Katharyn howd machan poems about death

Gifts

“Butterflies have always signified death to me.”
                                —Brooke Phillipps, 13 September 2021

She tells me of corpses in her Southern woods,
how wings find them and settle and pulse
to aid decay, help release the spirit,
turn dark truth into bright beauty
among long-shadowed roots, old branches
fallen in rain, struck down by wind.
Pale, speckled, veined with black
or maybe blue, like the moon’s dark blue,
they come from fields where honeyed flowers
have filled their days with such good food
they’re ready now to help dead humans
left alone by those they’ve loved
to make peace with the world at last,
departing without hunger. Soul
the stories whisper, hoping: Psyche
wide and free with dreams, strong
and fragile flying beings
the final colors that dying needs.

Katharyn Howd Machan grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut and Pleasantville, New York. She earned a B.A. in English from the College of Saint Rose, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Interpretation from Northwestern University. Since 1975 she has lived in Ithaca, New York, and has been teaching Writing at Ithaca College since 1977. In 2002, she was named the first Poet Laureate of Tompkins County, New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and in 40 collections, most recently Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022, competition finalist), A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020, winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Competition), and What the Piper Promised (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2018, winner of their international competition). She and her husband, fellow poet Eric Machan Howd, live joyfully with two cats, Footnote and Byron.

1. Do you write with your legal name, or a pen name? Why/why not? Have you ever considered creating a pen name?

With one exception (an anthology about incest in which I published a poem about my brother under the pen name Blanche Woodbury) I have always used my own name. That names changed over the years: Katharyn Machan when I first started publishing in the mid-70s, then Katharyn Machan Aal (my first husband and I each legally changed our last names to a last name we made up together), then Katharyn Howd Machan when I married poet and musician Eric Howd (who is now Eric Machan Howd, as we took each other’s last names as our middle names).

2. Where/how did you study writing?

I have known since early high school that writing poetry is my core, and I have shaped my life around that passion. My first mentor, in Pleasantville High School in Westchester County, NY, was Harriet Koshar; an early book of mine (Writing Home) celebrates her.

As a senior in high school, 1970, I self-published, with a classmate, a collection called Bird on a Wire. Winning the National Council of Teachers of English Award brought me many offers for college, and I chose the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where I was allowed to take every year the one creative writing course offered and where I self-published a second collection, The Wind in the Pear Tree.

For my M.A. I attended the University of Iowa, where I focused on playwriting (Baker’s Plays of Boston had accepted by play for children, The Baffling Boohunk, written and produced at the College of Saint Rose, and at the U of Iowa I wrote another play for childfren, which was produced by the Iowa City Players in 1975.

That summer I lived in Albany again and my wonderful performance/forensics mentor Sister Bernarda Jacques gave me the tuition to take an intensive writing workshop with Lyn Lifshin, who helped me approach professional publishing of individual poems in magazines and anthologies, which I have been

Katharyn Howd Machan

My poem (which is not autobiographical, but drawn from another woman’s life) arose from the essential courage required to be disobedient to wrong patriarchal values that shape rules differently for men and for women.

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At 55 You Get the Guts to Tell Off Your Ex-Husband

        so you’re on your way to Newfoundland
        to face him there, finally deliver
        the words you’ve always clenched inside
        the way he used to ball his fingers
        before he hit you and called you dirt
        or punched a wall or threw the food
        you cooked and baked and stirred

        the words that bulged and cut and burned
        that you couldn’t dare, you didn’t try
        because if you did he might push farther,
        pick up a gun or a stiletto
        and spit as he fired or stabbed
        and you’d have been dead at 27
        and maybe left in a ditch

        decades now you’ve still kept quiet
        even though he ran off sneering
        with another woman, a pale small woman
        whose mouth looked like it never opened
        or could even stretch into a smile
        and he emptied out the bank account
        and even took your clothes

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