This place, these poets--a Northwest Journey

By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Special to The Oregonian

[December 10, 2006]

One dictionary definition of "labor of love" should include the editing of a poetry anthology. Surely no one--contributor or reader--is ever satisfied with the final harvest. One's favorite poet might be absent; an annoying lightweight over-represented. A beloved voice submits a piece of lesser work, perhaps saving the gems for publication where they might be more generously compensated. Then there's the problem of an overall theme. What, exactly is, a Northwest poet?

Yet, thankfully, hardy souls persevere. A rich poetry anthology is a buffet for the brain, and editor David Biespiel, a Portland poet and poetry columnist for The Oregonian, has laid out a groaning table in "Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets." He wisely loses no time dispatching the risky business of grouping poets by geography.

"There is no such thing as regional poetry," Biespiel states flatly at the start of his well-crafted introduction. Even if "rain, trees and salmon" could be the litmus test for our local poetry, "no self-respecting poet would want to write it anyway," he declares.

Eighty-some poets represented in this handsomely designed Oregon State University Press book bear out Biespiel's logic, that "a Northwest poet's impact on our sense of how we see the Northwest may be greater than the Northwest's impact on the poet." The resulting harvest includes poets born here...or not. Who write about recognizable Northwest images...or not. What most of the selections share is the ability to color what we see and feel while we are here, literally living in the Northwest, or visiting it in our minds from an armchair far away.

It is arguably possible that Anne Caston's wonderful "Departures: Last Flight from Fairbanks," could have been set in her native Arkansas, but once read, it is unthinkable that the stanzas would spring from any other place. As a flight attendant carefully loads a box labeled "HUMAN EYES" onto an aircraft, waiting passengers watch in silence. With Alaska as the port, death's immeasurable distance is almost within reach as something understandable:

I would like to go out like that. I would
like to be borne one day from this
body, carried from the black
belly of the beast that mortality is
into a vast lifting off.

In "Precarious," Alice Derry travels thousands of miles and more than a century back to portraits by John Singer Sargent, particularly his fascinating depictions of the Wertheimer family in London. Musings about Sargent's sexuality, his connections to these wealthy Jews and others who commissioned his work, and the power of his art when revisited today in such vastly different context are just the sort of ideas that grow well in local soil.

Derry, writing of times and places far from her native Oregon, acknowledges the contradictions of a thinking-person's life:

So that nothing I see today is head on
but bears its undeniable
double blade.

Modern poetry and America's restless westward sprawl are natural partners, as Carl Sandburg showed us with his vibrant chronicles of place and immigrant. Jana Harris enriches that tradition with "About These Trumpeters That Line My Walls," a near-ballad of misery and beauty of Oregon pioneer journeys.

The philology caught between the covers of "Long Journey" is plentiful--at its most delightful with "The Devil's Dictionary of Medical Terms," a nod to Ambrose Bierce. Employing letters in the first word to form a clever, often satiric definition, poet Peter Pereira delivers 33 sharp-witted commentaries, such as:

Dementia: I'd eat men. Detain me.

And:

Whiplash Injury: Shh! I win jury, pal.

Critic Harold Bloom wrote in "How to Read and Why" that poetry at its best can "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life" and by that intelligent measure, "Long Journey" succeeds. Any other yardstick seems too flimsy to consider.

*****

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett recently reviewed "Democracy Reborn" by Garrett Epps for The Oregonian.