her second book of poems,
What the Living Do, from which the previous poem is taken:
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=... "In 1987, (Howe) visited the MacDowell Colony for a residency. She was shown to her cabin and assured that no one would ever disturb her unless it was an emergency. Less than ten minutes later, she heard a knock on the door. There was a phone call from her brother John, who was being treated for cancer. The emergency, however, concerned their mother. She'd had a heart attack. Howe went home to Rochester and stayed for a week. Her mother was still in intensive care but better, and Howe was about to leave. But then John spiked a high fever and had to be admitted to another hospital. Howe accompanied him, waited with him for hours while he lay on a gurney in a hallway as the hospital tried to find him a doctor and a bed. Finally, a nurse came with a clipboard and asked the standard series of questions—only this time: "How long have you had AIDS?" John had told no one that he had the disease, and Howe promised she would honor his privacy. She visited her mother at the other hospital, maintained that John was fine, that it was simply the chemo, then went home to her family's empty kitchen to eat dinner and call her answering machine. There were friends' voices, all concerned about her mother, then: "This is the National Poetry Series. We are looking for Marie Howe . . ." More beeps and clicks and friends, then. "This is the National Poetry Series again. We're still looking for Marie Howe. Is this her? Where are you? You won." Margaret Atwood had selected Howe's manuscript of poems,
The Good Thief, as the winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.
Howe remembers, "And now I'm weeping because my book has been taken, and my mother is in intensive care, and the one person who knows what the National Poetry Series is, who helped me arrange the manuscript to enter the contest for years, is curled on his side in a hospital bed, sweating out a 105 degree fever, without a phone installed yet.
"So I drive up to the hospital again, John's hospital, and walk up to the seventh floor because I'm afraid of elevators, and it's dark now and visiting hours are over . . . past the nurse's station and into the ugly green room where he is lying as I left him, sweating and weak and smiling to see me. 'Maria,' he says. And I say, 'John, I won the National Poetry Series.' And he holds out his hands and says, 'Good.'"
"My brother John died of AIDS," Howe says, "and so many friends have died since then. Stanley has said, 'We have to make our living and dying important again, and the living and dying of others. Isn't that what poetry is all about? Perhaps that is what AIDS is here to tell us. I wouldn't presume to know, but it is here to tell us something. And so many poets are listening: Thom Gunn, Cyrus Cassells, Melvin Dixon. It's breaking down the 'literary' walls that separate writers from everyone else, which is a great hope and dream." (From the journal,
Ploughshares, more at link.)
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