Poets and Poems: Fanny Howe and "This Poor Book"

Fanny Howe (1940-2025) was the author of some 13 poetry collections, five novels, and numerous short stories and essays. Her collection Second Childhood: Poems (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.  

Shortly before her death in 2025, Howe completed another manuscript, This Poor Book: A Poem. It is and isn’t a poem. It is and isn’t a poetry collection. It is and isn’t a memoir, an autobiography, a poetic essay. It is one of the most unusual works I’ve read.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Bringing Characters to Life – 1 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

The Poet at Work

I was working in communications for a Fortune 500 company. A large portion of the day-to-day work was meetings. We had a team-based culture, and to our work, our teams had to meet. 

The teams, and the meetings, proliferated. We had departmental meetings. We had cross-functional meetings. We had committee and subcommittee meetings. We had telephone meetings, video meetings, and online chat session meetings. We had one-on-one meetings. We had staff meetings. We had briefing sessions, strategy discussions, and crisis planning meetings. We often had meetings to plan meeting agendas.

I often wondered if the curse placed upon Adam and his work for eating of the Tree of Knowledge possibly included meetings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Poet Focus: Mark Jarman

Last week, we featured a review of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems by Mark Jarman, here at Tweetspeak Poetry . Published in 2011, it’s a wonderful volume covering poetry collections from the 1970s through the 2000s. And what it covers thematically is an initial focus on autobiography and childhood in his early poetry to the poetry of faith and doubt in his later poems.

Jarman’s poetry is such that one gets interested in the poet – his background, his personality, where he comes from, and how all of this eventually finds its way into his poems. Jarman did that for me, and as I read about his life I began to understand why his poetry appeals to me as strongly as it does.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Poet Focus: Marianne Moore

I live in the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis, a town of 27,540 called Kirkwood. It became a town in 1853, when a rail line was extended west. The project manager for the line was a surveying engineer from New York named James Pugh Kirkwood.

For the first 40 or 50 years of its life, Kirkwood was likely typical of towns in the 19^th century Midwest – small town center serving both the rail line and the farms in the surrounding region. Merchants, clergymen, and others built homes near the town center, many of which survive today in good working order.

This was the town and culture where poet Marianne Moore was born in 1887. Her grandfather, the Rev. John Warner, had been a chaplain at the Battle of Gettysburg and was called to be pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood in 1867. Moore and her family lived with her grandparents until 1896, when Warner died and the family moved back to Pennsylvania. (The church still exists, although not the original church building.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.