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Marie Howe is originally from Rochester, New York, and is the author of four poetry collections, of which the most recent is\u00a0Magdalene<\/em> (W. W. Norton, 2017),\u00a0a 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\u2019s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely.”\u00a0Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including\u00a0The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Harvard Review.<\/em>\u00a0Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.\u00a0In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the\u00a0Academy of American Poets.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Judith Roney for The Florida Review:<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m 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\u2014<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n What the Living Do\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes\u2014I\u2019ve taught that book\u2014it resonates so much for me personally, and now I have the chance to ask you how your most recent book, Magdalene<\/em>, came about.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019m 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 \u201cthe old testaments,\u201d and of course what the<\/p>\n Jewish tradition calls the Torah\u2014the stories meant a great deal to me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n In what way, specifically?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, they felt archetypal and deeply poetic as there were so many silences in them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Silences?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, silent space where they could be inhabited, and of course in the Jewish tradition there\u2019s midrash, a critical explanation where the Torah is considered a living document, and the rabbis imagine into<\/em> those silences, and continue to create the Torah. I always loved those stories and the spaces one could inhabit within them\u2014all those stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the Jewish great dilemmas, or debates as they\u2019re also called.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n I studied the Kabbalah in an undergrad course on world religion and love that aspect about Judaism\u2014the intellectual debates with the sense that the faith is in a state of evolving. I like this idea of \u201csilences.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, exactly. And the silences, well, Moses was a stutterer\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n At the side of my nightstand when I was a child, I had a huge children\u2019s Bible storybook with the most amazing illustrations. I still have it. I feel the stories helped create who I am. It\u2019s not that my beliefs are the same as when I was a child, but as a writer, they\u2019re so foundational when you hear them at a young age. Do they always find a way into your work?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Not always, I mean there are many poems where they don\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n In Fear and Trembling\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, and for me, always of course like many girls, it was Magdalene\u2019s story that appealed to me. I knew from a very young age that how she was depicted was wrong.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/em>, Vintage, 1979].<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n This is why I love your book\u2014you\u2019ve given her the voice stolen, and let her take advantage of the empty space left.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d been trying to write in the voice of Magdalene for thirty years. I think trying is the key word there\u2014for me it was a kind of receptivity that had to occur, I think I had to grow up!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n I get that. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve written in the voice of Eve, Noah\u2019s wife, stuck on that boat, questioning her husband\u2019s 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\u2019m interested: When you found yourself exploring, felt her voice coming out, would you say you were channeling her? That\u2019s how I feel they come to me, as if I\u2019m the receptacle and I let them speak.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, it is and it isn\u2019t, I mean in the book she\u2019s me, she\u2019s you, she\u2019s a contemporary woman, she\u2019s a woman who\u2019s still in history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cStill in history.\u201d Could you speak to that phrase a little more?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n I mean every poem, of course, for me is different. Some are more like just me wearing a mask of Magdalene, but sometimes it\u2019s like everything is there, and I feel she is me, she is you, she\u2019s the woman over there. That what was taken from us, from us women, was our commonality of her\u2014she was turned, by men, into a repentant prostitute, who was closed off to us. I feel she\u2019s the female principle trying to integrate herself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n I wanted to ask, how you feel about it\u2014that she\u2019s the one who always had to be forgiven for something, or Eve, right? These voiceless women who\u2019ve been reduced, in so many ways, to objects in need of forgiveness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n According to the story<\/em>, it might<\/em> have been her, or it might<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n To fit into their narratives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Right. Have you read the gnostic gospels and the gospel according to Mary Magdalene?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>: <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2014<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>: <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s a story that you can get, though the original scroll was tattered and there’s a lot of empty spaces, as it\u2019s ripped up, perhaps missing some pages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n A physical object that was found then. Is there an idea when she wrote it?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s 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 \u201ca character.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Which of course left us with two thousand years of patriarch-diluted history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, oppressions of female history!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n This book, this collection, I feel, on oppression, is quite timely. On the other hand, when wouldn\u2019t it have been? It\u2019s two thousand years in the making. What do you want to say to young female poets, with your own revelations, about what we\u2019ve always known of as sexual harassment?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n The key thing we\u2019ve 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\u2019s the political feeling I have, as a poet. I feel Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s great poets\u2019 voice of [German artist] K\u00e4the Kollwitz in the poem of the same name, comments in her poem, \u201cWhat would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.\u201d I feel we need to tell the truth about our lives. and we\u2019ve been telling the truth all along, but no one would write it for us. There were a few women writers, but they\u2019re 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\u2019t do it, mere witness doesn\u2019t even do it. Something has to occur in the telling <\/em>that\u2019s transformative to the writer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you for that. I find in some contemporary poetry it\u2019s men and women ranting, and the ranting doesn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a very mysterious aspect of art, right? That somehow through language and style, silence and metaphor, and musicality, and writing into<\/em> a subject, not merely about<\/em> a subject, but into what you don\u2019t understand about it, about the subject, then one becomes transformed in the act of writing, and one discovers something one doesn\u2019t know, and that is what art is for. There\u2019s nothing wrong with witness, we need it, but art transforms the maker. Art transforms both the poet and the reader.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you feel once the poem leaves you it becomes the reader\u2019s?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn\u2019t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can\u2019t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around\u2014that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn\u2019t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world\u2014this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TFR<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0In your book, What the Living Do<\/em>, you endured the death of your brother. I had a younger brother who died at forty-three of alcoholism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Howe:<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m so sorry! In my family too, we dealt with that. I feel the same way. Poetry saved my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was brought up in a tradition that had a very strong symbolic world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3542,"template":"","categories":[9,140],"tags":[6,1036,1037,1038,1039,1040,1041,1042,1043],"class_list":["post-3528","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-interview","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-catholicism","tag-christianity","tag-elaine-pagels","tag-magdalene","tag-marie-howe","tag-the-gnostic-gospels","tag-the-gospel-of-mary-magdalene","tag-what-the-living-do"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong>No, only the old and new, the little blurb-version in my Catholic Bible.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The dead sea scrolls?<\/p>\n