Robert Bly & Rebecca Starks awarded prizes for the best work published in Poetry Northwest in 2008. 2008 Theodore Roethke Prize Robert Bly of Minneapolis, Minnesota is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Award for his poem “War and Childhood,” published in the Spring / Summer 2008 Political Poetry issue.
To end the year we’re featuring W.S. Di Piero’s “Raven,” which appears in the current issue of Poetry Northwest. “Years ago I read the opening phrase in a field guideâs description of a raven,” says Di Piero, ” and it stuck with me: ‘Big black bird.’ I see ravens out my window every day and appreciate their donât-mess-with-me posture and gliding maneuvers. (Crows donât glide.) Apparent monochromatic blackness with endless flashing inflections — thatâs one definition of good style. They have no songfulness, just a marvelous variety of noises and calls, which recommends them to poetry but not to pretty poetry. “Most of my books contain a poem about a bird, none from a birdbrainâs consciousness, though: they all in some way are about hunger, appetite, or aspiration that sounds like fury.” Raven Ratso pigeons strictly for the birds. Morning vocalizing to settle oneâs nerves. Practice makes perfect. Hello high wire art, and come back O red-tail youth. Upstart. Hair bulbs down there. Feed and need. Sunshine so justified upon my wings and I sing …
A red wing rose in the darkness. â âEncounterâ After the red bird rises through the night, it leaves a wing-shaped shadow on the sky. The teacher asks, If the field is dark how can the poet see red flight? and would like one of the boys (his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes) to answer that we know the color of our blood from memory. We donât need light. A girl would reply the bird predicts both darting hare and man whose gesture follows, a lightning run of fur and tail, the sleek hind legs to leap into the third couplet where we skip across the years, both hare and man now gone only their motions left behind. And then like sudden grassfire the class would understand the poetâs awe, why he writes these words instead of weeping, why the poem must streak by, bleeding and animal but not quick to die. I have tried teaching CzeĆaw MiĆoszâs âEncounterâ several times, but never with much luck. “Encounter” is a small poem that travels …
You write for burnt glass.
It seems I must have gone into a tailspin brought on in part from madness already there, compounded with much that came on by the minute, and found myself on top of a high curb that felt to me like a bridge or a cliff edge on which I rocked and then quite literally emptied myself like a chamberpot into lâAbĂźme. At the time I was, in fact, speaking quite good French, about any number of things that came to mind though I was an audience of one, and at that one nutjob, who was alone in knowing what the hell he was talking about for Christâs sake, and since nobody was there to ask me that, I wasnât very likely to ask myself; and therefore didnât, but instead just stood there muttering about la poĂ©sie de lâhivernage, in a guttural mumble like a corner-boy giving out upon la pluie, la neige, mĂȘme quelque catastrophe diluvienne, or equally likely Professeur Michaud pacing around in his brown plaid double-breasted suit, from the crinkly left cuff of …
Very littleâs holding us together
From the Spring-Summer v3.n1 issue of Poetry Northwest, “The Political Issue,” we’re featuring Mary Jo Salter’s “Song of the Children.” According to Salter, “‘Song of the Children’ is one of the few poems Iâve written that was ever, in any sense, commissioned. A French friend was helping to put together an international anthology of poems about war, and asked me to try to write one. I saw I had been censoring myself: I had wanted, in some way, to write about the Iraq war, but had held off simply because I had no clue how to do it. The poemâwhich is partly about not knowing how to speak or write adequately about violenceâgot written, but the anthology was never published. I was fortunate that Poetry Northwest was interested in my attempt.
Itâs a simple question, and I even know what it is
In the not-too-distant future those to whom it matters may look back at some point in the 1990s, when the networking of the Internet really started to take off, and wonder if at that moment the actual writing of thorough and styled and even personal letters, as a medium of one reflective silence speaking to another reflective silence (roughly Rilkeâs definition of poetry), ended.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s “On Leaving Home” appears in Poetry Northwest Fall-Winter 2007-08 v2.n2. The poem focuses on departures and those who are left behind. According to Le-Blanc, ” I left Chicago at 18 and somehow knew that I would never be back for any length of time. I wanted to capture somethingâwho knows whatâabout that experience.
