On Kizer: “The Substance of Song”
A series of tributes to Poetry Northwest founding editor, Carolyn Kizer
Author: Staff
Robert McNamara: “Thwarting the Barbarian”
Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected Christopher Howell University of Washington Press, 2010 The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems David Rigsbee NewSouth Books, 2010 For more than twenty years I have been reading the poems of Christopher Howell and David Rigsbee, so the appearance of their handsomely produced and thoughtfully edited volumes of new and selected poems – Dreamless and Possible, by Christopher Howell, and The Red Tower, by David Rigsbee – has been more delight than revelation. They are very different poets, with very different gifts and ways of engaging both language and the world – the one lyrical, metaphorical, intense, heir to the poets of the deep image; the other more meditative, allegorical, philosophical, whose ancestry one would most likely trace back to Stevens, among others. There is also much they share, and at the moment my reading is shaped by a recent collection of essays by Alessandro Baricco, I Barbari, originally published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The barbarians of his title are not invading others, but are us, …
Theodore Roethke Prize 2010
Eric McHenry is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for poems appearing in the Fall & Winter 2010-2011 (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest. Read one of the prize-winning poems,“Deathbed Confession,” below, introduced by the author. The Theodore Roethke Prize is 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. To read the work of last year’s recipient, visit here. For a list of past winners, visit here. The man who called himself Dan Cooper — and who came to be known, through a journalist’s error, as D.B. Cooper — probably didn’t survive his jump from the plane. (There was a time when investigators believed that only an expert parachutist would have attempted such a dangerous jump. Now most believe that only an idiot would have.) But if he did survive, I promise you this: nothing infuriates him more than reading about someone’s recently deceased husband or father who with his last breath confessed to being the …
Martha Silano: “Ours”
I’m not the first person who’s longed to write a poem where Earth and its inhabitants are presented to a being who has no clue about us, and for years I thought about letting loose my inner Margaret Mead right here on my own home turf. My initial attempts to create anthropologist-like poems failed, perhaps because while they shared cool stuff about our “lil” planet, they didn’t add up to much. These failed attempts taught me that I needed to push beyond mere pond side/ highway median reportage. As I began “Ours,” I fell into conveying a more furtive stance which quickly became a shaping mechanism for the poem—I was amused and intrigued by our business-as-usual systems of greed, waste, and overconsumption . . . and war-making.  But more importantly, I was pissed. As I wrote this poem, I was asking myself questions like: when we do find intelligent life forms on some yet-undiscovered exoplanet, will they be torturing each other? Making art? Will they have creation myths? Pilates Nazis? We’ve become fairly accustomed to …
David McAleavey: “Daylily season”
There’s both turbulence and calm in this piece, something like kneading bread dough. We’d been to see an emphatic production of King Lear with a gangster-era setting; the next day our clothes retained some whiff of the characters’ onstage smoking. (The full slap of Lear is itself sufficient to make you wake up dazed – more than a whiff of smoke remained!) The previous year my mother had died, aged 95, and a couple of months before I wrote this we’d buried her ashes alongside my father’s in an old family plot in Topeka. Lady Bird Johnson made it her cause to beautify Washington DC, in part by planting banks of daylilies along Rock Creek Parkway, and I often drive by a similar bank along I-66 in Arlington. Our house is built on a slope as well, the bank of a small stream, and from inside you can’t see some of the showy flowers in the yard below. I don’t have a shoe fetish, but sometimes a bold pair of high heels makes a direct …
Carol Light: “January Walk”
“January Walk” began as a post-squall “nature walk” writing exercise, in hushed company with a–fishing now for a suitable collective noun: sord? siege? muster? ostentation?–of eighth graders. Breaking the silence meant yanking the whole skulk back to a fluorescent-lit classroom, and no one wanted to be held liable for that. With sharpened pencils and index cards, we huddled through woods to a duck pond behind the school, recording observations of cattails and red-winged blackbirds, which we later composed into poems. I wrote alongside the flock, and found this poem calling back to an earlier sonnet of mine, started more than fifteen years ago, in a time of far less forgiving storms. Thanks to Kevin for his superior ornithology, and thanks to my Blue Heron brood of writers for walking me through this poem. (Carol Light) — January Walk The wind has twisted the tops of hemlock and fir; cones and needles spatter the muddy path. Rising from nearby chimneys: wood smoke and ash. A cold mist washes my cheek and cattails stir the breeze, climbing …
Jennifer Bullis: “Directions to Pt. Rupture”
Jennifer Bullis, the inaugural winner of Poetry Northwest‘s contest, The Pitch, writes of her winning poem: I knew I would love writing to Rebecca Hoogs’s prompt, which calls for re-grounding in the language of physical place. I looked forward to tracing, verbally, one of the routes familiar to me:  the way through sagebrush to a pond in the gully below my house where, as a six year old, I looked for frogs; or the way on horseback through Reno’s outskirts, where, as an adolescent, I’d ride into the foothills to find shade among pines; or the way  up logging roads above the Nooksack River outside Van Zandt, Washington, to the washout at Skookum Creek where, in August, you can be surrounded by tiny purple butterflies. The poem that eventuated, however, had a source far different from personal memory or physical place. “Directions to Pt. Rupture,” it turns out, was an entirely imagined piece that found its inspiration in language, in the mouth’s commerce with air—in that particular set of vocalizations produced when we stop and …
Eric McHenry: from “The Lovelier As They Fall”
Last week, we featured the first of three takes by Eric McHenry on Robert Frost’s immortal “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” This week, we bring you the second of these riffs. The third appears as “Stay” in the Fall/Winter 2010-11 issue (v5.n2) of Poetry Northwest. The Lovelier As They Fall (2) Summer’s last green is gold. The sycamore catches cold and, with a silent sneeze, infects the other trees. Colors like doctors go from house to house, as though something gold could say might keep the cold away. — Eric McHenry’s first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser Press), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Common Knowledge, Seattle Review, The Guardian (U.K.) and Slate. He teaches creative writing at Washburn University.
Eric McHenry: from “The Lovelier As They Fall”
The Fall/Winter issue (v5.n2) of Poetry Northwest is beginning to arrive now in mailboxes everywhere; and with it–in the northern hemisphere, at least–the longer nights and falling leaves of autumn. To mark both of these arrivals, we bring you, this week and next, two riffs by Eric McHenry on Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” A third appears as “Stay” in the current issue of the magazine. The Lovelier As They Fall (1) Fall’s first gold is green. The leaves give up their sheen for texture and a tinge. Their edges curl and singe. Then, like a book of matches, the whole crown kindles, catches, and glows against the lawn. So day goes down to dawn. — Eric McHenry’s first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser Press), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Common Knowledge, Seattle Review, The Guardian (U.K.) and Slate. He teaches creative writing at Washburn University. Next: more from Eric McHenry’s “The Lovelier As They Fall”
Ed Skoog: “Space”
The fourth and final in our series featuring poems by Ed Skoog with photographs by J. Robert Lennon. Read the first, and Ed’s introduction to the series, here. Space wants to be held away from its surface, between shape and place. Looking for solace, do I walk or drift? For protection, I wear a soup pot. When I call out sweet, when I try to get it alone, late and talking in the pool light glow. Across midnight’s white tile floor, like cough medicine, or the grass stains on her rugby shirt. In dark basement, saying her name toward the vernal scent of vetiver. Sacked city we are fleeing, bright on our backs. — Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry. He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University. He lives in Seattle and teaches at Everett Community College. J. Robert …