Editing & Friendship
How a friend made Marie Howe's gorgeous award-winning poetry even better.
This semester I felt lucky to be teaching Marie Howe’s What the Living Do when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her New and Selected Poems. While I immediately told my students we were on trend, I also found myself thinking about friendship, and how sometimes a friend provides a crucial edit.
That’s the case with Howe’s famous poem "What the Living Do", which doubles as the collection’s title. In case you haven’t seen it in a while, here it is, below. (Or if you prefer, you can click the link to read it.) Like many of Howe’s poems, it starts in the rhythm of daily life, the so-called non-poetic stuff. Her language is plain, but the thoughts are not. The lines are long, and prose-like, and they run into each other, like the endless tasks the living are busy doing.
WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
The Friendship That Made This Poem What It Is
I didn’t expect to receive a missive in my mailbox about the inner workings of this poem many years after I first read the poem, but that was the case here.