Fanny Howe
Nacida el 15 de octubre 1940 en Buffalo, Nueva York es poeta, novelista y escritora estadounidense de cuentos. Howe fue galardonada con el 2009 Ruth Premio de Poesía Lilly.
Publicaciones
Poesía
Eggs: poems , Houghton Mifflin, 1970
The Amerindian Coastline Poem , Telephone Books Press, 1975, ISBN 0-916382-08-7
Poem from a Single Pallet , Kelsey Street Press, 1980, ISBN 0-932716-10-5
Alsace-Lorraine , Telephone Books Press, 1982, ISBN 0-916382-28-1
For Erato: The Meaning of Life , 1984
Robeson Street , Alice James Books , 1985, ISBN 978-0-914086-59-8
Introduction to the World , Figures, 1986, ISBN 0-935724-21-4
The Lives of a Spirit , Sun & Moon Press, 1987, ISBN 0-940650-95-9
The Vineyard , Lost Roads Publishers, 1988, ISBN 978-0-918786-37-1
[sic] , Parentheses Writing Series, October 1988, ISBN 978-0-9620862-2-9
The End , Littoral Books, 1992 ISBN 1-55713-145-7
The Quietist , O Books, 1992, ISBN 978-1-882022-12-0
O'Clock , Reality Street, 1995, ISBN 978-1-874400-07-3
One Crossed Out , Graywolf Press, 1997, ISBN 978-1-55597-259-2
Forged , Post-Apollo Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-942996-36-4
Selected Poems , University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-520-22263-2 (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize )
Gone . University of California Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-520-23810-7 .
Tis of Thee , Atelos, 2003, ISBN 978-1-891190-16-2
On the Ground , Graywolf Press, 2004, ISBN 978-1-55597-403-9 (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken Nightboat Books, 2005, ISBN 978-0-9767185-1-2
The Lyrics , Graywolf Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-55597-472-5
(with Henia Karmel-Wolfe and Ilona Karmel) A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond , University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25136-6
Come and See: Poems , Graywolf Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-55597-586-9
Second Childhood: Poems . Graywolf Press. 18 November 2014. pp. 29–. ISBN 978-1-55597-917-1.
Ficción
West Coast Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1963, ASIN B000CE8HP4
Vietnam Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1966
Forty Whacks , Houghton Mifflin, 1969, ISBN 0-575-00560-2
First Marriage HarperCollins, 1974, ISBN 0-380-01850-0
Bronte Wilde , Avon Books, 1976, ISBN 978-0-380-00548-2
Holy Smoke . University of Alabama Press. 1979. ISBN 978-0-914590-55-2 .
The White Slave , Avon Books, 1980, ISBN 978-0-380-45591-1
In the Middle of Nowhere: A Novel . University of Alabama Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-914590-83-5 .
The Deep North Sun & Moon Press, 1988, ISBN 978-1-55713-025-9
Famous Questions , Ballantine Books, 1989, ISBN 978-0-345-36177-6
Saving History , Sun & Moon Press, 1993, ISBN 978-1-55713-100-3
Nod , Sun & Moon Press, 1998, ISBN 1-55713-307-7
Indivisible , Semiotext(e), 2000, ISBN 978-1-58435-009-5
Economics: Stories , Flood Editions, 2002, ISBN 978-0-9710059-4-5
Radical Love: 5 Novels , Nightboat Books, 2006, ISBN 978-0-9767185-3-6
Joven ficción Adultos
The Blue Hills , Avon, 1981, ISBN 0-380-78998-1
Yeah, But Avon/Flare, August 1982, ISBN 978-0-380-79186-6
Radio City Avon/Flare book, 1984, ISBN 978-0-380-86025-8
Taking Care , Avon Books, 1985, ISBN 978-0-380-89864-0
Race of the Radical , Viking Kestrel, 1985, ISBN 978-0-670-80557-0
What Did I Do Wrong? , Illustrator Colleen McCallion, Flood Editions, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9819520-0-0
Ensayos
The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life . University of California Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-520-23840-4 .
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation , Graywolf Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55597-520-3
21
Ma es Dios, pero no exactamente igual.
Así que rézale a la cadena del inodoro, que funcione.
Rézale al piso, que se mantenga limpio.
Rézale a la frazada, que me abrigue esta noche.
A las semillas, que no sequen.
A las células de los niños, que combatan la infección.
A mis manos, que trabajen.
A todas mis percepciones, que no se apaguen.
A mi mente, que no olvide.
A la vaca y la gallina, gracias
por todo lo que le nos han dado
a nosotros, los trabajadores del mundo.
Y al latido de mi corazón, marca el paso, correctamente.
Le rezo a mi píldora, que me permita dormir.
A mi vino, que estimule la risa.
Después cierro mis ojos y le rezo a la materia gris.
Deja la luz encendida, Madre.
Fanny Howe, Buffalo, New York, 1940
Versión ©Silvia Camerotto
21
Ma is Got but not quite the same.
So pray to the toilet flush.
Pray to the floor, stay clean.
Pray to the quilt, keep me warm tonight.
To the seeds, don’t shrivel.
To the cells of the children, fight off infection.
To my hands, work.
To all my perceptions, don’t dull.
To my mind, don’t forget.
To the cow and the hen, thank you
for all you have given
to us workers of the world.
And to my heartbeat, time me, correctly.
I pray to my pill, give me sleep.
To my wine, stir laughter.
Then I close my eyes and pray to the gray matter.
Leave the light on, Mother.
A Hymn
When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction.
The paper slept but the night in me woke up.
Black letters were now alive
and collectible in a material crawl.
I could not decipher their intentions anymore.
To what end did their shapes come forth?
To seduce or speak truth?
While birds swept over the water
like pot-bellied angels
beautiful bells rang to assist the hoist.
Up they went to slake their thirst,
drinking from the mist
for the sound of bells seemed to free
as well as hold them.
Then down to scavenge the surf
and eat the innocent.
“I love God and the ferry too,” wrote Kerouac.
Only that which exists can be spoken of.
* * *
I wonder, will our imagination
remain a temple burning with candles
against all odds?
Behind a nipple and a bone?
The simplest of glands laid in a circle
around skin and liquid
that stirs up imagery
winged and prismed, as if blood
were a wine inducing visions
* * *
Some people cry when the characters die.
Then they kill themselves offstage, away from the pages
that they are turning in the night.
Some people sacrifice themselves on a whim
and regret it later on paper.
Now I see you in the window.
Are you in the book I was looking for?
The one who traveled back to the happy days
when she could jump on a moving bus
and swing in the open air
clutching a worn novel in her purse . . . ?
A curtain, a knife, adoring eyes?
* * *
I watched the children running
and turned to Alyosha for a blessing.
He was sunk in the morass
of rural life
I like to sit with him in the grass.
Then we see the same thing at the same time,
and are one mind.
We two masses, one a book, one a hand.
When Alyosha spoke to the boys at the end
I anticipated their next question and his answer
For they formed a single gesture
of kindness.
“Will we?” “We will.”
* * *
It seemed evil to read about people
we would never meet.
We tested their fortitude as if in sleep.
They generally failed the challenge
being strangers in a strange brain.
They were baffled by the tools
handed to them and by the traffic’s direction.
Frankly in a dream or story,
the goal is absolutely hidden
from the one to whom it matters.
* * *
Eons of lily-building
emerged in that one flower.
Eons, eons. Pins
and wool, thread and needle,
all material
made of itself and circumstance.
It was a terrible century:
consisting of blasted
oil refineries and stuck ducks,
fish with their lips sealed by plastic
and tar in the hair of cooks.
Filth had penetrated the vents.
Institutions moan.
Balls of used cotton
from the hospital dumpster, redden.
Yawning on obsolescence
the computer wonders
who punched in such poor grammar.
First-padded virgins
graduate to this suffering drama
all by her-selves.
Who once were cells.
* * *
History is more than just another surmising
grandmother at a window
or a reminiscence twisted in the scrim of translation.
Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart
on a laboratory dish.
That light has entered all the holes,
no matter how small, because it is the light that wants to live.
* * *
Still waiting for you my sunshine
of justice and mercy.
If west is east of Moscow,
depending where you’re going
then will you ever find me
coming from a northerly direction?
Are you even looking at the earth?
Remember the map is flat but everything else is not.
Is the newest child the oldest body in creation?
Does he carry more information than his mother?
Does her mother, his grandmother, do I seem redundant
by having arrived with less, though first?
Is that why I read at night with my lips compressed?
* * *
The fact is, I never knew if anyone felt me
the way Nijinsky knew how to feel.
Or Nastasya. Nothing could shock that woman
who had done so much wrong.
As if trained in a theater, multiple personalities
streamed from her tongue.
This made her an exemplar for our time.
She knew how others felt and became each one,
forgetting who she was before.
I remember her as a child.
Her skirt got tangled up
in a thorn bush when she watched the sky.
Shaking herself free,
she had to see the spiders, ants and dirt
around her skirt,
It was like peering into her own body
and she screamed in horror.
Later, consolation
would be extended by a man dark and handsome:
It came with his semen
(when she wanted hibernation).
She didn’t commit suicide this time, but ran
down Nevsky Prospekt as it began to rain,
and paused to lift her umbrella.
For this moment
we were in our soul a child
rushing home to granny five floors up.
* * *
I dropped the book, wept and went to the movies.
It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime.
Poisoning babies for profit. Harry Lime.
I can actually forgive it when he is crawling in shit.
Otherwise we will stand on the ferris wheel together forever
stuck in the fog and iron.
I just a witness to his ironic story
He will be a mix between Paul Celan and Oscar Levant
when we are at our happiest
and no forgiveness is asked.
Neurotic, pale, and drawn to the canals,
we will lean over the embankment like sister and brother
who are tempted to be actors.
It is here that his shoes and cat
will converge in the dark. Like fish in a secular city
flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ.
A Poem for Ciaran
The stroll from my cell
along the path above the donkeys
past a door open, a door shut
and a strong smell of wood
and cigarettes ends where
music helps white marguerites
cut through the masonry.
*
Dark for words with a clicking wren
a yellow tit and over the clover a
shovel and a rustle of grain.
He’s training calves with shouts and food
to follow him to another field
before the second bell.
*
Broom loops over the buttercups.
These names
give birth to cones and needles, ferns
with mini-sacs of pollen attached.
It only takes one shot of spittle on green
for my brother to explain the sexual life
of the forest and honeybees.
*
Simon says he would like to live alone
in a cottage with a garden,
no humans, no obligations. Solitary
I prefer a pod while he likes hives.
We confess we both wear armor
outside our habitats.
*
Water was our first armor before our skin.
Then came the bristle of sunshine.
And a thickening of blood into oil
or syrup in the lower veins.
*
I hate the thistledown
covering my prototype now
interior layer cowering at power
or shout, but can laugh
with the one who has sap under
his skin pouring the bucket
the hand is carrying.
*
Brother, help me find an animal
who will rescue me from
sharp delirium of fear beyond armor
and my friends the birds
by an open window: to be clear
would be wonderful.
A sigh without the ghostly gasps
that accompany a certain voice.
Still I still do desire more
of the kind no one can see or hear.
Not that second, rasping breath of triumph.
Find me instead
more like the breathy Saint Bernard.
But a little dog
A cask of brandy hanging at his neck