Author: Staff

Eva Heisler: “Lover’s Manual”

Published by Staff

For November we feature Eva Heisler’s “Lover’s Manual,” which appears in Poetry Northwest Fall-Winter 2007-08 v2.n2. The  poem is part of a longer series of prose poems entitled “Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic.” According to Heisler, “‘Lover’s Manual’ originated as journal entries written during the first three years of a nine-year period in Iceland.  This was a period in which the romance and astonishments of a foreign land were challenged by the difficulties of earning a living as a foreigner.  I was constantly faced with just how deeply language shapes perception and, as I struggled to learn Icelandic, the blind spots proliferated.

Christina Pugh: “Sebald’s Dream Props”

Published by Staff

Christina Pugh’s “Sebald’s Dream Props” appears in Poetry Northwest Fall-Winter 2007-08 v2.n2. When asked to discuss her poem, Pugh writes, “‘Sebald’s Dream Props’ is part of a manuscript entitled Restoration, which operates according to a particular form of dream logic that does not depend on collage, non-sequitur, or overt surrealism. Because it is based on dream material and is in part mimetic of dreams, this poem’s trajectory (perhaps one-third prayer, one-third inductive reasoning, one-third meditation on the transformative nature of figurative language itself) is not linear, and its visual aesthetic is something akin to pointillist cinematic (itself an impossibility that poetry may perhaps asymptotically achieve).

Robert Pinsky: 2007 Distinguished Lecture

Published by Staff

On March 21, 2007, in Portland, some 400 people crammed the sold-out Wonder Ballroom to hear to hear the former poet laureate speak, read poems, & launch the Music Issue. Robert Pinsky condemned educational administrators who want to break the chain of culture by cutting funding to music, arts, & creative writing programs. “Woe unto them,” said Pinsky, who also read recent & new poems, & closed the night with an electrifying reading of John Keats’s hymn to music & poetry, “Ode to a Nightingale.“ Listen to an excerpt of his performance exclusively through Poetry Northwest Online:

Kim-An Lieberman: “Water Buffalo Tale”

Published by Staff

In the spring of 1975, my grandmother boarded a one-way flight from Saigon to California. She joined a massive wave of postwar refugees desperate to escape Vietnam’s newly communist government; over the next two decades, millions like her would scatter and resettle across the globe. I wrote this poem trying to fathom the meaning and impact of relocation on such an epic scale. My portrait of the Willards is admittedly a touch sarcastic—I was picturing the white-picket realm of Donna Reed and Ward Cleaver, where an Asian face in the neighborhood would be just about as unexpected as a colossal bovine on the front porch—but I also see sincere pathos in Mr. Willard’s attempt to restore familiar logic to his corner of the world. I close the poem with an unresolved silence because while I think that Americans today acknowledge significant debt to all our combined histories of border-crossing and culture-blending, we still haven’t figured out how to shed our reliance on binary conceptions of us and them.

Matthew Rohrer: “Hey There, Mr. Blue”

Published by Staff

The third issue of Poetry Northwest, our special Music Issue, features prose by poets on the subject of music. This month we preview this Spring-Summer 2007 (v2.n1) special issue with an online exclusive: poet Matthew Rohrer writing about his all-time favorite band, Electric Light Orchestra. Rohrer has been listening to ELO since 1978, even through the dark times, when it was decidedly uncool. Hey There, Mr. Blue It was over a hundred degrees outside because it was Oklahoma, but inside our house it was perfectly cool, sometimes too cool, like something out of the future. And everyone’s house was this cool, and everything else was too, so essentially one moved through town (only when necessary) in an air-conditioned car, from chilly house to chilly movie theater to chilly grocery store. We might as well have been living on a moon colony because we needed advanced technology just to survive. Which I only mention because that day when I stood in the living room with the stereo—my parents’ stereo, the one made to look like wood—and …