All posts filed under: Poems

Weekly poems, selected by the editors. Featuring new work as well as poems from our rich archives.

MATTHEW OLZMANN
Notes Regarding Happiness

Published by Staff

Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that message nineteen times on your Facebook page. What I meant to do was wish you a happy birthday.  Instead, here are thirty random characters followed by fifteen more followed by an exclamation point! These messages must look like a language from the future, classified codes that will take years to decipher. They aren’t.  The only thing those signals say is that I’m bad at computers the way continents are bad at crossing oceans to touch the other continents, or the way planets are bad at breaking their orbits and setting off on their own.  Even light has limitations as, eon after eon, it barrels forward, unstoppable.  Yes, light is bad at changing its mind, so it continues to tumble in the same direction, the way I continue to pummel the same enter key, amazed each time at all the nothing that happens. So technology also can be accused: let no wire go without blame, no microchip be absolved. Remember when that plane left Brazil and was gobbled up …

Jeffrey Harrison: “Custody of the Eyes”

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I’ve loved Hopkins since I was in college, and over the years have often returned to his amazingly energetic poems and vivid journal entries. But it wasn’t until I was preparing to give a talk about him a few years ago that I read a biography (actually, two). I became fascinated by his pivotal years at Oxford, where he came under the influence of his teacher Walter Pater’s Aestheticism just as he was feeling the pull toward Catholicism. After his conversion, he gave up poetry, only returning to it after a seven-year struggle to resolve (partly through his theory of Inscape) the contradiction between his love of earthly beauty and the demands of his religious calling. (Obviously, more was at stake for him than for those of us writing poems today, who might feel at most a vague guilt at perhaps being too attached to the pleasures of description.) Some of this is in the poem, and some behind it, my main focus being the strange (to most of us) notion of one of the …

Tomas Tranströmer: “Haikudikter”

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Congratulations to Tomas Tranströmer, long-awaited and much-deserved winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011. In honor of the occasion, we’d like to make available a recent piece by the Swedish poet, originally published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Poetry Northwest (the “political” issue). —   Haikudikter 1. The power-lines stretch through the kingdom of frost north of all music. * The white sun trains alone, running toward the blue mountain of death. * We must live with the small script of the grass and the laughter from cellars. * The sun is low now. Our enormous shadows. Soon, everything will be overtaken. 2. Orchids. Oil tankers glide past. The moon is full. 3. Medieval stronghold, alien city, cold sphinx, empty arenas. * The leaves whispered: a wild boar at the organ. And the bells rang out. * And the night pours from east to west at the speed of the moon. 4. The presence of God. In the tunnel of birdsong a locked gate opens. * Oak trees and the moon. Light and silent …

Carolyn Kizer: “Jill’s Toes”

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As summer burns to its dry end here in Seattle, we bring to a close our series of tributes to founding editor Carolyn Kizer with a look at a recently discovered poem. Featured in a recent article at the The Seattle Times, read “Jill’s Toes” (also in Poetry Northwest Spring/Summer 2011 v5.n2). Here’s hoping that with our contributors you’ve enjoyed revisiting the work of this essential writer. For a list of links to those contributors’ letters, essays and poems, visit here.

Patricia Lockwood: “History of the House Where You Were Born”

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I was reading some Alice Munro, buzzing out of my mind on P.G. Tips. Alice Munro was describing a woman in an Observation Car looking out at the vast Canadian prairies. “What the heck is an Observation Car,” I said to myself. (I find that as a writer it often helps not to know what anything is or what it looks like, because then you can just imagine whatever you want.) So I pictured a big bovine caboose meandering serenely across the grasses, enormous glass windows for its eyes. “Oh my gosh what would its steaks be like, oh my gosh what would its jerky be like?” I wondered, and pictured the Observation Car shot dead and lying on its side. I’d been thinking a lot about prairie towns and railroad towns and small towns in general, and I’d been thinking a lot too about the concept of specialty stores: model train stores that sell you both the railroad and the small town itself; and frame stores with their hanging disembodied rows of gold and …

JANE WONG Aphoristic

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If you stay, you will always make that face. If you stay, a dog will bark and a chandelier will break. A child will bite another child, right on the nose. A lesson learned will be a lesson worn, thread barren. What is a good friend but apology? As in: I need my old habits. As in: I am sorry for the beetles littering the ceiling, for keeping miserable company. Truth is, I am nothing but a close stranger, well begun, half done. Having taken the bull by the sinking ship. We both know when it rains, a snail opens its eye. To see water seeking its own level. To say there is no word for standing in a windy field, looking at the back of the one you love. Out of sight, out of sigh: an open window. I once threw a stone into a glass house and nothing happened. I threw it again. If only to hope for you, if only to waste not to want all too much. — Congratulations to Jane …

J. W. Marshall: “Steilacoom and South”

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Late summer, and even the gods need a little R&R.  J. W. Marshall shares a few thoughts on this poem’s experience: I find I’m liking local poems as long as they are not shackled to an incident. And I like experiential poems when the experience happens within the reading/writing of the poem, not when the experience is something the poem points to from a distance. And I like thinking of the poem as an excursion, like a train ride, getting on at the first word and off at the last. Steilacoom and South does report an experience on a Seattle to Portland Amtrak ride but hopefully the ride on the poem is three dimensional, four counting time, in and of itself. — Steilacoom and South We were gods on holiday who’d stumbled on a local god at work. Until then no one had been loud. Look at that! the boy said and we who swam along with him inside the Amtrak Coach did look. A man stood in a boat as ingenious as a button in a button hole. The sun threw echoes all …

Theodore Roethke Prize 2010

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Eric McHenry is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for poems appearing in the Fall & Winter 2010-2011 (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.  Read one of the prize-winning poems,“Deathbed Confession,” below, introduced by the author. The Theodore Roethke Prize is awarded to recognize the best work published in Poetry Northwest each year. There is no application process; only poems published in the magazine are eligible for consideration.  To read the work of last year’s recipient, visit here.  For a list of past winners, visit here. The man who called himself Dan Cooper — and who came to be known, through a journalist’s error, as D.B. Cooper — probably didn’t survive his jump from the plane. (There was a time when investigators believed that only an expert parachutist would have attempted such a dangerous jump. Now most believe that only an idiot would have.) But if he did survive, I promise you this: nothing infuriates him more than reading about someone’s recently deceased husband or father who with his last breath confessed to being the …

Martha Silano: “Ours”

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I’m not the first person who’s longed to write a poem where Earth and its inhabitants are presented to a being who has no clue about us, and for years I thought about letting loose my inner Margaret Mead right here on my own home turf. My initial attempts to create anthropologist-like poems failed, perhaps because while they shared cool stuff about our “lil” planet, they didn’t add up to much. These failed attempts taught me that I needed to push beyond mere pond side/ highway median reportage. As I began “Ours,” I fell into conveying a more furtive stance which quickly became a shaping mechanism for the poem—I was amused and intrigued by our business-as-usual systems of greed, waste, and overconsumption . . . and war-making.  But more importantly, I was pissed. As I wrote this poem, I was asking myself questions like: when we do find intelligent life forms on some yet-undiscovered exoplanet, will they be torturing each other? Making art? Will they have creation myths? Pilates Nazis? We’ve become fairly accustomed to …