Author: Staff

Margaret Ross: “Godwits Migrating”

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The other day, I got a phone call from M. He told me what he was doing: “I just did a sketch of the hospital sailing.” “Sailing?” “The sailing, yea.” I remembered a waiting room with a pastel marina nailed to its windowless wall. “Like boats?” “C-E-I-L-I-N-G. Sailing.” Sarah Kane’s play “Blasted” is set start to end in a hotel room. Halfway through, there’s knocking on the door. Instead of opening the door, the person inside knocks back. Two knocks. Then two knocks from outside. Then three from inside. Then three from outside. When the door finally opens, there’s a war going on. The room changes shape: a wall crumbles, a body’s buried in the floor. I wrote this poem after hearing “windows” are cut into cows to study their live-action insides. Between studies, the cuts get plugged with rubber stoppers and the cows, now “window cows,” go about business as usual. The image of a herd of them grazing seems as sad as it does portentous, like all contemporary redesigns of what was once called the natural world. Something knocks …

Shin Yu Pai: “Grace Notes – Carol Levin’s Confident Music Would Fly Us to Paradise“

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Confident Music Would Fly Us To Paradise Carol Levin MoonPath Press, 2014 For 20 years, poet Carol Levin worked with Seattle Opera as one of the company’s supernumeraries, a non-speaking role in the opera. Levin’s fourth collection, Confident Music Would Fly Us To Paradise, celebrates the opulence, stagecraft, and literature of the operatic art, through musings upon various performances that cast her in roles such as a Grecian Grace in TannhĂ€user and a torchbearer in Electra. Throbbing with songs of “lobes of lung in minor keys,” Levin’s poems embody the opera’s music, likening the chambers of symphony hall to the chambers of the pericardial sac, “octave surge and oxygen/vital as melody heaves through my respiratory tract conducting air/filled with grace notes/into my bronchial tree.” The most interesting poems in Levin’s new book play with form while taking on the subject of modern dance, as in “Mark Morris: Paul Hindesmith, Kammermusik No. 3”: We made vows to art it was all about art, this silence +++++++++++And dancers ++++++++++++++++ moving, weaving ++++++++++++++++++++++against the backdrop of silence, steady, …

Afterwords // Patricia Lockwood: The Hour of Bewilderment

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By Elizabeth Cooperman and Matthew Kelsey On July 10, 2014, Patricia Lockwood read at Seattle’s Elliot Bay Book Company from her most recent book of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. The room–a book-lined basement annex with a small raised stage and podium–was full. Over the next few months, editors Elizabeth Cooperman and Matthew Kelsey exchanged a series of emails, sharing their thoughts about the event. This conversation results from that exchange. 1: Meme-Numbed MK: First impressions first: that reading was absolutely feral. The energy that Lockwood exuded seemed barely containable by the typical reading format. This was apparent from the get-go, when the woman introducing Tricia struggled to stay composed or even objective. She was effusive, probably to a fault. But between that anterior energy and the tone of Lockwood’s poems (and that voice!—those are hard poems to read aloud, I think, and she did herself a service), it’s hard to believe we were all seated, quiet and well-mannered, in the basement of Elliott Bay Bookstore, no? I know we’ll have to discuss how Lockwood became …

The Subvocal Zoo: Episode 5 – Robert Hass

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Poetry Northwest‘s monthly podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets during the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Seattle. Each episode will feature lively conversation between writers in a different Seattle location. Episode 5 features Robert Hass in conversation with Amy Glynn. Their conversation takes place on the morning of the final day of AWP in the Japanese Gardens of Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum. This is two wild minds meandering wonderfully, folks: topics of discussion include Gotland baptismal fonts, music and poetry, gardens, constraint and discovery, intense early encounters with poetry, and American poets’ relationship with the language of the sacred.

Jeff Hardin: “In Cultivation, Verity – Amy Glynn’s A Modern Herbal“

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A Modern Herbal Amy Glynn Measure Press, 2013 — The poems in Amy Glynn’s A Modern Herbal are abundant, full of “hedonistic languor,” and elegant in design.  They are voluptuous and fecund, hungry and elaborate.  Readers can choose any title—“Foxglove,” “Sword Lily,” “Lotus,” “Sunflower,” among others—and settle in for a lush, even educational, experience.  So many of the poems in this collection are not merely encounters but are, in fact, experiences, returned to again and again for their richness of detail and for how, under Glynn’s studious eye, ordinary plants and trees become not just interesting again, but archetypal. In “European Grape,” for instance, Glynn posits that “scripture’s an attempt to wring/Essential meanings from the panoply/Of earthly possibilities.”  Her poems certainly acknowledge the panoply, the rife possibilities; in fact, throughout this collection Glynn notes the abundance of the natural world, its gaudiness and flamboyance, its “multi-directional” and vivid plenitude.  Like the lexicographer in “Coast Redwood,” she attempts to take “everything into the lexicon” in an effort to “[b]ring/the whole world into wholeness.”  The difficulty in …

Justin Boening: “How To Live With Almost Nothing – Ed Skoog’s Rough Day“

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Rough Day Ed Skoog Copper Canyon Press, 2013 “Poetry is how to live with almost nothing,” proclaims the speaker of Ed Skoog’s wildly expansive yet personal and grief-filled second book of poetry, Rough Day. And though this idea—the belief that poetry can instruct us on how to live more attentively—may have never been rendered exactly in these terms before, the path it points toward is one we recognize. We see this kind of philosophy acted out by holy people in nearly every religion, such as nuns or monks who practice their faith primarily through abstinence. Skoog’s version of this ascetic character is a secular American one—the poet who needs little more than a book of elegies, fresh mink oil in his boots, and a sign so he might flag down his next interstate ride across the country. But the thinking that drives Skoog’s book forward isn’t always so declamatory or even imagistic. “I’m trying to find where influence end,” the speaker says. This sentence first reads like a typo. “Influence,” of course, is a singular …

David Rigsbee: “Still Cool – Re-reading Kizer’s Collected“

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Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000 Carolyn Kizer Copper Canyon Press, 2001 When Kizer’s Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960–2000 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) weighed in at a whopping 400 pages, readers were surprised both at the prolixity and the heft. Organized by decade rather than by publication, Kizer’s book seemed a recognition of the formal unfolding and elemental power of chronological narrative, and was in effect a wager that the justice of time transcended time’s erosions. Against the calm suggestiveness of classical entablature, framing the caryatids of her youth, there now stands, thanks to the block layout of contents, five decades worth of work, in which spin the demotic rush of particulars, of facts. As if in answer to Robert Lowell, who once wondered why invention had to be seated ahead of “what happened,” the march of poems in Kizer’s Collected alternates between lyric and narrative (with the latter seeming to take up more space in later years), dramatizing the most recognizable dynamic in her poems: the actual, remembered past confronts the idealization of …

Tod Marshall: “Never One to Paint Space, I Paint Air “

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Bugle is a book about extraction, containment, and transformation.  The epigraph to the collection is from Rimbaud:  “If brass wakes up a bugle, it is not its fault.”  Many of the poems explore extraction and containment gone wrong.  From Butte’s huge copper mine (mix with zinc for brass) to memory’s flawed renderings (raw matter for the imagination), transformations and abuses occur and recur over the course of the book. In this particular poem, I was thinking about a few things:  Fairfield Porter’s insistence upon representational painting during an era that preached abstraction, the frequent suicidal leaps off of the beautiful old bridge near my house, and, I suppose, the metaphysics of a soul somehow being contained in a body.  Somehow, old acquaintances entered the poem, and the soul transformed into Kirk’s being brutally outed.  Throughout drafts, the poem itself clung to a simple sonnet shape—another version of containment in Bugle.  Kevin suggested a few smart edits of the poem that led to the elimination of one of the rhymes in the sestet—another way to show …