Marie Howe’s poetry shines with a kind of clear and beautiful light of the ordinary. She somehow captures the simple yet eternal and graceful moment: Sitting with a dying brother, rushing on errands with a daughter, letting in the whining dog late at night. In Howe’s poetry these are opportunities for us to awaken to our true humanity.

Join us this Monday night.

The Singularity (fragment)

 … would that we could wake up to what we were
when we were ocean, and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid, and stars were space, and space was not
at all—nothing,
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
What once was? Before anything happened?
No I, no we, no one, no was
no verb     no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home.

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

Official Short Bio

Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others.

Marie Howe has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement.

She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and has taught at Columbia University. From 2012-2014, Howe served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Marie Howe’s poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.

—Stanley Kunitz

Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.

All proceeds for each event, including teacher dana, go directly to the guest speaker. Event attendees are encouraged to give as generously as you are able, so we can offer deep thanks to Luminaries guests.

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