Ada Verdun Howell was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

. Born in Beaufort, Victoria

Beaufort, Victoria

Beaufort is a town in Victoria, Australia. It is located on the Western Highway midway between Ararat and Ballarat, in the Pyrenees Shire local government area. It is 387 metres above sea level. At the 2001 census, Beaufort had a population of 987...

, on her father's sheep property, she was educated at Ruytons Girls' School. Her sister was the artist Valma Howell

Valma Howell

Valma Ondine Howell , was an Australian artist of pastoral watercolours of western Victoria and actor.-Early years:Valma Ondine Howell was born in Beaufort, where she was to spend most of her life...

. She lived in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in the latter part of her life where she wrote most of her most famous works. Her early writing, which she later eschewed as adolescent, showed considerable skill utilising Indigenous Australian phonetic form

Phonetic form

In the field of linguistics, specifically in syntax, phonetic form , refers to a certain level of mental representation of a linguistic expression, derived from surface structure, and related to logical form. Phonetic form is the level of representation wherein expressions, or sentences, are...

s of her childhood in Western Victoria

Victoria (Australia)

Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

. She is best known for her later writing, much praised for its great formal and feminine qualities, as an early sound poet

Sound poetry

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...

.

Her most influential works include the strangely disquieting Dookerimbud, Monmot and Neemini and the later Exit Strategies.

The last part of her life was apparently spent in much economic hardship and she died virtually unknown in her own country.

New York life

By the time she was in her late thirties Ada had abandoned Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, where she was surrounded by what she felt were stuffy and provincial relations, for New York and the bohemian life, where she was soon surrounded by an artistic life and freedom she was unable to experience in Australia. Her first husband, Adrian Morten, an undistinguished writer and critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

, by whom she had her two children, does not appear to have been very supportive. The marriage, like most of Ada's later relationships, floated on a tide of drink

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

 and was marked by spectacular rows. After Morten's sudden death she consoled herself with many lovers, including Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...

, who soon fled, leaving Ada convinced he was 'a pederast at heart'(It is claimed that she was the only person to have bedded both Chester Kallman

Chester Kallman

Chester Simon Kallman was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for his collaborations with W. H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky.-Life:...

 and Isherwood). However, "once I got Mr Morten out of my life I felt like a new woman," she told a close friend Harold Norse

Harold Norse

Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...

, and in her forties she stumbled into her métier, modern poetry.

In the early 40s she was taken under the wing of Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...

 who was to provide both financial and intellectual encouragement. In the decades that followed she became a close friend to poet and beat

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 Harold Norse

Harold Norse

Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...

. Her last years were a slow decline due to alcoholism

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

.Little is known of her last years and she died of unknown causes in 1981.

Juvenilia

Her earliest work Poems is not considered to be of much literary value, however it does display an affection for the sound of words and an awareness of other languages other than English. An example is the poem A single body of water:

In the dim light of the crescent moon,

I strode the high hills of Ercildoune.

Through the lakes and the waters' song

Soft words they whispered 'Buninyong'

Early work

Her professional career begins with Anamorphosis where she goes beyond the exterior world of landscape and the body and she begins to explore the interior universe of love and selfhood.

The poem Unlanguid longeurs exhibits a new awareness of the world around her:

All the same, my desire had taught me

An object lesson.

He was a sceptic, I was an enthusiast.

He analysed, I synthesized.

He dealt with proofs, I with questions of faith.

He was, in short,

An historian.

I couldn't help being

A pilgrim;

But I knew now I must be

As dispassionate pilgrim

As possible.

Concrete poetry

Her best known work is the controversial Exit Strategies. This prose/poem cycle was praised by E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

as "poetry as pure energy...just in time for atomic age", but similarly condemned by others for the same qualities.

The famous 400 stanza, Eanie Meanie poem:

Eanie Meanie Minie Meanie

Mo Mo Moonie Minie

Eanie Moonie Moonie Meanie

Oonie Eanie Moonie Me

....

has few andecedents in the English language: language was to her pure sound, its meaning lost in our collective past