Barbara Howes

Barbara Howes (May 1, 1914 New York City – February 24, 1996 Bennington, Vermont) was an American poet.

Life

She was adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts family, and reared chiefly in Chestnut Hill, where she attended Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She worked briefly for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Mississippi, and then edited the literary magazine, Chimera,[1] from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s, and she lived in Pownal, Vermont.[2]

In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University.[3]

Her work was published in, Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker,[4] New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.

Awards
  • Golden Rose Award
  • nominated for the 1995 National Book Award for The Collected Poems of Barbara Howes, 1945-1990

Works
  • "The Nuns Assist at Childbirth". Poetry. February 1949.
  • "A Few Days Ago". Poetry Foundation.
  • "In the Cold Country". Poetry. February 1949.
  • "Light and Dark". Poetry Foundation.
  • "The Lonely Pipefish". Poetry Foundation.
  • "The Nuns Assist at Childbirth". Poetry. February 1949.

Poetry

Fiction
  • 23 Modern Stories. Vintage. 1963.
  • Gregory Jay Smith (1970). The Sea-Green Horse. Macmillan.

Editor

Anthologies
  • New Poems by American Poets, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1957
  • Modern Verse in English, Macmillan, 1958
  • Modern American Poetry, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962
  • Poet's Choice, Dial (New York, NY), 1962
  • Modern Poets, McGraw (New York City), 1963
  • Of Poetry and Power, Basic Books (New York City), 1964
  • The Girl in the Black Raincoat, edited by George Garrett, Duell, Sloane & Pierce, 1966
  • The Marvelous Light, edited by Helen Plotz, Crowell (New York, NY), 1970
  • Inside Outer Space, edited by Robert Vas Dias, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1970.

Reviews

Reading the Collected Poems, one sees Howes very clearly as a woman writing in one of the oddest but most important traditions of American poetry. Howes stands with Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and ultimately Emily Dickinson in a lineage of women writers passionately committed to the independence and singularity of the poetic imagination. (To this group one might also add Louise Bogan, Julia Randall, May Swenson, and Josephine Miles). They form an eccentric but eminent sorority.[5]

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References
  1. The Chimera: A Literary Quarterly, Volumes 1-3.
  2. ERIC PACE (February 25, 1996). "Barbara Howes, Poet and Editor, Dies at 81". The New York Times.
  3. "School of the Arts". The New York Review of Books. 15 (12). January 7, 1971.
  4. "Barbara Howes", Contributors, The New Yorker.
  5. Dana Gioia (1995). "A review of Collected Poems: 1945-1990, by Barbara Howes". The Dark Horse.


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