’m so sorry! In my family too, we dealt with that. I feel the same way. Poetry saved my life.