Author: Staff

Meghan O’Rourke: “Elegy, 1972”

Published by Staff

Meghan O’Rourke’s “Elegy, 1972” appears in the Fall-Winter 2006-07 (v1.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest. Of her poem she writes: ” ‘Elegy, 1972’ was written after I had been thinking a lot about the fact that most elegies are for people the author knew, but sometimes it is the people one doesn’t know for whom one feels the most poignant or pressing sense of melancholy. Elegiac loss, in other words, is a metaphor for bigger kinds of spiritual loss, and it’s possible to represent that loss by writing an elegy for the unknown—in this case, say, by writing about a grandfather who died before the speaker was born. “It’s common to wonder (or worry) about what we will miss out on after we die, but much less common to worry about the events that took place before our birth. This seemed both natural and odd to me — natural, because we know certain things about life before our arrival, and odd, because of course we don’t really know all that much about it. It took a …

Mail, v1.n2 Fall-Winter 2006-07

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Dear Editor: As a former subscriber and contributor, I was excited to receive a copy of the new Poetry Northwest in the mail along with an invitation to subscribe. But no thanks. Normally, I stay out of the fray (this is the first letter I’ve ever written to any publication) but I received a copy a few days after the one-year anniversary of the death of my mother, Margaret Hodge, a venerable “Northwest” poet who contributed to Poetry Northwest many times, and I feel I must speak through her will, as well as for myself. Though I was thrilled to see new work by Stanley Plumly, C. K. Willliams, etc., anyone who knows anything about Northwest poetry knows that beginning the issue with several poems by meta-language poet extraordinaire Richard Kenney is a screeching announcement that the new guard has triumphed over the old. Why be so blatant about your triumph in the first issue and risk alienating so many readers? And then there’s your review of the selected Roethke! (“Some Books,” Spring 2006) To …

Old Masters, Neglected Masters, Non-Masters, and Gems

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For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Liu Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. $14.95 No bland heterosexist suburban poems of backyard sparrows here, Timothy Liu’s latest book, For Dust Thou Art, offers a smorgasbord of impudent isms: onanism, terrorism, “jism,” and solipsism. Titillating perhaps, but stick to the salad bar. The book’s title from Genesis 3:19 misleadingly window dresses a store of randy words, from “good head easier to get than a vintage Merlot” from the first section of the book to “linen falling off our laps as boytoys bathe” from the last section of the book. They sandwich some unsurprising poems in the middle that fetishize 9/11—“A fireman’s boot / exhumed at last—strange trophy / from rubble still too hot to touch” or “Every possible pleasure to be indulged for the world was at an end.” The middle section’s mediocrity begs the question: what of the failure of any poet so far to achieve a “Wasteland” from 9/11? While these poems may stimulate, they fail to surprise, much less catalyze new understanding of people and …

Summer Reading Lists 2006

Published by Staff

For the month of July we decided to embrace the spirit of summer vacation and feature the reading lists of our staff and volunteers. Amanda Bennett: “Heavy, heady stuff…” What Good Are The Arts? by John Carey Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff Monkey Luv by Robert M. Sapolsky Why Do I Love These People? by Po Bronson Gatsby’s Girl by Caroline Preston William Bernhard: “This is what I have in my queue, which is often mercurial.” The Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes The Boy on the Step by Stanley Plumly The Wild Iris by Lousie GlĂĽck Without End by Adam Zagajewski The Plague by Albert Camus Her Husband by Diane Middlebrook David Biespiel: “What’s stacked in the living room…” Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert District and Circle by Seamus Heaney The Curved Planks by Yves Bonnefoy Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt (“Actually this is in the car, and I admit, I’ve been reading it in traffic and in waiting rooms…”) Selected Lyrics by Cole Porter The Complete Prose of Marianne …

Marilyn Hacker: “Ghazal: Style”

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I’ve been interested in the ghazal as a form for a long time, an interest that was awakened by Adrienne Rich’s free-verse ghazals on one hand, and on John Hollander’s witty exposition-by-example of the “formal” ghazal in his prosody handbook Rhyme’s Reason. For me, as for many others, the interest took focus with Aga Sháhid Ali’s work in the form, and with his essay on the ghazal tradition, which appears, in different versions, in the anthology Ravishing Disunities and in the essay anthology An Exaltation of Forms.(Marilyn Hacker) Ghazal: Style Unmistakable, that consummate style pierces the incoherence of her late style. One of them liked to tease out a game for hours; the other had an eight-minute-check-and-mate style. Count stresses; number feet: you’ve got the meter, but there’s no metronome to calibrate style. Words from a dictionary; form-schemes from a textbook provide a trot; they don’t translate style. The urban innocent, one more gay man whose fantasy and flesh respond to straight style. And here is one more student shy of reading the classics, for …