A Study Guide for Marie Howe's "What the Living Do"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Marie Howe's "What the Living Do", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410393593

Book preview

18

What the Living Do

Marie Howe

1994

Introduction

What the Living Do is a poem by American poet Marie Howe. It was first published in the Atlantic in April 1994 and was reprinted in Howe's collection titled What the Living Do in 1998. It can also be found in The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry. The poem is Howe's reflection on the absence of her younger brother, John Howe, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1989 at the age of twenty-eight. The poem describes how survivors—people who have lost a loved one—have to get on with their day-to-day lives, in spite of the sense of grief and loss they feel. Howe told interviewer David Elliot in 2008 that her brother's illness and death profoundly changed how she thought of her poetic craft:

I wanted after that to make an art that was transparent, that was accessible to people who don't usually read poetry, to my brothers and sisters—wonderful, intelligent, smart people who want to read poetry if they know what to read. Regular people. And I wanted it to be the kind of talk that people talk in sick rooms, where it is very direct and very understated.

The result of this new understanding was the poetry she wrote in the 1990s, which culminated in the forty-eight poems that make up What the Living Do. What the Living Do is the penultimate poem in that collection.

Author Biography

Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York, the eldest of nine children in an Irish Catholic family. According to the Writers Online Magazine, Howe has noted "that the camaraderie between the siblings was tremendous; they were inseparably close, ‘a clan, a tribe,’ and between