Wendy Willis: “Blessed are We Poor”
While most of us can afford to align ourselves with the meek, going about our private lives, rarely—if ever—making life and death decisions, the President does not enjoy those luxuries.
Author: Staff
#MouthOfTheSkagit Instagram Challenge
Over the last few years Poetry Northwest has established a tradition of publishing theme based issues. Last spring saw The Science Issue. The year before saw The Carolyn Kizer Issue. Influences, politics, and music were the focus of other themes. Our current issue is The Photography Issue. It’s our largest one ever, clocking in at over 70 pages, and features poems and photos juxtaposed against each other in a way that emphasizes an aspect shared between the two art forms: the act of creating a good poem or a good photo is essentially, to borrow a phrase from Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, “sculpting in time.” They distill singular moments into small sustained emotional eternities that impact readers and viewers over and over again. Their perfectly balanced elements strike upon something that simply wouldn’t exist if everything wasn’t placed just so. Poetry Northwest + Instagramers Seattle + We Are Juxt Poetry Northwest approached Instagramers Seattle and We Are Juxt to see how people would respond to poems visually and are working together for the rest …
Zeina Hashem Beck: Two Poems, with photographs by Rola Khayyat
We’ve been cold in the summer /with fear at the back of our necks, /we lay with blankets over our heads /instead of sleeping half-naked /on balconies.
A Field of Light: Poetry Challenge #fieldoflight
Over the last few years Poetry Northwest has established a tradition of publishing theme based issues. Last spring saw The Science Issue. The year before saw The Carolyn Kizer Issue. Influences, politics, and music were the focus of other themes. Our current issue is The Photography Issue. It’s our largest one ever, clocking in at over 70 pages, and features poems and photos juxtaposed against each other in a way that emphasizes an aspect shared between the two art forms: the act of creating a good poem or a good photo is essentially, to borrow a phrase from Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, “sculpting in time.” They distill singular moments into small sustained emotional eternities that impact readers and viewers over and over again. Their perfectly balanced elements strike upon something that simply wouldn’t exist if everything wasn’t placed just so. Poetry Northwest + Instagramers Seattle + We Are Juxt Poetry Northwest approached Instagramers Seattle and We Are Juxt to see how people would respond to poems visually and are working together for the rest …
Paul Lindholdt: “More Merlot Than Malbec”
Subtle Thieves Ron McFarland Pecan Grove, 2012 — Ron McFarland opens Subtle Thieves with poems of ekphrasis, embellishments upon famous paintings. William Carlos Williams similarly filled out his 1962 Pictures from Brueghel and won a Pulitzer. Subtle Thieves adopts longer lines, though, and (in the mode of so many contemporary poets, e.g., Albert Goldbarth) a discursive manner and tone. McFarland is a writer like no one but himself, though: erudite, wry, and self-deprecating. Besides three previous full-length books of poetry, he has also authored The World of David Wagoner (U of Idaho P, 1997) and critical studies of Alexie and Hemingway. Subtle Thieves recalls Blake’s saying, “Without contraries is no progression.” The book jokingly yokes Kandinsky and Grandma Moses, Keats and baseball, John Donne and baseball, scansion and baseball, the gendered West and the New West, Wordsworth and Weyerhaeuser, grapes and gems, Amish culture and punk, shotguns and interior dĂ©cor. Two of the strongest poems open and close the book: “A Visit to the Art Museum” and “To Extinguish Fire.” Both portray the poet as …
2012 Theodore Roethke & Carolyn Kizer Prizes
Nate Klug is the recipient of a Theodore Roethke Prize for poems appearing in the Fall & Winter 2012-2013 issue of Poetry Northwest. Sarah Lindsay is the recipient of the Carolyn Kizer Prize for poems appearing in the Spring & Summer 2012 issue of Poetry Northwest. The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Carolyn Kizer Prize are awarded to recognize the best work published in Poetry Northwest each year. There is no application process; only poems published in the magazine are eligible for consideration. For a list of past winners of these and other prizes, visit here. — We would also like to extend our congratulations to Timothy Donnelly and–again!–Sarah Lindsay, each a winner of a Pushcart Prize for poems published in the Spring & Summer 2012 issue of Poetry Northwest. — photo from an original by aurelio.asiain via photopin cc
Rebecca Hoogs: “Autobiography of Silence”
This poem is one of the newest poems in my first full-length collection, Self-Storage, and was written in response to a series of photographs. The unifying theme for the photographs (all by different artists) was that they all included people being very, very quiet. I wrote a line for each photograph and compiled the poem that way. The first person voice came early on, though the title came only after revision and is cousin to other poems in the book that are self-portraits written as animals, architectural spaces, or concepts. I included this poem in the book because, even though it felt slightly different stylistically than some of its older colleagues, it fit with one of the themes of the book, which is silence. I’m interested in what we say and don’t say. What we say when we’re not saying what we’re thinking. What secrets we’re not spilling (careful: contents may be hot). What we’re trying to tie the stem of as if that’s somehow sexy. The sore we can’t leave alone. Of course, aren’t all …
DAVID BIESPIEL To Plumly from Lummi Island
Stanley Plumly has been a mentor and friend of mine since 1988 when I took his Form and Theory class at the University of Maryland. Lummi Island is the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago. Located near Bellingham, Washington, it is served by a small ferry that makes the six minute crossing about once an hour. It is just two hours from Seattle, and one and a half hours from Vancouver, BC. The Lummi Nation are a tribe of the Coast Salish. The tribe primarily resides on and around the Lummi Indian Reservation. The Lummi were forcibly moved to reservation lands after the signing of the Point Elliott Treaty in 1855.
STANLEY PLUMLY Limited Sight Distance
Stanley Plumly looks, with a poet’s eye and across the sublime landscape of northern Italy, at a certain day from early in the 21st century. That afternoon we’d finished up early, at about two-fifteen, and decided, since it was a particularly pristine day, to make the long descent to town. Maybe to get coffee, shop, whatever. We were fifteen minutes getting ready, and it would take fifteen minutes more to reach the exit gate. We were in lucky residence at the Villa Serbelloni, centerpiece of the Rockefeller fifty acre holdings spread out on the high hillside overlooking the village of Bellagio on one side and the meeting place of Lakes Como and Lecco on the other. The villa and its grounds and gardens are a sight to behold, located among some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the world, the Pre-Alps, as they’re called, which serve as green and granite precursors to the real Alps, the great gray mountains whose ghostly, snowy forms loom almost invisibly. Much of this height and majesty are grounded …
2012 Staff Picks: Brandon Krieg Suggests Brooklyn Copeland’s Newest Collection of Poems
Siphon, Harbor by Brooklyn Copeland Reviewed by Poetry Northwest Associate Editor Brandon Krieg Few young poets have their eye trained so intently and convincingly on the human relationship to the other-than-human as Brooklyn Copeland in Siphon, Harbor (Shearsman, 2012). Eschewing naĂŻve sublimity or dread; the mere atmospheric arrangement of scientific or naturalistic jargon; or hyperreal animal fetishism, Copeland gives us striking perception of the “natural” other, and of how we must construct it in language in our attempt to relate to it and be changed by it. The poems in Siphon, Harbor alternately absorb us into their precisely rendered landscapes and remind us of their construction as text. Most are longer poems made up of short sections, which, in themselves, often evoke intense experiences of being-through-language. The coordination of these sections into the longer poems accretes to something like the sense of a particular place or time intensified by memory’s careful selection. In the following section of the poem “Marina,” Copeland transforms an experience of the presence of natural objects into an experience of language prickling with …