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Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, including Night Philosophy (2020), Love and I (2019), and Second Childhood (2014). Night Philosophy, the latest book by Fanny Howe, is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Her stories, meditations and fragments are woven together with passages by Samuel Beckett, Marilyn Buck, Henia and Ilona Karmel, the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and literary ephemera to explore violence, survival and vulnerability.

Howe was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, and the California Council for the Arts. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute and MacArthur. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Probable Travel



1


In the upper unlimited

Math is illuminating earth:  miniscule

Numberlessness.



2


The sky makes room for one

Then closes when it’s gone.



3


A body in sand becomes a body of sand.



4.


Thank you, alchemy, for teaching me.

You stand before me

Whether as a ladder, a cupboard, or three windows

Onto a wall.

These descriptions:  what are they for-- that we live

Among their failings?

A miniature elephant grayed into water.


*


The lesson:  Nothing of you can die or became nothing

Once you are something.


*


Now you live inside the shell

That blackens away all difference.

Before it cracks

You peck at it

To replicate your heartbeat.


*


A man had a scar from shrapnel on his cheek.

Found its way to his heart and then spread.

      He never would go abroad.

      Or take his body very far.  It must have been sore

      The way he couldn’t talk about his time over there.

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