The Letter You Can't Send
Every Thursday, I post a poetry-writing prompt here on the site. This weekly tradition is designed to help you explore new ideas, experiment with different writing techniques, and expand your literary horizons. My aim is to provide you with thought-provoking themes, intriguing images, or captivating wordplay that will stimulate your artistic senses. You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you like and express yourself through poetry or creative writing.
This week I want to introduce you to a living poet who does something almost no one else can do: she writes about the worst thing that ever happened to her using nothing but clogged drains, spilled coffee, and grocery bags. No soaring language. No metaphor at all, most of the time. Just the plain furniture of an ordinary Tuesday — and somehow, by the end, you are undone.
Marie Howe believes that our resistance to writing plainly is really a resistance to seeing plainly. And that seeing plainly, without decoration, is the hardest and most healing thing a poet can do.
The Poet Who Refused Metaphor
Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest daughter in a large Irish Catholic family of nine children. She didn't publish her first collection until she was nearly forty; before that she taught high school. When her book The Good Thief finally appeared, Margaret Atwood selected it for the National Poetry Series, and Howe's career began in earnest — late, and entirely on her own terms.
Then her younger brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, and the poems that came out of that loss became What the Living Do, one of the most quietly devastating books of grief in American poetry. The title poem is written as a letter to him. It catalogs the small indignities of a January day — a sink that won't drain, a dropped bag of groceries, coffee spilling down her wrist — and the whole poem is her simply telling him: this is what it's like to still be alive. Nothing is elevated. Nothing is made beautiful. And then, near the end, she catches sight of her own reflection in a store window and is flooded with a longing so plain it has no name, and the poem lands with the force of something you didn't see coming because it never once raised its voice.
Howe went on to serve as the Poet Laureate of New York State and has spent decades teaching. She is famous among her students for one deceptively simple assignment: write ten observations of the actual world, with no metaphors and no similes. Nothing can be like anything else. She reports that her students find it nearly impossible — that they come back frustrated, having smuggled in comparisons without noticing. We reach for metaphor, she suggests, because standing in front of the bare thing is unbearable. And then someone finally does it, and reads aloud something like the tea kettle whistled and I couldn't get up to answer it, and the whole room goes silent.
The Howe Essence
Marie Howe's poetry is built on a few recognizable foundations:
The unadorned fact — she trusts the literal, observed detail so completely that she'll build an entire elegy out of household chores
Second person as lifeline — many of her poems are addressed directly to someone: a brother who died, a mother, God, a former self — which turns the poem from a performance into a private letter we're allowed to overhear
Long, breathing lines — her lines run to the edge of the page and back, giving her poems the cadence of someone talking to you in a kitchen at midnight
Ordinary time as sacred time — her Catholic upbringing never left her; in her work the holy shows up in laundry, in traffic, in the checkout line, never in cathedrals
The withheld turn — she does not build to an epiphany; she accumulates plain fact until the accumulated weight breaks open on its own, usually in the final two or three lines
Notice the structure: she never tells you what the grief means. She tells you she dropped the groceries. She tells you the water rose in the sink. And she lets the ordinary pile up until you understand that continuing to live is itself the hardest and most extraordinary thing.
This Week's Prompt: Ten Things, No Metaphors
Today, I invite you to attempt Marie Howe's near-impossible assignment — and then let it become a letter.
Write a poem addressed directly to someone who isn't here — someone who died, someone you're estranged from, someone who left, or the person you used to be — and build it entirely out of plain, literal, unbeautiful details of your actual day. No metaphors. No similes. Nothing can be like anything else. Then, in the last few lines, let yourself speak to them directly.
Getting Started
- Choose your absence. Someone who is gone from your daily life. It does not have to be death — a friendship that ended, a child grown up and moved out, the woman you were at twenty-five. Choose the one you'd still tell things to if you could.
- Live one day on the lookout. Before you write, spend a few hours noticing the ordinary mechanics of being alive: the thing you keep meaning to fix, the food going soft on the counter, what you do with your hands while the coffee heats. Write ten of these down. Just ten. Plainly.
- Ban comparison completely. No like. No as. Nothing "resembling" anything. If you catch yourself writing the light was like honey, cross it out and write what the light actually did — it came in low through the west window and lit the dust. This will be much harder than you expect. That difficulty is the whole exercise.
- Address the person from the first line. Use you. Don't explain who they are or what happened — a letter never explains itself to its own recipient. Just start telling them about your day.
- Let the lines run long. Give yourself permission to write lines that stretch to the edge of the page, the way you'd talk to someone you missed if they were suddenly, impossibly, sitting across the table.
- Break at the very end, and only once. Somewhere in the final three lines, stop reporting and speak. One direct sentence to them — I'm still here, you would have hated this, I never told you. Then stop. Don't explain it. Don't console yourself. Let the poem end on the bare sentence.
A Few Lines to Carry With You
The best Marie Howe poems feel like a voice on the other end of a phone call at two in the morning — someone telling you the small facts of their day because the large fact is too big to say. If you feel your draft reaching for beautiful language, that reaching is worth paying attention to. Ask yourself what you're stepping around. Then go back and write the sink, the bag, the wrist, the door.
You will want to make it mean something. Don't. Meaning is what the reader does with what you saw.
The clogged drain doesn't know it's an elegy. The soft peach on the counter doesn't know it's a love letter. That recognition is yours to bring.
Learn More About Marie Howe
You can read a detailed biography at the Poetry Foundation website.
What the Living Do (1998) is the essential collection — a book many readers describe as the one they hand to grieving friends when there's nothing to say.
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and Magdalene show her later range, and her interview with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, in which she discusses the no-metaphor assignment, is a beautiful hour and easy to find.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
Here's my own attempt at writing in Marie Howe's style:
Peaches, Late July
I bought too many peaches again. They're in the blue bowl on the counter and three of them have gone soft underneath where I couldn't see, and I'll have to decide about that tomorrow, or the day after.
The screen door still doesn't latch. I meant to fix it in April. When the wind comes up it swings open about four inches and stays there, and the cat sits in the gap and looks at the yard and doesn't go out.
I water the ferns on Tuesdays. I take the trash down Wednesday nights. Yesterday I stood at the sink and ate crackers out of the sleeve and read the back of the box twice without taking any of it in.
At the light on Main a woman in the next car was laughing at her phone with her head tipped back, and the light turned and she didn't go, and nobody honked, and I sat there with both hands on the wheel.
You would have laughed at that. I'm still here. I'm doing all of it. I'm still here.