The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Fanny Howe, Griffin Poetry Prize 2005 International Shortlist
Fanny Howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Gone: Poems (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), The End (1992), For Erato; The Meaning of Life (1984), Alsace-Lorraine (1982) and Poem from a Single Pallet (1980). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001.
Born in Buffalo New York in 1940, Howe is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist who has won multiple awards for her collections of poetry and novels for young adults. A creative writing teacher of note, Howe has lectured at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Judges’ Citation
“These are startling, beautiful, challenging poems that work within the troubled and chafed borders and interfacings between spirit and material world to ask that basic question: how can we live? How can we be ordinary with each other (so necessary) in these times of war and political terror that try to keep our lives in a ‘state of exception’ that seems to justify cruelty? Howe’s poems are firmly on the ground but not grounded; they use lyric energy and phrasings in new ways that are deft, open, and have synaptic intelligence. Here, poetic transport is not transcendent, not consolation; it is earth-bound, immediate and enamoured. This is a book that teaches us to be ecstatic about poetry; in it we hear the frayed and difficult passages of our thought and place as humans, our restive worry and our longing for peaceful cohabitation with all others. On the Ground is an essential book for our times.”
Fanny Howe reads from Kneeling Bus
From Kneeling Bus, by Fanny Howe
From Kneeling Bus
Hello air
Infinity is colonizing my mind
It’s as if a cornerstone is familiar but not the building
It this illness, senility, amnesia, fatigue, wine, medication or history
diminishing my memory
to the length of a bed?
Friends are often abandoned for passion That Person walking the path I cut for him
from the elevator to the hotel bar
His escape occurred while no one was there to care.
…
If daily bread extends its quota of air; and if heaven can’t manage what earth can
If you are 55 degrees below zero and dying there were no better times left!
When telephone wires are words trying to be one sound -and the gray flannel sky
blurs on millions while they look forward and no sense dares return empty
each container creates its fear of portion.
See the icy shape of a cowboy on a mirror? Animals turned into legends – The Tacky Little Lion -
and silver bars across the doors into the Church of Einstein?
Hail, curved time: ‘This labor camp is my cathedral.’
…
I couldn’t tell the end from the beginning or one side from another (west on the left?)
But I did seek structure in a minute.
The models got smaller the closer they were studied too close I wiped my eyes and cried.
This created a problem for separating the last impression from the most ancient.
Two shoes on a curtain Shadows thicker than a wax-white stripe. A floating paper bag colored rubber Drop-shaped leaves and silver lifted invisible thinking about terrible nothing: all in one blow.
If I look up I see the end bends down into today’s eternity.
I am no one. I know hell and have hope.
Let me travel the M11 down to Greystones with my brother
as happy a soul as he is and see the silver spears
of towers symbolically built into the deep dream state.
Let me who? Who will let me? Whom am I addressing?
Time covered sky over multiple eyes
A winter city’s
ice is an oyster inside a pearl.
A slow bus, a frightened terrorist, a girl -
My church is this machine rolling the people along and sometimes
my church is a public latrine, sometimes I drop on my knees and fall
across a chair like a coat in an empty room
Sometimes I whisper help to interrupt my wheeling brain.
I never learned how to live with a stranger or an underground train.
Sometimes my church is a Franciscan chapel near Penn Station. Beads rattle.
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