Core Thesis
Howe constructs a poetics of radical attention to the ordinary, arguing that grief—not as obstacle but as aperture—cracks open daily life to reveal its terrible, unremarkable beauty. The collection asks: how do we continue in a world where the dead "don't stop" living in us, and discovers that the answer lies not in transcendence but in the excruciating specificity of being human.
Key Themes
- The sacred ordinary: Howe's central revelation that the mundane—buying groceries, brushing hair, sitting in traffic—carries the weight of ceremony when viewed through the lens of mortality
- Grief as perception: Loss not as something to overcome but as a permanent alteration of consciousness, a way of seeing that cannot be unlearned
- The body as locus of truth: Physical experience as the only reliable epistemology in a world where spiritual certainties have failed
- Time's double movement: The past continually interrupting and illuminating the present; memory as haunting rather than archive
- Catholicism's residue: The collection wrestles with Howe's religious upbringing—not belief itself, but the habit of sacralizing experience, the grammar of prayer repurposed for secular witness
- AIDS and communal trauma: The particular grief of the 1980s-90s, when death became a constant presence in queer and artistic communities
Skeleton of Thought
The collection opens with Howe establishing a poetics of stripping away. In early poems like "The Man Who Went to the Movies" and "The School," she demonstrates her commitment to narrative clarity, to the story that tells itself without intervention. This is anti-poetry in a sense—a refusal of the lyrical gesture in favor of testimony. The reader is being prepared for something: the collection teaches us how to read it by withholding the consolation of traditional beauty.
The central section introduces the "Faulkner series" and poems addressing her brother John's death from AIDS. Here Howe performs a remarkable structural gambit: she refuses the elegy's traditional movement toward consolation. Instead, she lets the dead remain stubbornly present, not transcended but incorporated. The title poem arrives near the collection's center as a kind of thesis statement delivered in the form of a letter—not a poem about grief but a poem from within it, enacting the very "living" it describes. The speaker stands in a drugstore, "buying toilet paper and paper towels and freezer bags and dish soap," and in this most unpoetic moment, experiences a revelation that is devastating precisely because it refuses to be redemptive: "I am living. I remember you."
The final movement, including the devastating "What the Living Do," moves outward from personal grief to encompass broader questions of human continuation. Howe's genius lies in her understanding that the opposite of death is not "life" in some abstract sense but rather doing—the verbs of survival, the awkward imperfect actions that constitute remaining alive. The collection ends not with resolution but with a kind of surrender to ongoingness, an acceptance that the task of the living is simply to continue living, badly and beautifully, in a world that no longer contains the beloved but still demands our participation.
Notable Arguments & Insights
The argument against transcendence: Howe explicitly rejects the consolatory moves of traditional elegy. The dead do not become stars or live on in memory; they simply are gone, and the living must reckon with absence as a permanent condition.
The poetics of the imperfect: The collection's style—conversational, narrative, deliberately plainspoken—constitutes an argument about what poetry is for. Howe suggests that elaborate language is a form of hiding, and that truth requires the stripped-down, the unadorned, the "unpoetic."
The discovery of the title poem: "What the Living Do" has become one of the most widely read contemporary American poems precisely because it refuses poetic grandeur. Its power lies in accumulation of mundane detail—the "toilet paper," the "paper towels"—until the ordinary becomes almost unbearable in its preciousness.
Gender and grief: Howe implicitly argues that women's grief has different textures and territories than male elegiac tradition. Her grief is domestic, embodied, ongoing—woven into dishes and laundry rather than set apart in ceremonial space.
The AIDS crisis as context: Without being an "AIDS collection" in any reductive sense, Howe's work documents a particular historical moment when death became ordinary, when an entire community learned to live in the presence of mass dying.
Cultural Impact
The collection's title poem has achieved rare cultural penetration for contemporary poetry—widely taught, anthologized, and quoted at memorials. Howe's plain-spoken style influenced a generation of poets toward accessibility without simplification. The work has become essential to discussions of elegy, AIDS literature, and contemporary American poetics. Howe herself, as a professor at Sarah Lawrence and former poet laureate of New York, has extended the collection's influence through her students and public advocacy for poetry as a tool for processing collective trauma.
Connections to Other Works
- Stanley Kunitz's "The Layers" — Howe's mentor, whose late work similarly confronts survival and accumulated loss
- Mark Doty's "My Alexandria" (1993) — Contemporary elegiac response to AIDS, more lyrical but addressing similar territory
- Jane Kenyon's "Otherwise" — Shared attention to the sacred ordinary and mortal time
- Max Ritvo's "Four Reincarnations" — Later work engaging terminal illness with similar unsentimental clarity
- Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" — Prose exploration of grief that shares Howe's commitment to precise observation of loss
One-Line Essence
Howe teaches us that grief's true work is not healing but seeing—that to lose someone is to gain, painfully, the capacity to witness how much "this" (all of this, buying dish soap and breathing and failing) matters.