Author: Staff

Emily Pulfer-Terino: “Quick River” and “What We Love Is Killing Us”

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Sometimes it takes a long time for me to find a poem in the material I’ve drafted; “Quick River” started several years before it found its course. It began as a series of images—light, leaves, river water—draped over a cerebral argument about the problems of suffering and attachment. I was just out of college then, and my interests in Zen Buddhism informed much of my thinking but had not yet manifested as more than an intellectual activity. I was engaged with the whiff of philosophy and the music in my earliest draft but, as I couldn’t locate meaning in it, I put the piece away. Several years later I returned to the draft and discovered that the poem is less an argument about clinging to experience than it is an elegy mourning a friendship altered by loss and distance. Working to guide the poem from its cool detachment and lyrical gestures to a complicated and uncertain place, I needed the speaker to be more than an observer; she had to become a participant. That her …

Troy Jollimore: “My GPS Speaks”

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Sometimes I finish a poem and then spend weeks or months trying to find the right title, but “My GPS Speaks” was a case of finding the title first and then trying to write the poem that went with it. Once I had “puppy love” and “radar love” I had a sense of how the poem would move, logically speaking—that it would proceed by association and zip from one phrase or concept or image to another, something like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake, but not in a straight line. No straight lines seemed to be the rule. The crucial thing seemed to be to find pairs of phrases that had some kind of electricity between them. I had the ‘siege engines’/’search engines’ pair in my notebook from months before, and once the pairing of ‘tornado shelter’ and ‘tax shelter’ presented itself to me I knew I was onto something. The finished piece feels to me like a summary of cosmic wisdom presented by a lecturer who is slowly, or maybe not …

Sarah Rose Nordgren: “Letter from a New England Girl”

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Shortly after I moved to Provincetown Mass. in the Fall of 2008, I became plagued by a series of horrible nightmares. I had been told that my apartment at the Fine Arts Work Center was known to be haunted, and though I initially dismissed the story as a piece of superstitious art colony lore, the idea would seep into my brain when I was again sitting upright in my bed, clutched by terror from a dream. The thematic connection between the dreams was violence: or more specifically, the self-directed brutality of women as a counter-impulse to the outward-directed brutality of men. In this poem, which came after one of those fevered nights, Cape Cod’s long history of whaling serves as the backdrop connecting these opposing archetypes. I was thinking about how whalers would voyage out to sea, hunting whales with their harpoons and deconstructing the bodies for their parts, which had many uses. One of the uses for the baleen was in “whalebone” corsets – a common form of self-mutilation by/for women. The voice in …

Susan Stewart Memory and Imagination: Three Poems

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Editor’s note: Every few months, we’ll take a tour of the archives, highlighting poems and writers from Poetry Northwest‘s fifty-plus year history. The first in the series featured poet and essayist Albert Goldbarth. This, the second, spotlights early work by the poet and critic Susan Stewart. David Wagoner, editor of Poetry Northwest for some 35 years, was well-known for publishing new and younger writers beside those more established—a tradition editor Kevin Craft has carried forward. For Mr. Wagoner, one of those young writers was Susan Stewart, whose work when it appeared in the magazine had an immediate impact, winning several prizes awarded by the magazine at the time. Here are three of those poems as they originally appeared in Poetry Northwest, with the poet’s own reflection on what these pieces mean to her now. — My first response to these lyrics is a feeling of deep retrospective gratitude to David Wagoner for publishing them and sending encouragement. Although I had admired his poems and had been reading Poetry Northwest since my college years, David Wagoner …

Catherine Wing: “Self-Medication”

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I hate New Year’s Day. There’s something dull and numb about it—beyond the hangover—that never fails to feel disheartening. Some years ago, when I was still lucky enough to be living in Seattle, my writing group proposed to meet on New Year’s Day as an antidote to the annual drear. Even if we had no new work to share we would at least write something and fend off the prevailing sense of the wasted day. So on January 1, 2008, we were somewhere in our pre-writing preamble when my good friend Ariana mentioned that she had decided not to drink for a while. Now, Ariana is no heavy drinker, quite far from it, and she went on to explain that she was doing so to remind herself where her edges were—because alcohol, it seemed to her, is a kind of situational softener, and she wanted to be reminded of her sharper aspects. By which she meant her more difficult—edgier—self. The poem “Self-Medication” was born entirely from this idea. What are we at our edges and …

Vis-Ă -Vis Society: “Scientific Method: Am I In Love?” and “Scientific Method: Noir Sestina”

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Editor’s note: Our objective is to determine whether the relationship between poetry and science is field-specific, or something. We hypothesize that a sentence will grow best when infected by the same ideas, images and methods that occur within either field.  Preliminary results have been published in the Poetri Dish [experiments in verse] section of Poetry Northwest, Spring & Summer 2012 (v7.n1).  Here, doctors Ink and Owning of Vis-Ă -Vis Society offer further findings: — Scientific Method: Am I In Love? Question: Am I in love? Research: I sleep in a bed with another, I have held his breath in my mouth. Hypothesis: If I run away, I will know. Experiment: Fog up the window and see whose name your finger writes. Observation: Made it all the way to Vancouver: wrote one name, smudged it out. Results: It is true, the finger moves. Report: Scientists in their lab coats leap to their feet in applause! +++ Scientific Method: Noir Sestina From a broken phone booth she called our her question, under-eye circles purple as bruises told of …

Amit Majmudar: “On Richness of Metaphor”

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When it comes to poetry, metaphor is cake to me, and music is icing. Personal details are sprinkles, and frankly I can do without them. The Furor Poeticus is a lit candle stuck in the cake. Or, in the best cases, a lit stick of dynamite. There are poets out there who think of metaphor as an “ornament” to poetry. They go for lush descriptions. They go for hushed statements. They go for wry non sequiturs. My eyes glaze over when I read their work. It helps if they rhyme or scan or something, but even then I get bored. Tell me the hailstorm nails a coffin shut on summer’s green shroud, though, and suddenly my mind is a dachshund flushing out the badger of meaning. I’ve noticed that the poets of my generation really love non sequiturs. Straight non sequiturs are easy. Metaphor is the non sequitur that means. English may be rhyme poor (so I am told; this has not been my experience in practice), but all languages are equally metaphor-rich. O my …

Amit Majmudar: “The Tender-Hearted Hard Science”

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Editor’s note: Continuing the Science theme of the current print issue (Spring & Summer 2012, v7.n1), Amit Majmudar reflects on the ability of both poetry and science to “isolate and emphasize important information.” — When I tell people I am a doctor and a writer, the reaction usually has two parts. First comes the mild bewilderment about how I find the time. You get this reaction from other doctors and other writers alike: Both groups know how much dedication is required for competence, let alone excellence, in either field. (I don’t know how other doctor-writers do it, but I don’t sleep much, and when I’m awake, I don’t fool around.) The second part of the reaction is a loss of bewilderment. A little reflection reveals that I am not so special after all—people recall just how many of us there have been, both historical (Sir Thomas Browne, Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams) and more contemporary (Robin Cook, Khaled Hosseini, and Michael Crichton, who got famous just in time to avoid a residency). There are a …