JUNE 25 – JULY 15, 2012
Residency # 146
Application Deadline: March 23, 2012

MARIE HOWE , poet

Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.

Marie Howe wowed readers and critics alike with her first book of poems, The Good Thief. Selected by Margaret Atwood as the 1989 winner of the National Poetry Series, the book explored the themes of relationship, attachment, and loss in a uniquely personal search for transcendence. Said Atwood, "Marie Howe's poetry doesn't fool around...these poems are intensely felt, sparely expressed, and difficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots." Howe sees her work as an act of confession or of conversation. She says simply, "Poetry is telling something to someone."

Howe's equally acclaimed second book, What the Living Do, addressed the grief of losing a loved one. "The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe's signal achievement in this wrenching second collection," said Publisher's Weekly, in choosing it as one of the five best volumes of poetry published that year. Part of the urgency and importance of Howe's poetry stems from its rootedness in real life—just ten minutes into her 1987 residence at the MacDowell Colony, Howe received a call from her brother John telling her that her mother had had a heart attack. Two years later, John died of AIDS, and her book What the Living Do is in large part an elegy to him. Howe's poetry is intensely intimate, and her bravery in laying bare the music of her own pain–but never the pain alone—is part of its resonance. Inside each poem there is also a joy, a new breath of life, some kind of redemption. "Each of them seems a love poem to me," says Howe.

For more information on Marie Howe, please visit www.blueflowerarts.com/booking/marie-howe

Residency Statement
What I want to float over this statement is this: perhaps we have nothing to say in a poem. Perhaps the poem has something to say to us.   How do we hear it?   I want to work with writers who are interested in practicing a radical receptivity.  Poets often speak of discovery – but how does one achieve it?   We’ll practice writing in unfamiliar ways in order to break our usual habits of style, syntax, tone, subject matter, and music...so that new poems might find a place to travel throughout and into the world.  We’ll meet each weekday afternoon from 2-4 except for Thursdays when that time will be reserved for individual conferences. We’ll have a wonderful time.

Application Requirements
Applicants should submit 5 poems, a resume and letter of intent.

FULL Scholarships to attend FREE are available for painters and sculptors (through The Joan Mitchell Foundation) and composers (through The Sally Mead Hands Foundation) for ALL accepted artists who submit ACA Financial Aid forms upon acceptance. Limited additional Financial Aid is available for writers through The Pabst Charitable Foundation for the Arts and the Atlantic Center for the Arts Advance an Artist Program.