Author: Staff

Emily Warn: “The Almost Wilderness – Remembering Denise Levertov”

Published by Staff

May 16 is Denise Levertov Day in Seattle. For a listing of related events, including a choral setting of Levertov’s poem “Making Peace,” visit St. John’s Parish. I’m waiting for the kettle to boil in Denise’s kitchen. It’s mid-November and raining. Out the window, the branches of her unruly pear are outlined against the gray sky. At three-thirty it’s already dusk. I look across neighboring roofs and down to Lake Washington where I can barely distinguish lake water from the black forest rising behind it. I pour boiling water into Denise’s serviceable yellow tea pot wide enough to hold four cups, swirl it around the sides, and dump it into the sink. I put three tablespoons of English Breakfast tea into the pot, refill it with water, and steep until it is black and strong. I set it on a tray next to a sugar bowl, pitcher of milk and a plate of cookies, and carry it all into the living room where Denise is sitting on the couch. Brewing a perfect pot of tea was our …

Derek Mong: “Walt Whitman’s iPad”

Published by Staff

There will come a time when I fall out of favor with the American marketing machine. My “likes” will have stabilized, even calcified, and my opinions will slump into the armchair of middle age. I will become unswayable and thus unsellable, and would—were I plied with the latest cellular doo-dad—shoo the damn thing from my front lawn. But the ad men will know of my disinterest before I do. One day their targeted commercials will dissolve into white noise, retuned for the young couple who bought the house down the street. I look forward to that moment more than I ought to and practice a Ludditism that will speed it along. Today, however, is a day like any other. Today is the day I hear the late Robin Williams read Walt Whitman while some iPad users chase tornadoes, photograph waterfalls, and make art. It is the latest and slickest ad from Apple, their pitch for the new iPad Air (retail: $499), and I can’t turn away.

Emily Bedard: “Reading Lucie Brock-Broido in Mexico”

Published by Staff

On the chair next to my packed suitcase the books are teetering in their tower. I know they cannot all go along, but at the moment I cannot choose between them because each one is my favorite child. In the days before departure, their spines stack up, swap out, rearrange themselves like parakeets startling off a branch and settling back down.

The Subvocal Zoo: Special Episode – Season 2 Preview & Timothy Donnelly’s “Apologies from the Ground Up”

Published by Staff

Poetry Northwest‘s podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets. Each episode features lively conversation between writers in a different location. We’re gearing up to record interviews this Spring that we’ll release for Season 2 of the podcast. After bringing you six episodes in 2014, we’re back to preview the upcoming season of poets in conversation. This Spring, we’ll be traveling to Minneapolis for this year’s AWP conference with microphones in tow. There, we’ll record the first three interviews for the second season. We’ll be talking with Minneapolis poet Michael Bazzett–author of You Must Remember This; fellow Milkweed editions poet Sally Keith, author most recently of River House, forthcoming this Spring, as well as Danez Smith, whose first book, [insert] boy is out now from Yes Yes Books. We have more in the works, including some writers from the Pacific Northwest. Subscribe in iTunes or your favorite podcast app, or follow us on Facebook to stay in the loop. In this episode:

Broc Rossell: “It becomes necessary to live”

Published by Staff

This poem came out of a few different impulses
at the time I wrote it I was reading Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: thinking about the ways in which responsibility and love are inextricable and limitless, and how the only way the external world doesn’t completely overwhelm me is by virtue of the fact that I can ingest it with my eyes. There’s also a strong elegiac streak in here. I lost my best friend when I was twenty, and while that is literally half a lifetime ago today, I don’t think those losses ever leave
 I wrote him a number of short poems describing the ways my life was now different than it was, like being able to pay rent (when I last saw him we lived in his car), and one of those short poems made it in here. Visually, the central image of the yellow dress is a portmanteau of a few lines from an album he and I used to listen to. In the end, however, I’m not sure if the poem is more weft …

Callie Siskel: “Mother-of-Pearl”

Published by Staff

I wrote “Mother-of-Pearl” in a class in which the only assignments were elegies, persona poems, and lullabies. It was then that I began associating with one another the ideas of loss, façade, and night. Of course, the “lull” in lullaby means to make someone feel deceptively secure—to cover up the longing, grief, and fear that tends to surface just before we go to sleep. There are the lullabies we sing to ourselves and the ones we sing to others. For the speaker of “Mother-of-Pearl,” there is no distinction. Her lullaby is not a song, but a ritual of silence. She wordlessly lulls herself and others not only by concealing her grief, but also by turning her lies into pearls. I wanted her body to enact the lullaby, and so I gave her the power of mollusks. The nature of mollusks and pearls appealed to me for their concentric layers, which seemed apt as a metaphor for withholding. There are many poems in which mollusks and pearls feature prominently; two of my favorites include “Whelks,” by …

David Thacker: “My Spinnerets are Honest” – Kimberly Johnson’s Uncommon Prayer

Published by Staff

Uncommon Prayer Kimberly Johnson Persea, 2014 Uncommon Prayer, Kimberly Johnson’s third book of poems, is a book of transition in the deepest sense. Johnson’s first two collections, Leviathan with a Hook (Persea, 2002) and A Metaphorical God (Persea, 2008) are erudite, strange, and ultimately affirming. Uncommon Prayer, however, transitions from affirmation to a more emotionally direct ambivalence. The arc is signaled in the first poem, “Matins for the Last Frost,” which opens with a lush description, in one languorous sentence covering eleven lines, of the imminent bloom of a tulip bulb—“a leggy dishabille in lipstick.” Significantly, though this is a poem for Matins, we are not in the space of traditional Christianity. Church bells “raise their brazen” “somewhere on the other side of town.” How appropriate, then, that “Matins” is a liberated sonnet, dispensing with traditional rhyme and meter while adjusting the placement of the volta. What use is a form, after all, unless it fits a current need? Clearly, when the poem concludes, “everything is about to change,” it means anything as well.

“Beautiful Evidence – Vispo and Videotape”

Published by Staff

The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 Nico Vassilakis & Crag Hill, editors Fantagraphics, 2012 In her essay “Broken English,” Heather McHugh explores the role of fragment in poetry, including the artwork of English artist Tom Phillips in A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Phillips’ work goes beyond simple erasure—the pages of A Humument are, with their patterns, depictions, and odd geometries, works of art themselves. Their attraction is visual, and within these images the observer finds, almost like speech bubbles, fragments of text. In McHugh’s words, these fragments of text “[allude] to the Romantic operation while performing a deconstructive one.” McHugh’s terminology of the Romantic and deconstructive came to mind as I approached the Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008. The twentieth century saw the dissolution of Romantic conventions of both image and language, and it’s fitting that, in the form of visual poetry, the new century would see the reconstitution of these fragments. In his introduction to the anthology, editor Nico Vassilakis writes, “Letters lose their chemical word attraction, their ability to bond …

Kary Wayson: “In the dream you leave me”

Published by Staff

  This poem tries to describe a recurring nightmare where I catch whoever I’m with — I mean with-with or partnered to — I catch that person in the act of physically betraying me — i.e. having sex with someone else. The worst part of this is that they don’t deny or try to hide it — whoever it is (and there have been many in this role) just looks at me with dead uncaring eyes while I wail or plead or otherwise exhibit grief. This poem holds pride of position as the last piece in my as-yet-unpublished second book.   In the dream you leave me   it’s always for another, and you tell me while she sits in your lap. I’m facing your blank affectless face: you’re unbothered by my silent spastic opera- tics. In the dream (I can’t speak) the worst part is as in life pleading with the dirt. At I should say, not with, but if I could ever (I never) get further, I might in defeat relax. By giving …