Remembering Richard Howard, Pulitzer prize-winning poet and translator
Dear Writers,
Happy April! The sun is shining, the sky is clear, everything is blooming—and it’s cold and windy. Wishing you a happy Passover, Easter and Ramadan, if you observe.
Last Friday, I went to a tribute in Miller Theatre at Columbia for Richard Howard, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet and translator who passed away March 31, 2022. Howard was one of my favorite professors in grad school. He was dapper, knowing and intimidating; he was also provocative and smiled a lot. He taught poetry workshops, which I didn’t take, and lectures, which I did. One of the most memorable classes I took with him was a course called “Difficult Love.” The notion that love was difficult and you should write about it was at first astonishing and then made perfect sense.
In Howard’s “Difficult Love” course we read Marquis de Sade, Pauline Reage’s Story of O, Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and other books I don’t remember. I kept the “Difficult Love” syllabus in a box in my attic for 20+ years. Last year, shortly before Howard passed away, we cleaned out our house and got it ready for sale. I found the cardboard box from that class but rain had dripped down into it and Howard’s carefully typed syllabus and the papers I had written in response to the books he assigned were blurred beyond recognition. I remembered how much I loved him and the class and how grateful I was to have known him. In grad school, I took terrific fiction writing workshops with Jennifer Egan, Helen Schulman and Binnie Kirshenbaum. But Howard was the biggest influence. I published dozens of essays and a memoir after studying with him. Writing about love’s difficulties became my theme.
At the tribute, Binnie gave a lovely, funny intro—she recalled that she had once sent Howard a tie as a thank you gift and he called to tell her he would treasure her thank you note but was returning the tie. After Binnie, many of Howard’s friends and former students read from his work. Among them: Mary Jo Bang, Wayne Koestenbaum, Vijay Seshadri, Rika Lesser, Benjamin Taylor, Baba Badji, Jennifer Franklin, Meghan Maguire Dahn, Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda Wineapple, Samantha Zighelboim, Edward Hirsch, Grace Schulman and Jimin Seo.
Seo prefaced reading Howard’s poem, “Mind Under Matter,” by saying: “I came out as queer to my family and then didn’t have a family.” Howard and his husband, the painter David Alexander, became Seo’s family. The memorial ended with a clip from a documentary about Howard called, “Howard’s Way.” I sat in the dark and cried.
If you want to read a Q&A between J.D. McClatchy and Howard in the Paris Review, click here, For Craig Morgan Teicher’s tribute to Howard, click here.
