Stephen Kampa: “When I Whistle This Tune”
After I’d sketched in some / Detail the man I never wanted to become, / I easily became him
All posts filed under: Poems
Weekly poems, selected by the editors. Featuring new work as well as poems from our rich archives.
Kate Lebo: “Fishing for Icarus”
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool. – Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, Almost Famous But Phil, our Phil, was so cool, in that stylish, cipher-ish, miserable way that makes a man handsome, impossible, unforgettable and rich, no matter what face he was born with, no matter what was in his pockets when he died. He used English like an invented language. When we first met, he drove me to Squalicum Beach and bantered about the moon until I ran out of jokes. We sat on a log to watch the night, swimming distance from a rotten pier whose final job was to touch all the water we wouldn’t reach. Annie Dillard set her historical epic, The Living, in Bellingham. This pier could be home to one of the book’s best cruelties. Phil hadn’t yet read it. I leaned into him, studious. Later, a year after our paths stopped crossing, we shared a booth in a Bellingham bar, the one tucked into a …
Meghan Dunn: “In the Rec Field at Camp Nazareth”
I curse your steady / breath, your strong hands, and curl // my own fingers into the dead / grass, startling again the ants,
Sarah Lindsay Origin
it had little to do but thrive
Timothy Donnelly: “The Earth Itself”
The unstoppable eccentric visionary antiquarian scholar-priest Athanasius Kircher is pretty high on my list of heroes. Born in 1601 outside the city of Fulda, not far from the geographical heart of today’s Germany, Kircher’s beautifully illustrated books on Egyptology, magnetism, acoustics, Kabbalah, numerology, volcanology and an array of other subjects exuberate over the world’s inexhaustible complexity, its baroque convolution of matter and spirit, sparing no detail as they reveal how all creation is “bound by secret knots.” In his Turris Babel, a treatise on linguistics by way of a compendium of pre-classical architecture, Kircher crunches all kinds of numbers in order demonstrate how doomed an idea the Tower of Babel was, concluding, among other things, that it would have required no fewer than 374,731,250,000,000,000 bricks to build.
Brittany Cavallaro: “A Taxonomy of Sex”
Chart your own arrangement. As in: the star’s heat / looped into the black hole and looped again
Olena Kalytiak Davis: “Sight Unseen”
i’m a pretty face with just one pretty eye. / my self-worth what? its weight in storm.
Troy Jollimore: “Polaroid Model 100 Onestep, Circa 1978”
If it mattered it mattered only because / it was our constant companion
SIERRA NELSON The First Photograph
Hasn’t there been a moment you never wanted to leave?
Stephen Dunn: Five Early Poems
Periodically, we’ll take a tour of the Poetry Northwest archives, spotlighting vital poems and writers from the magazine’s fifty-plus year history. Previous entries in the series can be found here. This edition features early work from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn, a frequent contributor to the magazine during the seventies, eighties and beyond. Here are five poems as they originally appeared in Poetry Northwest, with the poet’s reflection on what these pieces mean to him now. Before I begin to say anything about these poems that appeared in Poetry Northwest many years ago, a few dating back to 1969, I want to thank David Wagoner for recognizing a quality in them worthy of publication. He was the first editor of an important magazine to regularly publish my work, and therefore helped develop in me a confidence that I might have a little something on which to build. It may not be possible, but I’m going to try to look at these poems as if they were written by someone else. “Affirmation” is amazingly …