Marie Howe's Poem 'What The Living Do'

In the poem “what the living do,” by Marie Howe explores the emotional impact of incest and death on a woman from childhood to adulthood.

Marie Howe is saying that we spend so much of our lives obsessed with minutiae (trying to get the plumber to call, trying to fix the central heating, do the groceries) that we often forget how magical it is simply to be alive. Often, remembering someone we loved who has died (What you finally gave up) reminds us how precious life is.

It is a pretty cliché idea, and Howe has no original insight to add to it; but like most cliché ideas it is eternally popular with the slow-witted (this is also the life lesson that begins the universally approved book of modern philosophy Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder).

The huge popularity of creative writing courses (especially in the US) since the 1980's has spawned a comfortable market for 'poetry' which seems awkward and unsophisticated, but in fact delivers comforting and traditional half-truths as if they were news. Writers like Marie Howe exploit this market ruthlessly.
A few years after her younger brother John died from AIDS-related complications in 1989, poet Marie Howe wrote him a poem in the form of a letter. Called "What the Living Do," the poem is an elegiac description of loss, and of living beyond loss.
"When he died, it was a terrible loss to all of us," she tellsFresh Air's Terry Gross. "As you know, as everybody knows, you think, 'My life is changed so utterly I don't know how to live it anymore.' And then you find a way."
Howe's poem "What the Living Do" was anthologized inThe Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry. Howe discusses several of her poems, which deal with topics such as loss, love, spirituality, gender, sexuality and intimacy.
"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," says Howe. "The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that."
In the first section, Howe illustrates the tests that the young girl, Marie, experiences. “Sixth Grade” shows her brothers tying Marie and a friend to the garage door and torturing them with a dried deer’s leg. “Practicing” is the girls, first explorations of romance, kissing each other in the basement to get ready for the real thing. And in “The Mother,” readers see the father, drunk and abusive, forcing himself on the girl. In all, readers feel the girl’s detachment as she tries to stay outside of the pain.
Then readers share the pain as Marie, now a woman, watches her brother, John, die of AIDS. “A Certain Light” gives a glimpse of those small moments of the appreciation of life within the context of death. In “Rochester, New York, July 1989,” the piano teacher downstairs promises to play softly for the patient. And in “The Gate” and “One of the Last Days,” Marie and John experience the immediacy of life and the negation of love as death draws near.
In the third section, Marie watches her husband leave her, her sister die of cancer, and another friend die of AIDS. In “The New Life,” her husband has come back and she understands the immediacy of everyday things. And in “What the Living Do,” and “Buddy,” she celebrates the transitory vividness of life, and the “yearning” we experience while we are living.
Although the magnitude of death is almost overwhelming, and the structure of the poetry is loose, the poems present a vivid picture of the pain and uncertainty faced when death approaches, and the absolute importance of appreciating life while it is lived.
I read this poem yesterday, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
I don’t know if a poem has ever explained so well the contradiction between “that yearning”–that part of you that wants and wants and wants–and reality. That yearning is always there: “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.” I don’t think that part of you ever dies, because it’s what propels you forward. But that’s not “what the living do.” What the living do is leave crusty dishes and forget or refuse to call the plumber, drop a bag of groceries on the street and watch the bag break, spill coffee down their sleeves. What the living do is live imperfect lives, each day.
“This is what the living do.”
The speaker addresses this poem to Johnny, who did the opposite. He stopped parking the car and slamming the car door shut in the cold; he stopped living. The speaker says this is “What you finally gave up.” He gave up all of the small, meaningless tasks we have to do every day.
But he also gave up on the small moments of clarity we sometimes have. The speaker says: “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 speaker continues on despite her hurt and loss and longing, and she finds “a cherishing so deep” for the reality of her chapped life. Because, “This is it.” This is life. What the living must do is what the speaker finally does: she finds a way to appreciate her life. She doesn’t give up.
The traditions of the elegy include not only a statement of the mourner’s grief at the death of the subject but also, usually, a documentation of that grief with an account of the past relationship between the subject and speaker. Moreover, elegies of the past usually concluded by offering some sort of consolation from which the survivors might take heart. Although the late twentieth century challenged many of poetry’s traditional forms, the essential elements of the elegy remain perceptible in Marie Howe’s volume What the Living Do, a collection of poems that memorializes her brother John, who died at age twenty-eight, and that also marks the deaths of other people important to the poet. The mode of these poems, however, has much in common with the work of contemporary poets such as Sharon Olds; Howe’s voice is personal and colloquial, and her descriptions of her relationships with the people to whom this book is dedicated are often detailed and frank. However, her purposes are those that have always been associated with the elegy—to find meaning in the suffering and deaths of loved ones and to find a means by which the survivors can somehow redeem their losses.
Poems in the first section of the volume record events from the speaker’s childhood; her brother figures in these poems, but he is not their main focus. A central theme of this section concerns the sexuality of children. “Sixth Grade,” for example, relates how a gang of neighborhood twelve-year-olds harasses the speaker and a friend one summer. As the bullying increases, so does its sexual suggestion. Only the speaker’s direct appeal to a friend of her brother defuses the violence that seems imminent. In “Practicing,” the poet records the long sessions of “practice” kissing she shares with other seventh-grade girls as they prepare for the real kisses they will soon share with boys.
This section also portrays conflicts between the speaker’s father and the family’s children. The book’s first poem, “The Boy,” relates how the speaker’s older brother runs away from home to prevent his father from cutting his hair. He runs to a nearby vacant-lot hangout, and, after a few days, the speaker is sent to coax him home with the promise that there will be no reprisals. When the brother returns, the father shaves his head; the brother refuses to speak for the next month. This poem makes a sort of epigraph for this section of the book. It concludes:
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
The most painful revelation of this section concerns the speaker’s sexual abuse by her father. “The Mother” portrays a passive woman who cannot defend her daughter against the abuse she knows is going on. Only the older brother offers to help her. He sits like “an exiled prince grown hard in his confinement” in his attic bedroom, designing dream buildings for a drafting class and listening while their father enters the speaker’s bedroom across the hall. When the father leaves, he goes to his sister and sits with his arm around her: “I don’t know if he knows he’s building a world where I can one day/ love a man.”
The next section begins to detail John’s decline and death, beginning with “For Three Days.” The title refers to the three days in which the speaker has tried to think of another word for “gratitude,” the gratitude she feels at her brother’s escape from a death that seemed almost certain as the family gathered around him in the intensive care unit.

At the same time, Howe notes, guiltily, that she had already begun to imagine him dead and to plan what she would write about him. The poem ends with a reference to Jesus’ raising of the dead Lazarus. When Lazarus’s sister saw him alive, Howe says, she was “crushed . . . with gratitude and shame.” (Howe uses a similar biblical reference to Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha toward the end of this collection in “Memorial,” a poem about the death of a friend.)

Howe’s editing of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1995, edited with Michael Klein) suggests that her brother John was dying of AIDS; the character Joe, who appears in this section, may have been John’s lover. The focus of this section, however, is on the slow-motion process of death rather than on its clinical details or the politics of its cause, and the details will seem familiar to anyone who has watched the gradual decline of a loved one. The process is painfully slow and painfully inevitable. Meanwhile, life goes on outside the sickroom in all its heedless

beauty....
What the Living Do” manages to give me an unsentimental but still deeply felt picture of the pain of living beyond loss. The immediate occasion for these poems is the death of several friends and family members over what seems, in the context of this books at least, a relatively short period of time. The real focus, however, is not so much on the dying–the psychic and physical pain of disease, the fear of a passage elsewhere–as it is on the poet herself, or at least her personae. These are not elegies then; or at least not elegies to the dead so much as elegies to who we imagine we must have been before the clefts and rifts that the loss of those we love opens in our lives, or perhaps elegies to the selves we imagine we might have become. Finally, though, these are poems of hope. I would not call them poems of overcoming. Grief remains, and in some sense we become, as we age, people who remember the dead, in our voices and in our silences. But poems of hope in that they recognize that we do go on. This is what the living do: they go on, carrying with them acts of remembrance such as these.