Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Marie Howe

Poetry Unbound

On Being Studios

Arts, Relationships, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Books, Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of religious myth. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Marie, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. Marie reads several poems, and together, they discuss Mary Magdalene as complex everywoman, the “eternal energy” of dead loved ones that fills Marie’s life and work, and her current efforts to listen to what the Earth is saying to us. We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi friends, Podrig Otuma here. Thank you very much for tuning in again to Portrait Unbound.
0:07.6	Season 10 starts on Monday the 12th of January, but in advance of season 10, we are bringing you what we're calling poetry unbound in conversation.
0:16.2	We'll have loads of these coming out over the next year.
0:19.1	Today you'll hear the luminous Marie Howe.
0:22.3	We'll hear her discuss and read from new and selected poems
0:25.6	which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
0:29.9	This was part of the Greenbelt Festival,
0:31.9	an annual festival of arts, activism and belief in England.
0:36.1	Greenbelt has an online component too.
0:38.3	For this conversation, Marie and I were both in New York.
0:41.9	A special thanks to Paul Northup, Jane Cuxon, Joanna Booth,
0:46.1	Stream 7, Christian Aid, and all the volunteers and staff
0:49.8	and audience members at the Greenbelt Festival.
0:52.5	Thanks too to Marie Howe and her publishers, W.W. Norton and Blood Acts Books.
0:57.8	So welcome to Poetry and Bounden Conversation.
1:00.8	Here I am talking with Marie Howe.
1:08.2	We're going to talk today about a whole variety of things. saints, sex, time, love, the life of a woman, war, yearning and ecology, all in a single, simple hour.
1:20.7	So I wonder if we could start off with a poem of yours that you published recently, but that you've given a timestamp from 1968,
1:28.5	the letter, 1968.
1:31.4	Well, first I want to say hello to you, Padrick,
1:34.2	your friend, hello to all you people out there.
1:37.0	I wish we could squeeze through the Zoom
	...

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