Marie Howe's "Hurry"

Thoughts on the word "and."

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   
as she runs along two or three steps behind me   
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.   

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.



from The Kingdom of the Ordinary (Norton, 2008)

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Marie Howe won the Pulitzer Prize the other week. But it’s also worth saying that Mosab Abu Toha received the prize as well — a poet and essayist whose work in writing about the ongoing violence and cruelty enacted upon Gaza is a work of profound witness and courage. Even now, such violence continues, whether the world chooses to watch or not. It continues and even escalates and people are starving and it is awful. It is a horror.

I’d like to spend today talking about Howe’s work, in part because, on today of all days — Mother’s Day — it’s hard to think of another poet who writes as beautifully and succinctly and carefully about loving and losing (our family, our friends, our partners) amidst all of this time that passes between us and through us.

I want to say a few things about this poem and about Marie Howe and about mothering and about caring and about so much else, but before I do, I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, “Hurry,” alongside this other poem, “Walking Home,” published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after “Hurry”:

Everything dies, I said. How had that started?
A tree? The winter? Not me, she said.

And I said, Oh yeah? And she said, I’m reincarnating.
Ha, she said, See you in a few thousand years!

Why years, I wondered, why not minutes? Days?
She found that so funny — Ha Ha — doubled over —

Years, she said, confidently.
I think you and I have known each other a few lifetimes, I said.

She said, I have never before been a soul on this earth.
(It was cold. We were hungry.) Next time, you be the mother, I said.

No way, Jose, she said, as we turned the last windy corner.

It makes me smile. It really does. All the echoing. Like sunlight and shadows playing over the same face of rock over the course of years. Even that line — you be the mother — echoing across the decade. And the questions! Why years? Why not minutes? How they echo where do I want her to hurry to? Her grave? Place these two poems next to anyone who forbids you from writing about the same idea more than once. Say Marie Howe did it. Say I am going to do it, too. In fact, say it doesn’t matter who did it. Say I am just going to do it anyway.

But yes. I love Marie Howe. And I love today’s poem, which begins with a stanza that is an entire sentence and whose most repeated word is maybe my most favorite word: and.

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry

Five times that stanza uses the word and, and only once is that stanza a sentence. Howe uses and after and to enact the pace of the day, the seeming-thoughtlessness of the mother, the daughter hustling behind. And then, finally, she pauses, holds all of the space that fills between the first two stanzas, and asks:

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown? 

In this stanza, there are no and’s. There is only the mother, wondering aloud. Thinking about time and how she cannot control it and about her daughter and how she sometimes thinks she can control her and about herself and how she knows she will die one day and about all of this, wrapped up in one, and how such a thing is called a life.

Funny then, how the daughter returns, with one word announcing her arrival:

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   
back at me, laughing. 

That word is And.

In Kathryn Schulz’s Lost and Found, a memoir that I will now recommend to anyone, and a memoir which contains, among so many wonderful things, a stretch of fifty to sixty pages (a section on its own called, simply, Found) that are among the most stunningly crafted pages of any book I’ve read in recent memory, Schulz quotes Philip Roth:

Life is and.

She writes this amidst a meditation on conjunctions in which she mentions that the word and used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet, and how we owe both the word ampersand and its corresponding symbol (&) to that fact. But her meditation is also about how the word and — and all conjunctions — are words of relation and connection:

Still, it is almost impossible to overstate how emotionally, ethically, and intellectually impaired we would be if we could not perceive connections among seemingly dissimilar things.

I think I’m thinking about all of this because, for the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching — for two of my senior class sections — a little end-of-the-year unit on sentence structure and composition, a tiny primer to get them ready for wherever they’re off to next, some to college and some to work and some to another year of high school. And as I’ve been prepping and teaching materials on independent clauses and dependent clauses and coordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs, I’ve been struck — as I always am — about how much I love a conjunction. I love how rich and relational these little words are — for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so — and how they perform the hard and sometimes impossible work of connection.

And, as I’ve been teaching these classes, I’ve realized how little grammar so many of my students have been taught. This isn’t their fault. Certainly it is no fault of their own to know or not know what a conjunction is. And I can imagine many well-intentioned reasons why they might not, such as an intentional pedagogical de-emphasis on grammar and mechanics in favor of a more holistic learn-by-reading and learn-by-writing kind of approach to instruction, an approach I have taken before, too. I have my thoughts on this, and they are complicated and wide-ranging and variable and they change and are changed all of the time.

But really, what I am trying to say is that, as I have been teaching these foundational concepts to students, I have been reminded of what a joy it is to learn such concepts for the first time, and I have been reminded, perhaps more importantly, about the weight such seemingly small concepts hold. To know how to use a word like and is to know how to connect and explain and build and emphasize and accumulate and exaggerate and love, even, if loving is what you are trying to do. Who knew you could say the sky was this and this and this? But you can, can’t you? And it is, isn’t it?

When Howe uses that lone and at the start of the third stanza in today’s poem, she connects a mother to her daughter. She passes time. She pauses, too, right after it, with that little comma. She holds us there, Howe does, in the weight of that and. It’s lovely. I smile when I read it. I get, sometimes, a bit misty-eyed. It’s both a joke and a testament to love, that and is. It’s a whole wealth of things. It’s that moment before a daughter adopts her mother’s voice. It’s the whole world, that and. It’s connection enacted. It’s the space between one person and another.

And I mean that. One way to use the word and is to connect two independent clauses. You forego the and when one clause is dependent, such as here:

when all the errands are finally done, I say to her...

There, a simple comma will suffice.

But if both clauses are independent, and if the relationship between those clauses can be expressed with a word as small and mighty as the word and, then yes — put that word there. Connect them. They need it.

People are sometimes independent clauses, and people are sometimes dependent clauses. When we are dependent clauses, and when we allow ourselves to be completed by someone else, we lean into them the way a comma leans. It makes sense, doesn’t it? But when we are both independent — as we sometimes are — then it can be hard to express that relationship. Sometimes there is tension. Sometimes we do not want to be joined. Thus, a word like but. The remarkable power of a little word is that it gives us the language to practice our possibilities of connection, even, sometimes, when it is hard to imagine such connection. Such little words remind us that we exist relationally, that we can be this and this and this. That we can be together, in the same sentence.

It was my mother who gave me my first book of poetry, and so it was my mother who made me love all of this. And it is my mother, each day, who gives me the language to think about independence and dependence, about how to be fully ourselves and about how to say we need help. I love her for that, and for so much else. Sometimes, when I am on the phone with her, all she says is and. This and this and this. It is as if the world is moving so fast, and all she has is a single word — and — to hold onto it. But this is true, isn’t it? All we have, sometimes, is language to make sense of the feeling of nonsense.

And, too, it was another woman — her name was Nancy, and I called her my second mom — who taught me more about language and life. She died years ago, now. She was one of my best friend’s mothers. I sat at her kitchen table countless times as she insisted that I eat one more serving of her chicken, her husband — my wedding officiant — making jokes at the table, my friends and I doubled over and laughing between bites. When she was dying, this woman who had been near-heaven-personified, a bundle of goldenrod lightness strolling across a field, she shrunk to a size so small she might’ve fit inside of a pillowcase. I didn’t know, then, that life could be all of this — the laughing and the crying, the growing and the shrinking, the loving and the losing. She taught me that. She held it all, with grace, the way she once held me, the way I imagine she once held her son, her husband, a whole host of people, the way I know she held so much at once: this and this and this. And when her husband married my wife and me, I know he held her in his heart. There were Mary Oliver’s words echoing in our ceremony, and there was a book of Mary Oliver’s poems I gave him not long after Nancy’s passing sitting somewhere in his house. How can you tell the story of a life, any life, without and? Life is all of this. This and this and this.

I think that mothering — in whatever form it takes, whether biological or adopted, the mothering of friends and the various mothers we encounter along the way that see our needs and meet us in our sometimes-lonely space of them — is one of the ways we learn that language of feeling and connection. One of the most beautiful things about working in a school is that I see such mothering every day, in all of its forms. I talk to mothers on the phone. I see teachers mothering kids. I see kids mothering one another. I have watched a student I teach mother her own kids, two little babies, right there in school, in my own classroom. To watch such mothering is to watch, enacted, a kind of language-lesson of connection. Maybe it is balance, the word and taking the form of doing so much at once, holding and caretaking and breathing and trying. Maybe, too, it is acceptance, the word and a kind of allowance, the one that says that it’s okay to feel this and this and this. And maybe, too, it is the beautiful excess of appreciation. And as hype-man and emcee, as a long train of reminders that you are all of what you are, beautiful and beautiful and beautiful and more.

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Some notes:

1. Annie Dorsen put together a spreadsheet of presses, organizations, and other institutions of the arts who have been affected by the loss of NEA funding. Here’s a helpful guide for how to support small and independent presses who have lost their funding, put together by Deep Vellum Books.

2. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

3. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

5. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

6. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.