The Work of Not Knowing

Marie Howe: “The Maples”

I asked the stand of maples behind the house,
How should I live my life?

They said, shhh shhh shhh . . .

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.

A squirrel scrambled up a trunk
then along the length of a branch.

Stand still, I thought,
See how long you can bear that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
drinking light      breathing

James Shaheen: So I’m here with poet Marie Howe. Hi, Marie. It’s great to be with you.

Marie Howe: Hello, James. It’s great to see you.

James Shaheen: You know, I was at the bookstore several weeks ago, and your book was prominently displayed, New and Selected Poems, and it said, “Pulitzer Prize winner Marie Howe,” and I said, “What?” I talked to some mutual friends of ours and I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t know this,” and they said, “Well, don’t worry. Marie didn’t know either.” So how did that happen?

Marie Howe: I didn’t know, and I have a feeling I know who those mutual friends are, the monks, the beautiful men monks, Chodo and Koshin, maybe. Yeah, it was a complete surprise, James. Billy Collins was laughing at me, because he said, “Everybody always says, ‘I was just cleaning out the closet.’” But I really was just cleaning out the one closet we have in our New York apartment, our tiny apartment. And I was actually quite depressed. I’d been struggling with depression over the last few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll do something useful,” and someone was about to take care of our dog for a week while I went to Ireland to read, so I was cleaning out the closet for him, and the phone rang, and it was Michael Klein. Now, you know Michael Klein, and we can’t do an imitation of his voice now, but I’m going to do a terrible imitation. I said, “Michael, how are you?” He said, “Darling, you won the Pulitzer Prize.” And I said, “I did not, Michael. That’s not even funny.” And he said, “You did.” And I said, “I didn’t, stop.” And he said, “You did, you did.” And I said, “I didn’t, I didn’t.” That went on for about eight or ten minutes, and then he finally convinced me, but I had no idea. None.

James Shaheen: Yeah. That’s amazing. So they didn’t contact you directly?

Marie Howe: No, apparently they contact the publisher, but that letter ended up in the spam of the Norton press. Nobody. So I didn’t know, nobody knew. My editor, everybody, my agents, Bill Clegg and Jill Bialosky, were both like “Ah, what?” So it was fun.

James Shaheen: Well, congratulations, Marie. That’s impressive.

Marie Howe: I’m very moved. Very, very moved by it. I’m very moved and very disoriented.

James Shaheen: Well, it’s well deserved. So we’re here to talk about your latest collection, New and Selected Poems, which is the one that won the prize. So to start, can you tell us about the collection?

Marie Howe: Well, as you know, I write very slowly, James. It takes me about nine or ten years to finish a book of poems. And so I thought, I was 72 years old at the time, “My goodness, I’m going to be really old by the time I finish the next book.” And a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you do a new and selected?” And it had never occurred to me. It was a bit of a relief because I could put together the other books, or much of them, and then include new poems. And it gave me a kind of a deadline as well, which I love. But putting it together was very difficult. I don’t think I could have done it without my friends. I tried, but it was emotional. I don’t really look back. I mean, of course I read from the books, but when a book comes out, I read from it, but I don’t go back and look at it. It’s happened, you know, so to read through it again was quite something, just to see forty years of writing. And then, as I say, friends helped.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it was really nice reading the new poems and also reading the selected poems, many of which I had already read, but reading them all together was a really great experience. You begin the collection with a poem called “Prologue,” and it ends with the line, “I came to the edge / and I did not know the way.” This idea of not knowing is a major theme in your writing. So can you tell us a bit about the role of not knowing in your work as a poet?

Marie Howe: I could burst out laughing right now. Well, that’s pretty much the whole role. That’s the role. The major role is not knowing. I never know what I’m doing, and I don’t think it really matters what I’m doing. I’m waiting. I was just reading this morning, James, Meister Eckhart, who strikes me as the most Zen of Christian mystics because of the way he emphasizes not knowing, absolutely not knowing and being empty and still.

So I never know what I’m doing. I don’t have any idea, and I begin to write what the weather is, what the leaves look like, what the dog just did. But I would truly depend on something else to come through and use my stuff to transform something into something else. So not knowing is important. It doesn’t mean I can’t turn in some direction. I mean, I could turn in some direction, and I write a lot of poems that I throw out because I know what I’m doing. And so those, they don’t really stay. But then I wait to be taken over by something else, which is the best feeling in the whole world.

James Shaheen: You know, most spiritual traditions have this notion of not knowing, I think. I mean, like you, I grew up a Catholic, and that was pretty buried.

Marie Howe: All too buried. All too buried.

James Shaheen: It’s all too buried. And when I was in high school, I read The Cloud of Unknowing, and I was flabbergasted. I’m sure you’ve read that.

Marie Howe: Yeah, I love that guy. But I have to say, I love Meister Eckhart even more. I don’t mean to compare. Because Meister Eckhart’s so funny. I mean, he’s like, “Now, listen, this part’s really important. Listen to this now.” But The Cloud of Unknowing, yeah. We were told dogma, unfortunately. It was a true tragedy because we grew up with rules, which is not the point. But yeah, to be still and know that I am God.

James Shaheen: Well, I do enjoy reading bits from Meister Eckhart in your work. I just wanted to turn our attention to attention. So much of your work revolves around attention. In fact, in another interview you described yourself as a noticer. So can you say more about how you think about the practice of attention?

Marie Howe: It’s a beautiful question. You know, I love the world, the physical world, and I love to look and walk around and see things. Like everybody else, much of what’s going on in my  mind is my own worries: what’s going to happen, regret, planning, the past and the future, the past and the future, the past and the future. And every once in a while, especially in New York, that’s one of the great joys of being in New York. Just walking along the sidewalk, you see—last week there was a person, a man on my corner of Hudson and Barrow who was completely naked except for a kind of loincloth and angel wings, right? And he was dancing. What can I say? I’m glad I was there to perceive him and to see him. There are also three bunnies out on the lawn right now. It’s a great relief to be able to notice the world instead of to be buzzing around in my own worried mind.

The other thing is I’m not really a metaphor maker, James. Maybe you’ve noticed. It’s like what strikes me is I guess what T. S. Eliot called the objective correlative, which is the actual description, the actual thing, whether it be a storm in King Lear or whether it be an empty milk bottle on the kitchen table, can be itself and also somehow resonate of something else that’s happening there without being a metaphor. I love that.

James Shaheen: Right. You take the ordinary and and describe it well, and at the same time, the unseen runs through it. I mean, you describe a scene in a market on Sixth Avenue that I know, and all of a sudden it’s at once very ordinary and at the same time, all of the unseen that is running through it becomes apparent or sensed. I wonder if you could say something about the unseen.

Marie Howe: Well, we even know physically right now with the new science that we’re learning more of every day that we perceive almost nothing of what’s really happening. I mean, our perception is so limited. Because we have the tools we have, we perceive what we perceive, knowing that what we perceive is not all there is. My dog Jack can know more with his nose than I can know with my eyes, for example. He can tell time without a watch. But also I grew up with the sense, always the sense that there was more present than could be perceived.

James Shaheen: So I want to go back to attention for a moment. In recent poems, you turn your attention to the natural world. And again, it’s not metaphorical. It’s there both as it is and also, again, we have a sense of the unseen. You listen to the world around you. As one example of this, I’m wondering if you’d be willing to read “The Maples.”

Marie Howe: Oh, the maples. I’m looking at the maple right now through my window, as you said that. Well, I wanted to say first of all, thanks to so many of the students I’ve worked with at Sarah Lawrence, we’ve all been learning ecopoetry together over the last ten years. And it’s really changed and even deepened my life because to pay attention to what we’re learning about, I mean, we even begin with the word nature. You know, we decide not to use it because it implies that we’re not nature, which of course we are. Or even the word animal. We say the “other animals” because we are animals too. We just try to find or really really remember our actual place in the living world. The rest of the living world seems to me quite sane, and humans, not so much. So, I was asking the maples one day out of desperation. I’m just looking for it, James. Here we go.

James Shaheen: In the book, it’s on page 24, I think.

Marie Howe: There you go.

“The Maples”

I asked the stand of maples behind the house,

How should I live my life?

 

They said, shhh shhh shhh . . .

 

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.

 

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,

And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.

 

A squirrel scrambled up a trunk

then along the length of a branch.

 

Stand still, I thought,

See how long you can bear that.

 

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,

drinking light      breathing

James Shaheen: Thank you. You know, that reminded our podcast producer, Sarah Fleming, and me of an interview we had with Arthur Sze. He talked about poetry as a way of listening to the syntax of the aspen leaves and a way of giving voice to nonhuman, sometimes even inanimate, voices. So can you say more about your own practices of listening? How does listening show up in your poetry?

Marie Howe: Well first, Arthur Sze. Thank goodness for Arthur Sze. I was listening to his talk with you the other day, James, and it was wonderful to listen to. I love his work. 

You know, I want to make something really clear. It’s very hard for me to sit still. It’s very, very hard for me to listen. It’s very hard for me to pay attention. I am a restless person. But it is, again, a great relief when a portal opens, and I can.

I feel we’re surrounded by living entities. Everything around us is alive. I mean, the stones are alive. All the trees, the birds, the insects, everything. And I feel as if they really, truly do know more about living—or that’s not quite right. Not know; they are living more sanely than I am. So I am more and more interested in watching them and listening to them and trying to notice them and asking for their forgiveness for my ignoring them for much of my life. But I also have to say that from the beginning, I’m sure a lot of us are like this. We had a friend who was a tree, a friend that was a certain rose bush in the backyard, a friend that was a squirrel in a certain place. So that was always there in many ways. But I do look at these trees. It’s very hard for me, for example, to meditate. I’ve been trying to do it for just fifteen minutes a day. And I feel like if there weren’t ticks out here, so many, I would go outside and lean against one of these trees with my back to one of them, because it could teach me how to be still while being alive, be still while being receptive, be still while expressing itself constantly and in relationship to everything, to the air, to the light, to the other animals. And yet it’s still in that it’s rooted. It’s not distracted. It’s not spilling out its attention all in 50,000 different places. So I think it’s no accident that the Buddha sat under a tree when he became enlightened.

James Shaheen: He didn’t worry about ticks.

Marie Howe: He didn’t have to worry about ticks. I’m sure he worried about, I’m sure there were other things to be concerned about. Snakes, for example.

James Shaheen: You know, I would say that I’m surprised to hear you say that you can’t sit still or that sometimes you’re outside of yourself and you’re not paying attention to people and you feel some regret about that, except that I read your poetry and I hear that. At the same time, I think there is such a stillness at the center of it at the same time. So you do seem to find that still point. Is that fair to say?

Marie Howe: Well, it’s home, right? It’s home. And again, Meister Eckhart would say that is the unknown, that’s the part of us that doesn’t know anything and isn’t not attached to anything. It’s home, you know? It’s a place of deepest eternity. And that place has always been home. I mean, probably for many people. But it is a very difficult world. There are so many distractions. There are so many emergencies. There are so many, you know, Instagrams. There are so many things. 

James Shaheen: But you know, about distraction. You once said in an interview, and I’m going to quote you, “This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the email and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.” So it can be so easy and tempting, as you say, with, say, Instagram to look away or to disappear into a Netflix series. 

Marie Howe: Mm-hmm.

James Shaheen: So how does poetry help us to keep looking?

Marie Howe: Well, it’s hard to read poetry, right? Let’s just say it. It’s demanding. And no matter how accessible the poem is, it’s the same way. It’s demanding in the way that sitting still is demanding. I mean, if I were just sitting still here and not talking with you, I’m happy to be talking with you, but when I was looking out the window toward these maples, you know, there are like a hundred colors of green in that tree because of the way the light’s going through the leaves. See, and I’m losing my train of thought, because there are three things I want to say at once.

The notion of looking at something without looking away started with asking my students to bring in ten observations a week. Just, you know, “I saw white chickens by the red wheelbarrow,” for example, and they were like, “Ugh, I can’t,” and they couldn’t find anything to look at. I’m like, “Forget about looking. Just in this room now, look on the floor. What do you see?” And they were like, “OK, somebody’s pen. It’s a blue Bic pen on the wooden floor.” You know, there you go. Just notice it. And they wanted to make similes or metaphors of it, and I kept saying, “Just try to say what you see without turning it into something.” And that was the resistance. It was very easy to say “The puddles were like little lakes all over the pavement” instead of just “There were puddles.”

So anyway, there’s that kind of looking without turning it into something else. And then there’s just, how do I say this? When we look, we’re also being looked at. We’re being looked at. We’re also withstanding the gaze. It’s a mutual gaze, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I think that that is enthralling and hard to bear.

James Shaheen: I think in one of the poems you do talk about that you’re outside yourself. You’re inside yourself, and then there’s that third place in between when two people are looking at each other.

Marie Howe: Yeah. Or a tree and a woman are looking at each other, right? Or a bunny and a woman are looking at each other, or a dog or another person. Yes. An in-between place I had not yet been where there’s a mutual gaze, and you’re in it.

James Shaheen: Mmhmm.

Marie Howe: I think that with the living world is what I want more of.

James Shaheen: Marie, since we both love animals, I’m going to ask you to read a poem about Jack. It’s on page 25. It’s called “Jack and the Moon.”

Marie Howe: Oh, “Jack and the Moon.” OK.

“Jack and the Moon”

After driving home through the forest,
I curled into bed to sleep, but Jack wouldn’t let me.

He whined and barked—high-pitched barks I’d not heard before.
No, I said, from under the blanket. No.

Still, he barked and paced and paced and barked, No Jack!
Then yelped strange high yelps, followed by low growls, as if he might,

by the mere scope and scale of his pleading, persuade me,
until I did finally throw off the covers and open the front door

through which he hurried, not to sniff or pee, but to sit on the lawn,
his back to me, a small white dog facing the moon

lit by light so bright I could have read these words within it.

And when I went to fetch him, he scooted farther away to sit
tucked into himself, gazing into the flooded distance.

A very cold night—I stood a while at the open door-calling Jack!
Jack come, come now! (willful, stubborn dog!)

And when he didn’t come, I curled up on the couch,
wrapped in a shawl and dozed for I don’t know how long . . .

then woke, went again to the door and said quietly, Jack.
It was then he turned and came in, cold and calm, soaked with the moon.

James Shaheen: That’s great. You know, I love the line “soaked with the moon,” and I had to say, is that a metaphor? And then I said, no, he’s soaked with the moon.

James Shaheen: Many of the poems in that collection come from your 1997 book, What the Living Do, which focuses on your relationship with your brother John, who died of AIDS. So can you tell us about John and your experience of caring for him?

Marie Howe: Well, he cared for me. You know, Johnny was a lover of the first degree. Everybody loved John. I’m one of nine children, James, and John was the second youngest, and I was the second oldest, but the second oldest and a girl, which meant I was in charge, if you will, which was annoying to most of them. But John and I were close from when he was a tiny boy. He was really a spiritual teacher to me in many, many ways. He would laugh if he heard me say that. But like all great teachers, he had to go through the descent and then emerge again later.

We were very close, and we always had been. And then when he became sick with AIDS, it was back in the day when people died. He was living with his beloved partner, Joe, who was a Buddhist actually, and before he lived with John, he lived at the Zendo in Rochester, the Zen Center. But the main thing about Johnny was that he was—not the main thing. One of the things I want to celebrate about John and his relationship to me is that we wrote to each other all the time. So, so many letters passed between us before the internet. You know, handwritten letters, typed letters, and most of the letters started with “The kitchen sink has been clogged for days,” you know, or “It’s been raining all month,” or just physical details. So whenever I got stuck, as I often am when writing, often Johnny would say, “Write me a letter,” or “Do what you always do. Just start to say what’s happening.” So after he died, there were so many—as you know, the room where somebody is aware that he’s dying, because we’re all dying, and we’re all living at the same time. Johnny used to say, “Everybody’s walking around. They don’t understand that they’re going to die. I just look at everybody, and I think, ‘You don’t even know yet, do you?’” And he wasn’t criticizing them, he was just kind of like, “Wow. That’s what I used to be like too.” So in those rooms, beautiful things happen.

James Shaheen: You know, in the poem “The Last Time,” he points out to you, “You say that you know that I’m going to die. What I’m telling you is that you are going to die,” and that’s a revelation. And I totally resonated with that because I was in your position. You know, this was in the nineties, early nineties, and his name was also John, and it was transformative to be alerted to the fact that, yes, I’m going to die too, and everybody is. And everything changed when I understood that a little bit better. And he said the same thing: “All these people are walking around like they feel bad for me, but it’s them too.” And that kind of equalized everything. So it wasn’t like people treated him like he was no longer there or less there, but he was as there as any of us. And so that poem really hit me.

Marie Howe: Well, the other thing in that poem is that the speaker, me, really didn’t understand what he was saying, which is a little joke. Can I just read it? It’s very short.

James Shaheen: Yeah, absolutely.

Marie Howe: “The Last Time”

So I would go to Rochester to visit him and, and we would go out to eat, usually to a nice restaurant, and so—

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white table cloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, what surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

All those nos.

James Shaheen: Right. And how did all of a sudden getting an inkling of that or knowing it at least to some degree, how did that change everything about your relationship or how you cared for him, or how he cared for you?

Marie Howe: Well, my father died when I was 29, and John and I were moved home to help take care of him. And watching my father die, being there at the moment when he died, caring for him when he died, that was huge. I mean, then I really got it, like, “OK, we’re finite,” you know? I mean, I really got it—I got this much, a teeny little bit, but it flooded me, the knowledge that we’re finite as this whatever we are.

When John was dying, or was living, and then when he died, it was so relational. It was so different. We were talking to each other all the time. It was such a different kind of relationship than with my dad. You know, Johnny said maybe a week before he died, “Marie, this is not a tragedy. I’m a happy man.”

James Shaheen: Right.

Marie Howe: “You know, I’m a happy man. When I’m asked if I could love, I can answer yes.” You know?

James Shaheen: I mean, people have a sense that something went wrong, but nothing went wrong.

Marie Howe: That’s a beautiful way to put it. Nothing went wrong. That’s a beautiful way to put it, James. Nothing went wrong.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s what I was told. He looked at me and said, “You know, people look at us and feel sorry for us, but nothing went wrong.”

Marie Howe: Yeah, that’s beautiful.

James Shaheen: “They think something went wrong if they’re unhappy. Nothing went wrong.”

Marie Howe: Nothing went wrong. And that’s how John was. He was like, “Ooh, this is a really good sandwich,” you know, or “This is really nice lemonade.” I mean, every little thing became, it was always important to him, but it became really important. I mean, it became really the thing that was happening, you know? And after that, I was so demolished though by grief that I realized the great awakening of that was the day when I realized, I sort of turned around, and there were millions of people behind me just waving very gently at me, people who also had lost someone they just thought they could not live without. And I turned around and I was like, “Hi everybody.” And I felt so different to be in the world, like, “Oh my lord. Of course.” I mean, there were millions just waving and smiling at me. And that made all the difference, and then I really felt I could enter this world to be here without John and keep going and love everybody and know that I’m going to die, you’re going to die, my dog’s going to die, and that here we are, and all those people are still there just so kindly waving.

James Shaheen: You know, some years ago, our mutual friends Koshin Paley Ellison and Chodo Campbell interviewed you, and you told them that everything changed after John died, and the particulars of daily life suddenly mattered much more to you. Can you say more about this devotion to the particular?

Marie Howe: Well, you know, again, what’s right in front of me, James, is this glass of iced tea and lemonade mixed, and I’m just looking down into the glass, and the gorgeous surface of it is shining from the light reflected off the trees. And it’s a beautiful thing. Like there it is, this beautiful glass full of amber, cool liquid, and that’s never going to happen again. Never going to happen again. You know, your John’s never going to happen again. Not in that form. My John’s never going to happen again. Who knows who we are, what goes on, if anything? I don’t know. But the irretrievable, absolute nowness of what is right there is kind of amazing. Every moment becomes more and more itself. It never happened before. It’ll never happen again. And then to be with friends and dogs who know that, then it becomes even more fulfilling, you know? But mostly it’s, as they say, an inside job to remember that this has never happened before and it will never happen again, to try and be fully present.

James Shaheen: Would you mind reading “What the Living Do?” It’s on page 95.

Marie Howe: A lot of people, no, I shouldn’t say a lot of people. I understand that some people sort of misunderstand this poem. OK, here we go. So this was, I couldn’t write, couldn’t write, couldn’t write, couldn’t write, couldn’t write. And then I pushed everything I was working on that day aside and said I just had to write to my brother who was dead, and dead probably for over a year.

“What the Living Do”

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano 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’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s 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

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Marie. You know, we’ve been talking about embodying this knowledge that we too will go, and you’ve said in another interview that poetry holds the knowledge that we’re alive and that we know we’re going to die. So how so? I think your poetry pretty much demonstrates that.

Marie Howe: Well, we wouldn’t write if we weren’t going to die, right?

James Shaheen: Right.

Marie Howe: We wouldn’t have to. If we were superheroes and were going to live forever, we would have no need to write anything down. Probably. Maybe. We’d have no need to record or put a word in place for the thing. I don’t know. Death is the mother of beauty, Wallace Stevens says. Everything dies, everything changes. Octavia Butler: God is change. I mean, yikes. But I don’t know what dying means anymore.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I can’t say I do either. You know, you said something, and we tend to want to instrumentalize everything, including poetry. And in an earlier interview with Tricycle many years ago, you said that poems aren’t meant to be used; they’re meant to just be there, like a living voice.

Marie Howe: Hmm. That’s interesting. Well, it’s interesting, the word “used.” I mean, the problem—here’s what I go to instantly, OK? You ready? The terrible thing about being a teacher of poetry is that one begins to collect poems to quote “use” them as examples to show young writers. That is a real terrible thing. I mean, seriously.

James Shaheen: And yet you have to do it, right?

Marie Howe: One feels one has to do it. I mean, I still do. I wish there was another way, because people even say, “Oh, can I use that?” It’s like listening to music. I guess you play music for people, but there’s a way that in looking through poems to “use” to teach, they’ve become commodities. And the great thing about a poem is that it is worth nothing to anybody. It doesn’t cost anything. I mean, poets want people to learn their poems by heart. Poets want people to take them away, to write them down, to pass them around without charging for them. You know, poems get passed in and out of prisons, in and out of all kinds of rooms. And so this lack of, it’s simply not a commodity in the market, one of the only last things that isn’t so. It’s precious. It’s priceless, as they say. It’s pure. Or, you know, the dead—John Donne wrote poems centuries ago, and we’re reading them now. I mean, Emily Dickinson. I mean, they’re passed through time and space. So, yes, to be used. They’re not really to be used. I think they’re to be experienced, to be listened to. It’s difficult to settle down. Just like you would experience a person or a dog or to stick with the dogs or the maple, you have to be there. And I think that’s why some people say, “I don’t like poetry. It’s too hard.” And at some point poetry was—there was that whole period where Americans were writing poems that people couldn’t understand.

James Shaheen: You know, recently I interviewed the playwright Sarah Ruhl, and she thought of writing as prayer, and several years ago, you told us that the poem you carried around in your pocket was Galway Kinnell’s poem “Prayer.” You yourself have also written several poems titled “Prayer.” So I wonder, do you think about poetry as a spiritual or contemplative practice or a form of prayer?

Marie Howe: It is for me, absolutely. It is a way of being, listening, quieting down to listen to that still, small voice, No matter what direction one is putting one’s attention, maybe it’s “Jack and the Moon.” It’s not about me in Jack and the Moon. It’s about something ineffable that’s trying to find its way through the poem. But definitely, I love that poem by Galway. “Whatever / what is is is what / I want. Only that. But that.”

James Shaheen: I copied it down, because I went back looking for it in that interview, and I love it too.

Marie Howe: A lot of people forget the third “is.”

James Shaheen: Well, why don’t you say it again? You’ve memorized it.

Marie Howe: “Whatever / what is is is what / I want. Only that. But that.” So it’s hard. “Whatever what is is what I want” Is what you think he’s saying. But what he’s saying is “Whatever what is is is what I want.”

James Shaheen: I see.

Marie Howe: Simplicity. Boy, that’s like calligraphy. That’s like a Zen drawing. Simple.

James Shaheen: Yeah. There are certain things that I recite again and again, sometimes every day, like a particular refuge prayer.

Marie Howe: Like what?

James Shaheen: It’s just like taking refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, a little bit more elaborate, with a little bit of an explanation of what each of those might mean. But it’s funny how a ritual like that, something like the poem you just recited, sinks in after a while and begins to work on you without you even being conscious of it, which is the best way, just reciting it.

Marie Howe: Yeah, it is. If you just live with “Whatever / what is is is what / I want,” wow. That’s a lot. That’s something to want that. That means like right now. That means whatever what is is. That’s Gaza, that’s Iran, that’s Trump. That’s everything. Can you really say that? You know, is that what you want?

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny. It’s not like I go to Mass anymore. But sometimes the prayers I learned as a young person come back to me and they have a very different meaning from what I was told they meant, you know.

Marie Howe: For example, tell me, James.

James Shaheen: Well, let me see. I could say the Hail Mary, and it means something different to me, and I think I just sort of absorbed it over the years. I stopped hearing it, but when I did it again, I thought, “Full of grace, what does that mean?” And it becomes a bit of a koan. Or I can think of biblical stories like the fishes and loaves, and when I was caretaking, the unexpected generosity that would come out of me wasn’t even recognized as generosity; it was just simply what I did. In retrospect, I can describe it as generosity, but the more I gave, the more there was to give. And I thought, “Oh, the fishes and loaves, that’s what that meant.” And so these things I was impressed with come back. Is that that way for you?

Marie Howe: That’s beautifully said. It’s like being a parent, right? A parent to a small child, which is completely exhausting, but there it is. So what are you going to do? Stop? And you can’t, so you just pull up other things, or other things come through you that are, somebody could say generous, but it’s not. It’s really just love. It’s love.

James Shaheen: Absolutely. It just came through me. I remember I hadn’t slept for days, and I thought, “I can’t do this,” and all of a sudden I could, and the more I gave, the more capacity I had to give. It was extraordinary, but it wasn’t me. And again, we talk about the unseen. That was an unseen thing passing through me that remains a mystery, but it was an incredible experience.

Marie Howe: I love what you’re saying. It’s very moving to me. I’m thinking about, I keep going back to Meister Eckhart because I’ve been reading him again lately, but he’s talking about Mary, and he says, “Each one of us can become the mother of God.” Because he’s talking about that deep interiority that is home, that knows that, and he goes farther than that. He’s so radical. No wonder they wanted to arrest him, or, you know, he was on trial, but they didn’t get to kill him, thank goodness. But he essentially is saying everybody is a son of God. Oh, wild man, Meister Eckhart. I mean, I love him. I love that he said everybody has this inside them, everybody. But I’m drifting around because what you just said, it’s like when we give up. When you said, “I can’t do this.” Surrender. I mean, that’s the miracle of twelve-step programs, right?

James Shaheen: Right.

Marie Howe: Surrender.

James Shaheen: Yeah. It’s not submission. People confuse it for a submission. It’s surrender.

Marie Howe: And it’s not willpower ever.

James Shaheen: Right. No. And what came through me in those moments was unexpected, unplanned, and it couldn’t be invoked except perhaps through prayer. But it is something other, and it’s not under my control.

Marie Howe: Yeah.

James Shaheen: Well, Marie, many of your poems revolve around the lives of the two Marys, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. Can you say more about the role of biblical narratives in your work? And in particular, what have you learned from inhabiting the voices of these two Marys?

Marie Howe: I love them both. First of all, I love these two women. I love the young woman who was visited, who had a visitation that asked her to accept a future that was utterly original and different from anything she’d ever known. And I love Magdalene. What I regret is how these two women have been split into dualities by the Church Fathers and the patriarchy. I think they’re sisters. I think they are the same woman in many, many ways. But Mary I think of as younger. I mean, she’s just young, and she’s encountering what we’ll call the powers that we’ve been talking about in her life mythologically, of course, in that she’s asked to do this original thing, to assume a future that’s incomprehensible to her, that’s never been done before. And that, I think, is what’s asked of each of us really, no matter what our work is, is to move into the ever new as much as possible.

Magdalene, of course, has been just trashed by the men in all the paintings, the beautiful paintings. But as you probably know, maybe you’ve read The Gnostic Gospels, she was actually quite a leader and quite something. Jesus was her teacher, but it was pretty, pretty clear that he might have been even much closer to her than that—intimate, possibly, of course. But more importantly, Jesus aside, she seems to me to be a woman in her culture trying to integrate herself, her sensuality, her spirituality, her physicality, which is what all of us are trying to do. We’re trying to integrate all those aspects of, and women especially, because we’ve been split, split, split, split, split. So to become integrated within yourself, it seems to me that for most women, the path to that is very difficult. It’s fraught with eating disorders, with addictions, with destructive love affairs, with compulsion, with depression, because of the culture we’re in. And so to come through that, to come through it and to come to peace within herself and in relationship to others, it just strikes me as it was wonderful to try to move with her through all those different phases. I think she is a marvelous woman, but both of them are.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, I really hadn’t thought about it, but it’s true. I can’t think of one Mary without thinking of the other.

Marie Howe: They did that to us, James, and to themselves. They split off the feminine from the masculine. But I love both of these women, and I do feel that they’re very, very similar. They’re together all the time.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, if our readers get the book, they’ll get to read about both. I was wondering if you could read one of the poems about Mary. It’s “Mary (Reprise)” on page 126.

Marie Howe: Sure. Oh yeah. This is after she’s a mother, I think.

“Mary (Reprise)”

What is that book we always see—in the painting—in her lap?
Her finger keeping the place of who she was when she looked up?

When I look up: my mother is dead, and my own daughter is calling
from the bathtub, Mom come in and watch me—come in here right now!

No Going Back might be the name of that angel—no more reverie.
Let it be done to me, Mary finally said, and that

was the last time, for a long time, that she spoke about the past.

James Shaheen: You know, I love that poem. I wonder if you could say something more about the angel called No Going Back.

Marie Howe: Well, I think it’s what we were just talking about. I mean, what Mary was asked to do, mythologically, was to accept a future that was unimaginable, previously unimaginable to her. There’s no going back when you take a step toward that. And I think that when we step into each moment knowing it’s finite and will never happen again, it’s the same thing—that we keep stepping into the newness of the now. But I also think it was mixed in a very subjective way with becoming an older mother of a tiny child, because I adopted my daughter after I was 50, and suddenly, you know, your inner life, you don’t have one for a while. I mean, you really don’t. It’s just like every single minute, if you have a wildly alive child, “Mom, come in, look at me. Come in here. Go look at this. Look at this.” You know, I have a good friend whose son used to ask her to watch him work on the computer. “Just watch me.” You know what I mean? He didn’t want her to see what he was doing. He just wanted her to be in the room watching him on the computer. It’s like, it pulls you completely out of yourself. But that’s another kind of annunciation, right? Anything that does that, caretaking your partner: I can’t do it. I don’t have any more. And then something comes and you do. No Looking Back might be the name of that angel. You know what, there you are right there. There’s nowhere to go but there. And it feels so good, James. Doesn’t it?

James Shaheen: Yeah, absolutely. You know, just so our readers know, if they’re going to read that poem, and I do hope our listeners will get the book, also read “Magdalene — The Seven Devils,” which we don’t have time to read right now, but it’s a wonderful companion to that poem. So Marie, anything before we close? I’ve had so much fun, and I wish we could continue, but our time is up, and maybe we can do this again sometime. But do you have anything more to say?

Marie Howe: I love listening to you, James, talk about your relationship to your own life and to Catholicism that we both grew up in and how so much of what was actually alive in that tradition was buried and kept from us. So I want to just put a shout-out to that too. I can’t believe I just said shout out, such a cliche, but I still do want to say.

James Shaheen: You’re allowed.

Marie Howe: Thank you. There’s so much richness in the mystical traditions, and I mean that down home, everyday mystical traditions, and also in how these splits between Zen and Catholic—Thomas Merton, you know, the last vision he had were the great buddhas just before he died in Bangkok. You probably know that story when he said, “Finally, I’ve seen what I have all my life wanted to see in the faces of these buddhas.” And then he gives a speech and gets electrocuted in the shower right after. You know, it’s like there’s so much more connection than division, and there’s so much richness in the traditions that we grew up with that can be easily found.

James Shaheen: You know, I just should give a shout-out to Elaine Pagels. I find her work so wonderful because she looks at it historically and from the point of view of a scholar, and she doesn’t debunk and she sees the value in it.

Marie Howe: Elaine changed the world with her book The Gnostic Gospels. I studied with her at Union when I was at Columbia.

James Shaheen: Oh, really?

Marie Howe: And she’s a friend now. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person. And she, like all of us, has been through life-changing tragedies and griefs and joys, and she always is just so right there, you know.

James Shaheen: Yeah, we had her on the podcast after she wrote that book that was so personal, and now she’s got a new book out and maybe we’ll have her back on, but I’d certainly love to have you back, Marie. This has been a real delight.

Marie Howe: It’s a joy. I want us to talk more about what still is real and true for us from the traditions we grew up in.

James Shaheen: I would love to do that.

Marie Howe: Me too. I’d love to hear you.

James Shaheen: OK, well, we’ll do that. So thanks so much for joining, Marie. It’s been a great pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of New and Selected Poems, available now. Thanks again, Marie.

Marie Howe: Thank you, James.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Marie Howe. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!