Fanny Howe, Poet of Unsettled Dreams, Is Dead at 84

New York Times

7 hours ago

Fanny Howe, a poet whose words mined her own complicated personal history, expressing pathos and beauty in a life of upheavals, died on Tuesday in Lincoln, Mass. She was 84.
Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by her daughter, the writer Danzy Senna, who said the cause was complications of a previous surgery.
Ms. Howe's heritage and her life story — one of contradiction and struggle as a scion of Boston Brahmins, a civil rights activist and the mother of biracial children — shaped a discursive verse style that veiled sharp edges and melancholy resolutions.
She won numerous prizes, from the Poetry Foundation among other organizations, for a prolific output that included more than two dozen books of poetry and more than 20 works of fiction, as well as memoirs, essays and children's books. In 2014, she was a National Book Award finalist for the poetry collection 'Second Childhood.'
Her words were often rooted in concrete experience; 'the basis of Howe's poetry is watchfulness, as from a train window,' the poet Dan Chiasson wrote in a 2019 appraisal of her work in The New Yorker. But the pang of life's mixed blessing is never far from what might be an alluring surface. In her long poem 'The Definitions,' she wrote:
'There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl/ In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects/ Around can't be switched to fit.'
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