Editor’s Note

Having entered what I call the elegiac stage of life, one expects disappearances. Still, July has been especially demanding. Dear friend and Arrowsmith author Fanny Howe died on July 8th after a brief stay in hospice. Two weeks earlier, I'd spent an afternoon with Fanny finishing up a conversation about the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 2 for James Fraser of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. She said to me then, In poetry you look for the language for something you intuited. I call that backward thinking. No one followed the circuitous rhythms of poetry like Thomas Sayers Ellis, another dear friend and Arrowsmith author who died on Friday, July 18th in St. Petersburg, Florida. Both writers were true American originals.

Here are Fanny and Thomas in conversation just a few years ago. Arrowsmith plans to honor their work, language and thought in a future issue. 

Fanny Howe and Thomas Sayers Ellis