Fanny Howe, a poet whose words mined her own complicated personal history, expressing pathos and beauty in a life of upheavals, died on Tuesday in Lincoln, Mass. She was 84.
Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by her daughter, the writer Danzy Senna, who said the cause was complications of a previous surgery.
Ms. Howe’s heritage and her life story — one of contradiction and struggle as a scion of Boston Brahmins, a civil rights activist and the mother of biracial children — shaped a discursive verse style that veiled sharp edges and melancholy resolutions.
She won numerous prizes, from the Poetry Foundation among other organizations, for a prolific output that included more than two dozen books of poetry and more than 20 works of fiction, as well as memoirs, essays and children’s books. In 2014, she was a National Book Award finalist for the poetry collection “Second Childhood.”
Her words were often rooted in concrete experience; “the basis of Howe’s poetry is watchfulness, as from a train window,” the poet Dan Chiasson wrote in a 2019 appraisal of her work in The New Yorker. But the pang of life’s mixed blessing is never far from what might be an alluring surface. In her long poem “The Definitions,” she wrote:
“There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl/ In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects/ Around can’t be switched to fit.”
In “The Cenotaph” — the title refers to a stately monument to the absent dead — the subject matter is anything but stately, and the poem becomes the ironic elaboration of an un-memorial:
I want to leave this place
unremembered.
The gas stove is leaking
and the door of the refrigerator
stained with rust.
The mugs are ugly
and there are only two forks.
These disabused commentaries hint at a central twist in Ms. Howe’s own unusual story. Through her father, the Harvard Law School professor, historian and civil rights activist Mark De Wolfe Howe — who spent his 1965 summer vacation in Mississippi defending other activists — she was a descendant of Josiah Quincy III (1772-1864), a mayor of Boston, congressman and president of Harvard, and of other famous Quincys. Her mother was the Irish playwright, actress and novelist Mary Manning, friend of Samuel Beckett and founder of the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
“Roots don’t give up,” Ms. Howe wrote in “The Definitions.”
Ghoulish are the ghosts
Of time past: ancestors
With our same names.
Those ghosts pursued her. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, Ms. Howe described herself as a “a sort of permanent adolescent wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.” She dropped out of Stanford; was voted “Slum Goddess of the Bowery” in Manhattan by a Bowery newspaper in the late 1960s (“New York was really horrible, ugly and sad” in that period, she said in the Paris Review interview); joined the Congress of Racial Equality; and married a Black writer from Montgomery, Ala., Carl Senna, who became an editor at Beacon Press in Boston.
These elements shaped a writing life that included periods of deprivation and questioning of settled truths, culminating in a conversion later in life to the Roman Catholic Church. Her marriage to Mr. Senna, and their subsequent divorce, helped further unmoor her from one set of surroundings, situating her in another that was less rigid and certainly more precarious.
“I would spend the seven years of our tumultuous marriage in a skewed relationship to many old friends and family members,” Ms. Howe wrote in the introduction to her essay collection “The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life” (2003). She added: “Not one of them was rude or overtly racist. But the media and the environs around Boston were so charged with those exact possibilities that any personal exchange on the subject of home life would be marked with symbolic value.”
At the same time, the legacy of her activist father pushed her into political and social engagement — she fought for school integration, among other things — not calculated to ease a path back to Beacon Hill.
“The daughters of white activists tended to become more engaged than even their fathers were,” she wrote in “The Wedding Dress,” “and like certain Greek heroines they drove themselves to madness and incarceration, carrying to the nth degree their fathers’ progressive positions.”
Ms. Howe never went to prison, but she experienced desperate times as a single mother in the late 1970s, trying to provide for the three children she had with Mr. Senna with only occasional part-time teaching jobs.
“I remember walking down Centre Street sobbing because I had to go to the welfare office to start getting checks, and I realized that wouldn’t be enough to live on,” she told The Paris Review. She wrote in “The Wedding Dress” that she “learned how to bend the rules, to prevaricate, to be crooked.”
But she kept writing and publishing, all during a period that Ms. Senna, her daughter, recalled in an interview as “bohemian and peripatetic.”
Ms. Howe’s first book of poems, “Eggs,” was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1970; there would be nine others by 1990, as well as eight books of fiction, including “Holy Smoke” (1979) and “In the Middle of Nowhere” (1984), both published by the University of Alabama Press.
“She was living in another state of being,” Ms. Senna said, “constantly scribbling things on napkins.”
Though her work is touched by the difficulties of her early experience, an element of playful wonder and dream recounting also runs through it. “What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the days as much as the work,” Ms. Howe wrote in “The Wedding Dress.” She suggested to The Paris Review that she worked toward keeping inner demons at bay:
“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually.”
What the poet Ange Mlinko, writing in The London Review of Books, called Ms. Howe’s “sense impressions gathered from an accumulation of days and weathers” fend off darker elements:
What if the outcome of an act burst into color.
All that fruit skin dimpled from the touch of branches.
The oranges falling when the creatures below were hungry.
Fanny Quincy Howe was born in Buffalo on Oct. 15, 1940. Her father, who had been a law clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court as well as his biographer, was teaching at the state university law school there. When he fought in World War II as a colonel, her mother took Ms. Howe and her older sister Susan, also a poet of renown, to Cambridge.
Ms. Howe attended the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge and Beaver Country Day School outside Boston in Chestnut Hill.
When she was a senior in high school, her father sent her to Paris, where she met her mother’s old friend Samuel Beckett. At 17, she enrolled in Stanford University, where she studied Russian literature and history and took classes with the critic Malcolm Cowley (who she said slept during them). She was kicked out of San Francisco City Hall at one point while attending a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee; dropped out of Stanford three times; and was briefly married to a microbiologist at Berkeley.
Ms. Howe started writing while she was still in California, turning out two pulp novels about nurses under a pseudonym. It was the beginning of a long career.
Besides “Second Childhood,” her poetry collections include “Manimal Woe” (2021), “Love and I” (2019), “The Needle’s Eye” (2016), “Come and See” (2011), “On the Ground” (2004) and “Gone” (2003). Her “Selected Poems” (2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
Ms. Howe held teaching positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts. She taught at the University of California, San Diego, from 1989 until her retirement in 2000.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Howe is survived by her sons, Lucien and Maceo; her sisters Susan Howe and Helen Howe Braider, a painter; and six grandchildren. At her death, her daughter said, she had just completed another book of poems, to be published next year.
“It is to the dream model that I return as a writer involved in the problem of sequencing events and thoughts,” Ms. Howe wrote in “The Wedding Dress,” “because in the weirdness of dreaming there is a dimension of plot, but a greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty as the basic stock in which it is brewed.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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