Author: Staff

Bob Hicok
The Fortune Teller

Published by Staff

cannot tell me if Americans will come to believe in evolution. “You will get a sliver of cedar in your hand,” she says, kissing my palm where Christ would have had a scab, whose father made everything, including Band-Aids, according to polls. And what about the oceans? Will senators admit we’re breaking them? Her eyes roll to white, a wave of capitalism snaps her flesh to and fro in her chair, “I see a woman telling you not to worry, it happens to all men,” and falls back, arms flung out, panting as if she has just won gold in the hundred meter fly. Can you at least see if we’ll stop beating up nerds in movies? She takes her wig off, her mole, her hooked nose is a prosthetic, her crap teeth are fake, layer by layer she un-uglies herself until I’m looking at a beautiful woman lighting a cigarette and saying, “no one likes the smartest person in the room.” She’s so wise I want to marry her brain and protect it at …

Kathleen Flenniken: “Augean Suite”

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Herbert Parker (1910-1984) started the Health Physics program at the Hanford Works in 1944, charged with designing and implementing radiation monitoring systems for both workers (who must remain within “permissible” exposure limits that he, in part, established) and the downstream and downwind environment.  Parker created standards and methods in an industry that had never before existed. His team brought back proof of new and unforeseen contamination every day; monitoring must have been—I think, looking back—a terrifying adventure.  Parker embraced and advanced secrecy, and worried in now-declassified memos that an action like closing the Columbia River to fishing (in the 1950s, sediments, fish, and water samples tested well above the radiation exposure limits he helped set) or evacuating public lands (a particularly alarming stack problem at Redox Plant in 1954 resulted in widespread airborne radioruthenium contamination large enough to see with the naked eye) would do irreparable “public relations” damage.  Armed with his own calculations that scuttled “overly conservative” safety factors, Parker invariably erred toward maintaining morale. The italicized sections of “Augean Suite” are in Herbert …

Albert Goldbarth: “Some Archeology”

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Editors’ note: Thumbing through the Poetry Northwest archives, many names appear with pleasing frequency, and Albert Goldbarth’s as often as any—particularly in the magazine’s early days with David Wagoner as editor. One finds already in those early-published poems the strobe of wit and intelligence we’ve come to expect from Albert Goldbarth’s poetry and prose. On the occasion of his visit to Seattle and of the publication of his new book of poems, Everyday People, we bring you five poems as they originally appeared in two vintage issues of Poetry Northwest, featured here with the poet’s own reflection on what these pieces mean to him now. Look for more from the archives in months to come! On Thursday, February 9, 2012, Albert Goldbarth will read as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series. Details here. — 1971—forty-one years ago! I was twenty-three when “Village Wizard” and “The Death of the Printed Page” appeared in Poetry Northwest, probably twenty-two when they were written. The cells of my body have completely replaced themselves six times since …

Stephen Kampa, “Watering the Garden (Till It Bursts into Flame)”

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While some poems originate in incident and others in image, this poem arose from a musical motif that guided me forward (impatiens, portions), backward (patience, potions, passion’s), and then beyond as I explored other musical themes and variations (plots, spots, touch-me-nots; “rung to hear her wring harangues”; “wedded bliss” and “weeds that blaze,” “forages” and “for ages”). Listening to that music, I found myself writing a vignette about one of those homely, undersung virtues, which in addition to patience could include chastity, temperance, or humility. They are such painfully unsexy traits! Yet I believe that steadfast kindness, even in something as simple as sharing a little neighborly gardening, can invite grand passion, one that generates enough heat to be worth the wait. For that kind of passion, perhaps it helps to have a little magic—a secret potion—and all the better if that potion should be patience, finally getting its due (here in the poem if nowhere else) as not merely a sexy potion, but the sexiest. (Stephen Kampa) — Watering the Garden (Till It Bursts …

James Bertolino, “Waves Again”

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The Pacific Ocean has a huge presence in the Northwest—we live in a region where it’s likely everybody has, or would like to, experience ocean waves. And I mean physically, as symbol, and in the way the Pacific figures in stories and myths that have emerged over the generations. I wrote this poem as a way to both examine what I know about waves and to think in new ways about this planetary phenomenon. While I’ve lived within a few hours’ drive of the Atlantic or Pacific for over 30 years, my entire life has been spent close to water: ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers and the sea. Sometimes a wave is a ripple, sometimes a tsunami, but always an aspect of the dynamic life of water. Earth is the planet of water in this star system. (James Bertolino) — Waves Again What has not been said about ocean waves? That they resemble white chicken feathers in the wind? Or cream cheese icing on a carrot cake after you’ve dragged greedy fingers through it? Waves have a sense of …

MATTHEW OLZMANN
Notes Regarding Happiness

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Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that message nineteen times on your Facebook page. What I meant to do was wish you a happy birthday.  Instead, here are thirty random characters followed by fifteen more followed by an exclamation point! These messages must look like a language from the future, classified codes that will take years to decipher. They aren’t.  The only thing those signals say is that I’m bad at computers the way continents are bad at crossing oceans to touch the other continents, or the way planets are bad at breaking their orbits and setting off on their own.  Even light has limitations as, eon after eon, it barrels forward, unstoppable.  Yes, light is bad at changing its mind, so it continues to tumble in the same direction, the way I continue to pummel the same enter key, amazed each time at all the nothing that happens. So technology also can be accused: let no wire go without blame, no microchip be absolved. Remember when that plane left Brazil and was gobbled up …

Zach Savich: “Turning Through Nature”

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Severance Songs Joshua Corey Tupelo Press, 2011 — Put anything in fourteen lines, and someone will call it a sonnet; although each poem in Joshua Corey’s third full-length collection, Severance Songs, shares that number of lines (often with visual variations that slide the tree line of the volta up and down the poems’ slopes), his poems are sonnet-like less for their containers than for the bright shapes they contain. The sense of a sonnet, these poems suggest, isn’t in formal configuration but in a manner of speaking, of talking to oneself, of talking things through. In Severance Songs, this manner reels through landscape to render the “pool of newsworthy airs” that “surrounds my perception.” For Corey, such perception typically comes from pastoral inspiration that he is both suspicious of (“Building sorrows / on a plan of pastoral affection”) and beholden to (“I do not reject terrain”). Early in the collection, a poem begins with a walk; throughout Severance Songs, one sees the record of a mind sent outside by some fever, and what it sees, …

Jeffrey Harrison: “Custody of the Eyes”

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I’ve loved Hopkins since I was in college, and over the years have often returned to his amazingly energetic poems and vivid journal entries. But it wasn’t until I was preparing to give a talk about him a few years ago that I read a biography (actually, two). I became fascinated by his pivotal years at Oxford, where he came under the influence of his teacher Walter Pater’s Aestheticism just as he was feeling the pull toward Catholicism. After his conversion, he gave up poetry, only returning to it after a seven-year struggle to resolve (partly through his theory of Inscape) the contradiction between his love of earthly beauty and the demands of his religious calling. (Obviously, more was at stake for him than for those of us writing poems today, who might feel at most a vague guilt at perhaps being too attached to the pleasures of description.) Some of this is in the poem, and some behind it, my main focus being the strange (to most of us) notion of one of the …

Help support the Fall Fundraiser

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On November 13th we’re hosting our first annual Fall Fundraiser and Haiku Hootenanny in Seattle. If you’re unable to attend but want to contribute to Poetry Northwest’s continued success, please pledge your support below. Donations of $75 or more will receive a year’s subscription, and be entered for a chance to win a Series Pass to the remainder of Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series. We thank you for your generosity and support!