Thursday DECEMBER 4
FANNY HOWE

4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
512 Humanities, SFSU, free

Fanny Howe is the prolific author of nearly thirty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her most recent book, The Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2007), follows On the Ground, and the remarkable poetic play ‘Tis of Thee; eight of her novels have been collected in two volumes issued by Nightboat Books; she recently—A Wall of Two—introduced and adapted the poems, written in Polish, of Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel ; her extraordinary, influential essays, many collected in The Wedding Dress, mine the territory of body, spirit, poetics, ethics. Professor Emeritus at UC, San Diego, Fanny Howe lives in New England. Photo: Ben E. Watkins.

. . .

The sky, my loom, is under me.
My foot rests on air.

It’s in my hair
The wind is weaving.

Clack and pedal.
Propeller and reactor.

My garden droops
With bleeding heart.

Thick oily leaves.
Brick and buttresses.

Abstract berries.
Spikes and watching lights.

Down here is the worker zone.
Over there is management.

from “Forty Days,” The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007.

Saturday DECEMBER 6
the George Oppen Memorial Lecture FANNY HOWE

7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5

Fanny Howe will deliver the 23rd annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, dedicated to the work of the late poet George Oppen, to Oppen’s contemporaries, and his legacy.

A poet and novelist versatile in multiple mediums, Fanny Howe in her essays has met with rare acclaim: “I have never before had such a physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experience while reading one book” (Frances Smith Foster, on The Wedding Dress). Hers is a life-work that takes place very much in a neighboring orbit to that of Oppen: its address and concerns serious, large open questions that keep opening, its embrace of its materials intimate, singular, bold. The Winter Sun, a collection of new essays, is due Spring 2009.

“After all, the point of art—like war—is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”

Fanny Howe, “Bewilderment,” The Wedding Dress, University of California Press, 2003