The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems

by Marie Howe

An anticipated new volume from Marie Howe whose “poetry is luminous, intense, eloquent, rooted in abundant inner life” (Stanley Kunitz). Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time―during those periods that are not apparently miraculous?

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary, Nonfiction, Adult, Literature, School, The United States Of America

80 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2008

About the author

Born in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She received an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”

Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and NYU. She co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time was the tenth book in my October poetry project. This was a reread and confirmed that, while this is a very good poetry collection, it doesn't do quite as much for me the other two of Howe's I've read, What the Living Do and Magdalene. Howe was raised Catholic and this figures heavily into her work; as a lapsed Catholic myself I sometimes relate to this and sometimes don't relate at all. Perhaps, then, it's fitting that my favorite poem from this collection is this embodiment of struggle: Prayer.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty

The soul has a story that has a shape that almost no one
sees. No, no one ever does. All those kisses,
The bedroom chair that rocked with me in it, his body
his body and his and his and his.
More, I said, more
and more and more. . . . What has it come to?
Like dresses I tried on and dropped to the floor. . .

[Twila Newey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe, 68pp. We need more poetry, all of us. Buy this little book.

My Mother's Body

Bless my mother's body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,

grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing

the pedals of the blue-car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings,
rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs...

Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,

and my body hurt her, I know that--24 years old. I'm old enough
to be that girls mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened
eyes,

her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It's a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me

with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,

slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it,
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.

Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.

[Miranda Lukeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really substantial and magically colloquial--I eased into these poems thinking thinking I had read this stuff before, many times over. But it's one of the few poetry books I've ended up reading straight through. It's all in the title. It's there--you'll find it.

[Shayla]

As always, so rooted to earth and the specifics of life, but so mysterious at the same time. I love Marie Howe. Some really notable ones in here for me were The World, After the Movie, Prayer, My Mother’s Body, Non–Violence, The Spell, and Mary (Reprise). But this one especially sent a zing throughout my body—

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

[Jenna Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marie freaking Howe!!!!!

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago


You think this happened only once and long ago?
Think of a summer night and someone
talking across the water,
maybe someone
you loved in a boat, rowing. And you could
hear the oars dripping in the water, from
half a lake away, and they were far and
close at once. You didn't need to touch them
or call to them or talk about it later.
— the sky? It was what you breathed. The lake?
sky that fell as rain. I have been like you
filled with worry, worry —then relief.
You know the wind is sky moving. It happens all the time.

[adeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

feeling like myself again (reading poetry)

[Dorianne Laux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking. As always. More when I'm done.

[Keegan Keelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been meaning to pick up some Marie Howe for ages, ever since I read "Annunciation" a few years ago. And I'm so glad I did. I love when poets can play with language and communicate thoughtfully without going too deep into LaLaLand. Marie Howe strikes the balance well. You know she's a good poet when her words actually almost force you to pause and reflect.
Definitely will be reading more by her when I get the chance!!

Oh and I should add: the blurb tells you exactly what you're in for. I appreciate the reflections on mundanity and the exploration of sacred vs secular!

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idk what I was expecting but WOW

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first collection of Howe's that I've read and she's immediately leapt onto my list of favorite poets. The ultimate compliment I can give these poems is that I wish I wrote them; Howe's style is both accessible and sophisticated and her subject matter is TRULY the Kingdom of Ordinary time. She is obsessed with finding the sacred in the profane, or moreover, eliminating the very CATEGORY of profane time and experience. Errands are holy, caring for her ailing mother is communion, and having the same conversation with her daughter after school every day is prayer.

I learned a lot as a poet from reading Howe. She expertly uses the concrete image to BECOME the emergent meaning of the poem, rather than ending where it seemed she was headed in he first line. If I have any critique here, it is that many of Howe's poems follow a similar form---expository or introductory image, exploration of that image, and then the introduction of a SEEMINGLY unrelated second concrete image which sheds light through juxtaposition on the first. Again, this is both a strength a minor weakness. There is a certain intuitive rhythm Howe establishes in repeating this format.

Needless to say, I immediately ordered the rest of Howe's books as soon as I finished reading this one.

[Santi Valencia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate to say that this one really pales in comparison to “what the living do” and “magdalene”. what I love about Howe, particularly in the latter collection, is how effortlessly round & whole her poems are, so that when I read them I think yes, this poem could only have moved in such a way, and i feel as if I’ve just eaten a full dinner. the poems in this collection, however, were mostly dull and non cohesive and the surprise of where they placed me didn’t elicit any feeling in me, just made me confused. like the motion from one thought to the next was such a leap that I felt bewildered and destabilized but not in a way that felt purposeful or productive to the reading experience. i imagine that spending more time with these poems would illuminate their mechanics but i wasn’t moved enough to want to give them that time. I enjoyed the poems about her daughter most. they were definitely the most honest & actually profound.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marie Howe is such a talented poet, and all the same I guess I itch at the lulling of white-christian-hetero poetry. I'm a horrible reader for it: she mentions being at a park with her daughter and I instantly shut off.

But I connected at moments when Howe allows for something rougher to peek through, like in the poem "Non-violence." Maybe my favorite was "What the Woman Said," which begins:

I don't want to offend anybody but I never did like
fucking all that much.

And ends:

I want to tell you everything I know about being alive but I
missed a lot of living that way --

My life was a story, dry as pages. Seems like he should have known
enough to lick them even lightly with his thumb

But he didn’t. And I have to admit I didn’t much like the idea
of telling him how.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I picked up this collection because “After The Movie” is one of my favorite poems. The whole collection followed this theme of exploring specific moments in time (I guess one could argue that’s all poetry does, but this felt different than that) which was unexpected but interesting and enjoyable! I’m looking forward to eventually reading What The Living Do which I’ve also heard wonderful things about.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book that I came to through browsing actual books on actual shelves. I wouldn't have picked up Marie Howe but--hey!--I did. And she made me cry in the bathtub and that's usually a good thing and it was.

[Bekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first I've read of her; makes me eager to check out "What the Living Do" soon, too.

[Carolyn Waldee · Rating 5 out of 5]

every time i come back to marie's work i brace myself for the fact that maybe i won't love it as much as i remember but every single time she takes my breath away. every damn time! how does she do it! at this point there's nothing left in the book for me to underline!

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Jesus said. He said, The kingdom of heaven / is within you. And the spiked wheel sloughed through the living centuries / minute by minute, soul by soul. Ploughs still. That's the good news and the bad news, isn't it?" (17-18)

"Oh it happens in time and time is hard to live through." (29)

"I want to tell you everything I know about being alive but I / missed a lot of living that way--" (59)

and don't even get me STARTED on "Annunciation" and "Mary (Reprise)"

favorite living poet. why don't i read her every day, again?

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't sure how to rate this one. There are 6 poems that I really liked, but the rest are dull, flat, and seemed more like uninteresting prose than quality make-you-sit-right-up poetry. And I went back and reread several in hopes that a tiny little poetry bomb might light up. Nope. But the poems I liked are of the kind that make you want to say "You should read this." Anyway here the good stuff vs bland makes for a lousy ratio. The poems range from the sacred to the secular with a lot of boring stuff spanning both areas. I'm mystified at the high praise this one gets, because as a collection it's a far cry from Howe's excellent "What the Living Do." Poems I liked: Prologue, The Star Market, After the Movie (took a couple of readings), Once or Twice or Three Times I Saw Something, My Mother's Body (Whoa!), Fifty, and What the Woman Said.

[Anna Snader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love these poems because they beautifully capture the harshness and beauty of the world and the complexities of living in these crazy and ordinary days.


-The World
-Limbo
-Prayer
-Ordinary Time
-Sometimes the Moon Fell in the Well at Night
-Once or Twice or Three Times, I saw something
-Annunciation

[Kari Yergin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn’t as taken by this book as by What the Living Do but this poet is clearly a great writer.

H qSome poems that I love: the world, what we would give up, how you can’t move moonlight, my mother’s body, what the woman said, Mary (reprise), and especially Hurry (p 62) and why the novel is necessary but sometimes hard to read (p 29).

[katie risley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars! i thought i’d read a cheeky poem before bed, and i just read this entire thing. i couldn’t put it down. i’m genuinely stunned by her writing—this collection made me weep maybe three times. docked half a star because these poems, at time, were so…angry?

[Rosie Rosie.Adkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m trying to read a bit more poetry but this book was not a great start. Maybe it’s not my style or (more likely) maybe I’m not cultured enough. A lot of the poems felt lacklustre, one or two that I enjoyed.

[shelby]

didn't find as moving as her other collections that i've read (what the living do & magdalene) but very solid regardless because it's marie freaking howe!

[Selah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would highly recommend! My favorite poems were: "Prayer," "After the Movie," and "Courage."

[Lisal Kayati Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Transcendent. Extraordinary.

[Dan Gobble · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard an interview which Krista Tippett (host of Speaking of Faith / On Being radio shows on NPR) did with Marie Howe and I became intrigued with her story and I got to hear some of her poems and her approach to the craft of being a poet. I immediately went to my local bookstore, the Literary Bookpost, and bought a copy of the only Marie Howe book of poems they had on their shelves, "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time".

I read these poems virtually non-stop, cover-to-cover, in one sitting and I've returned to them again and again. Howe's images have stuck with me. I look forward to reading more of her poetry in the future, especially the book of poems which deal with the death of her brother.

Some of my favorite lines from the poems in this collection include:

From "The World": "The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words."

From "After the Movie":
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street - a clear unclouded night - and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.


From "Why the Novel is Necessary But Sometimes Hard to Read":
This is the life you have written, the novel tells us. What happens next?

From the poem "Government":
But the next day, negotiating the too narrow aisles of
The Health and Harmony Food Store - when I say, Excuse me,
to the woman and her cart of organic chicken and green grapes
she pulls the cart not quite far back enough for me to pass,
and a small mob in me begins picking up the fruit to throw.

So many kingdoms,
and in each kingdom, so many people: the disinherited son, the corrupt counselor,
the courtesan, the fool.

From one of Howe's "Mary" poems titled "Annunciation":
Even if I don't see it again - nor ever feel it
I know it is - and that if once it hailed me
it ever does -

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn't - I was blinded like that - and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I'd die
from being loved like that.

This collection probes at the questions and mysteries surrounding what makes us who we are . . . flesh and bone, spirit, soul, mistakes, successes, life and death.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover of Howe’s third collection of poems is decorated with a watercolor by her daughter Grace Yi-Nan Howe and one Alex Ross. The painting has a fried egg of a sun shining over a landscape of green, purple, brown and red triangles and squares, with what look like letter T’s and I’s providing fences and trees, and maybe a couple of A’s. It’s a pleasing, vibrant, child’s view landscape threatened by a fury of scrabbled colors, reds, brown, grey filling the painting’s right side like a storm. Mom was probably slightly more pleased over whichever part her daughter contributed but likely realized this was her collection’s cover when she thought, the kids are right, Life is like that. Something beautiful, something threatening. Howe’s collection is filled with poems of religious meaning (“The Star Market,” “Reading Ovid,” “Easter,” “Prayer,” two poems titled “Limbo,” a sequence called “Poem from the Life of Mary,” and “Snow Storm”). It also filled with poems of mortality, her own, aging past 50, and her mother’s, whose death is captured powerfully in “My Mother’s Body,” which ends “Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers / our voice in my throat speaking to you now.” And in “In the Course of the Last Three Days,” which ends “One of us touched her foot / One of us touched her shoulder / One of us tried to pull off her rings. / One of us tried to close her mouth by placing one hand on her head / and another hand under her chin, but her mouth wouldn’t close.” Finally, it is filled with poems where the domestic world, the religious world, and the shadowed world of violence that reaches us via the news media overlap like a venn diagram. Because it is a slim collection, less than forty poems, less than seventy pages, the poems, like “How You Can’t Move Moonlight” demonstrates, marry worlds of wonder and woe:
“How you can’t move moonlight—you have to go
there and stand in it. How you can’t coax it
from your bed to come and shine there. You can’t
carry it in a bucket or cup it in
your hands to drink. Wind won’t

blow it. A bird flying through it won’t
tear it. How you can’t sell it or buy it
or save it or earn it or own it, erase
it or block it from shining on the mule’s
bristly back, dog’s snout, duck bill, cricket, toad.
Shallow underwater stones gleam underwater.

And the man who’s just broken the neck
of his child? He’s standing by the window
moonlight shining on his face and throat.”
This collection is Marie Howe’s finest work, moving, questioning, real, and soulful.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not ordinarily a poetry person. But I fell in love with Marie Howe's work. Our book club read "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time". It was a discovery for me.

Her poetry is made of ordinary life events...big things like the death of your mother and a brother and little things like walking down the street and seeing your reflection in a store window. This is what brought it home to me personally...it was so like life. "Poetry", says Howe, "happens in the silences."
To me her work happens in the mixing of time (your mother's life intertwined with yours) and the subtle humor of looking at everyday (ordinary, to use her words) things.

For book club purposes, we each picked out and read aloud our favorite poem. Poetry, I think, needs to be spoken. It was marvelous!

It helped that many of Howe's ideas matched mine. To name a few

1, The juxtaposition of being spiritual and institutional religion. Go Pope Francis.

2. The place of animals in God's plan. Everyone who has loved a pet knows they learn, they are conscious of self, they have emotions, and they are non-judgmental. According to Howe, we are fellow creatures, not necessarily lords over them. I so agree.

3. In every culture, women are underestimated and undervalued. Howe talks about Mary and Mary Magdalene in terms that makes you know they were real women.

Suggestion: there are some NPR interviews with Marie Howe where she reads her own poetry. Start there.

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her language is very ordinary and carries in it a very subtle surprise, especially when it does its delicate wondering about the character of Mary, giving her a halo of ordinariness. Interesting how nonspecific much of the language is -- but the unspecifics are well placed so that they're open but not vague, like that line in Bishop's "Fish," in the midst of such incredible specificity, when she describes the fishes eyes: "It was more like the tipping/ of an object toward the light." Like the last stanza in Howe's, well the whole poem really:

Annunciation

Even if I don't see it again--nor ever feel it
I know it is--and that if once it hailed me
it ever does--

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn't--I was blinded like that--and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I'd die
from being loved like that.

--

Much unsentimental stuff about loss, motherhood, the soul: "My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was." ("Before the Fire")

My first Howe book, a gift from kg, and now I move on to WHAT THE LIVING DO... (thank you, kg).