About this episode
For Marie Howe, poetry is a form of prayer. “It is a way of quieting down to listen to that still, small voice,” she told Tricycle . “It’s about something ineffable that’s trying to find its way through the poem.” Howe is currently the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her latest collection, New and Selected Poems , which brings together four decades of her writing, recently won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In this episode of Tricycle Talks , Tricycle ’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Howe to discuss the role of not knowing in her work as a poet, how poetry helps us keep looking at what’s difficult, why poems are like koans, and what she’s learned from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. Plus, Howe reads a few poems from her new collection.