Author: Staff

Rick Barot: “The Poem is a Letter Opener”

Published by Staff

In celebration of the arrival of the Spring-Summer 2010 issue (v5.n1) of Poetry Northwest on newsstands and in mailboxes, we offer you this instrument of opening by Rick Barot, exclusively online.  “I wrote this poem during an autumn residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire,” notes Barot.  “Prior to the residency, I hadn’t written a poem in many months, perhaps close to a year.  And so my mind was full of half-thoughts and half-images and half-possibilities just waiting for some galvanizing energy to give them coherence.  There was a rocking chair in the studio, and I spent nearly all my time in that chair, rocking and reading.  On the day I wrote the poem, I was sitting in that chair and opened up Bill Knott’s book of poems The Unsubscriber, a favorite book.  Immediately I came across the page that had this as the first line of a poem: ‘The poem is a letter opener.’  I closed the book, knew instantly that Knott’s line was the title of a poem that I wanted to write, sat down at the desk, and …

Tracking Spring

Published by Staff

The next print edition of Poetry Northwest will be the spring-summer issue, due in April 2010. Until then, in addition to our regular monthly highlights from the most recent issue (see Natasha Trethewey’s “Mexico,” for instance), we are publishing new poems by poets we admire as a countdown to and preview of our back-in-Seattle debut. In January, we featured Eric McHenry’s “New Year’s Letter to All the Friends I’ve Estranged by Not Writing.” February gave us “Hall of Sea Nettles,” a new poem by Paisley Rekdal, rich in sinuous assonance and shifting, sharp-eyed imagery. You can expect to see more poems by Paisley Rekdal in the spring-summer issue to come. Now, on the threshold of our new issue, we are pleased to present Marvin Bell’s “The Book of the Dead Man (The Northwest).” The Dead Man has been a stalwart of Amercian letters since his debut in 1994. His resurrection here is sure sign that spring is upon us again. ~~~

NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Mexico

Published by Staff

Mexico began as an attempt to make sense of a memory that has stayed with me all these years.  As a small child on vacation with my parents, I managed to step off the pool’s edge into deep water before either of them saw what I was doing. I must have been in there only moments, but I have carried with me the image of the sunlight coming in above my head, my mother’s frantic response, and then later—as if it were part of that moment—the sound of water coming from the bathroom and the slant of light on the tiles in our hotel room.  When I began writing the poem I did not know what those images would give way to, nor that—because my mother is no longer alive—I would see in that imagery the blueprint for the loss to come. (Natasha Trethewey) Mexico It always comes back like this:      light streaming in, the sound of water in a basin I know is white               my mother’s footsteps on the tile floor; and the long …

ERIC McHENRY
New Year’s Letter to All the Friends I’ve Estranged by Not Writing

Published by Staff

I’m sorry, first of all,for the impersonalmedium. It’s midnight and I’m spreadso thin I just about said spin so thread.Sage came home with a strip of masking tapeacross her lunchbox: PLEASE SLICE EVERY GRAPE.And there again I’ve put a blameless childbetween us like a human shieldagainst accountability, and thenacknowledged it. And there again.As though by self-embarrassment aloneI might regressinto a truer self, becoming smalland solid as the last matryoshka doll;as though that might redressthe failings up to which I’ve failed to own:I’ve identified too closely withmyself, or with my sympathetic myth.I’ve acted as though it were all an act —the first of five — and called the fact the brutal fact and failed to callthe fourth wall a wall.And all while waiting for the world to dropthe dozen of us at a common stopso you could keep me company again,which would require the world to be a train.The world’s a wheel. The world’s a rolling pin.The world is spinning thread and spreading thin.I can’t imagine what this goes to proveexcept the obvious — I’d rather …

Bruce Beasley: “Year’s End Paradoxography”

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I had been reading about the ancient literary collections in Latin and Greek called ‘paradoxographies,’ which were assemblages of brief notations of bizarre occurrences considered portentous, bewildering, wonderful, and strange: monstrous births, miraculous weather phenomena, astonishing reports of the barely believable but urgently interpretable events of the world. This poem came to me first through a series of urgent dreams: lines that later made their way into the poem reciting themselves insistently over and over until I woke up and scribbled them down. I found pages the next morning with strange paradoxical fragments and urgent pieces of prophecy and advice scribbled all over them, lines I had forgotten I had dreamed or written down, which seemed paradoxigraphical itself. The poem’s fragments of strangeness came out of those lines. This is the first poem for a manuscript I’m finishing called PARADOX DOXOLOGY that considers the strangenesses and wonders of the turn of the 21st century, from robot public service operators to genetic engineering to mood-altering neurosurgery: a ‘paradoxography’ for the new millennium. (Bruce Beasley) Year’s End …

Sara Wainscott: “The Apprentice Making Paint”

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I  am interested in the way poems allow scenes to overlay one another, in the relationship between image and reflection, in the simultaneous workings of internal and external worlds. Mostly, though, I have a lot of fondness and respect for ‘shit jobs’ and the lessons I learned by working my way up. (Sara Winscott) The Apprentice Making Paint A stupid boy, crying into the lapis lazuli again and rubbing his punished head. The mortar and pestle, very blue, and his runny face hued by the costly grime— a waste of ultramarine, the most unyielding stone, so hard to grind by hand. Half-filled flasks of linseed oil, spilled pot of rabbit skin glue, husks of roaches. The boy, sighing, holds the stiffest brushes to warm under his arms. The window’s writhing landscape, the hollers from the damp street, the coal-sellers, the basket-vendors. The raving rooster woman wrings her cloak. The still canvases on the wall—unfinished portraits, hunting scenes—most of all the wonderful archangel drying leisurely in a vermilion sky (mercury and sulfur need tending as they …