All posts filed under: Poems

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

David McAleavey: “Daylily season”

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There’s both turbulence and calm in this piece, something like kneading bread dough. We’d been to see an emphatic production of King Lear with a gangster-era setting; the next day our clothes retained some whiff of the characters’ onstage smoking. (The full slap of Lear is itself sufficient to make you wake up dazed – more than a whiff of smoke remained!) The previous year my mother had died, aged 95, and a couple of months before I wrote this we’d buried her ashes alongside my father’s in an old family plot in Topeka. Lady Bird Johnson made it her cause to beautify Washington DC, in part by planting banks of daylilies along Rock Creek Parkway, and I often drive by a similar bank along I-66 in Arlington. Our house is built on a slope as well, the bank of a small stream, and from inside you can’t see some of the showy flowers in the yard below. I don’t have a shoe fetish, but sometimes a bold pair of high heels makes a direct …

Carol Light: “January Walk”

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“January Walk” began as a post-squall “nature walk” writing exercise, in hushed company with a–fishing now for a suitable collective noun: sord? siege? muster? ostentation?–of eighth graders. Breaking the silence meant yanking the whole skulk back to a fluorescent-lit classroom, and no one wanted to be held liable for that. With sharpened pencils and index cards, we huddled through woods to a duck pond behind the school, recording observations of cattails and red-winged blackbirds, which we later composed into poems. I wrote alongside the flock, and found this poem calling back to an earlier sonnet of mine, started more than fifteen years ago, in a time of far less forgiving storms. Thanks to Kevin for his superior ornithology, and thanks to my Blue Heron brood of writers for walking me through this poem. (Carol Light) — January Walk The wind has twisted the tops of hemlock and fir; cones and needles spatter the muddy path. Rising from nearby chimneys: wood smoke and ash. A cold mist washes my cheek and cattails stir the breeze, climbing …

Jennifer Bullis: “Directions to Pt. Rupture”

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Jennifer Bullis, the inaugural winner of Poetry Northwest‘s contest, The Pitch, writes of her winning poem: I knew I would love writing to Rebecca Hoogs’s prompt, which calls for re-grounding in the language of physical place.  I looked forward to tracing, verbally, one of the routes familiar to me:  the way through sagebrush to a pond in the gully below my house where, as a six year old, I looked for frogs; or the way on horseback through Reno’s outskirts, where, as an adolescent, I’d ride into the foothills to find shade among pines; or the way  up logging roads above the Nooksack River outside Van Zandt, Washington, to the washout at Skookum Creek where, in August, you can be surrounded by tiny purple butterflies. The poem that eventuated, however, had a source far different from personal memory or physical place.  “Directions to Pt. Rupture,” it turns out, was an entirely imagined piece that found its inspiration in language, in the mouth’s commerce with air—in that particular set of vocalizations produced when we stop and …

Eric McHenry: from “The Lovelier As They Fall”

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Last week, we featured the first of three takes by Eric McHenry on Robert Frost’s immortal “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”  This week, we bring you the second of these riffs.  The third appears as “Stay” in the Fall/Winter 2010-11 issue (v5.n2) of Poetry Northwest. The Lovelier As They Fall (2) Summer’s last green is gold. The sycamore catches cold and, with a silent sneeze, infects the other trees. Colors like doctors go from house to house, as though something gold could say might keep the cold away. — Eric McHenry’s first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser Press), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Common Knowledge, Seattle Review, The Guardian (U.K.) and Slate. He teaches creative writing at Washburn University.

Eric McHenry: from “The Lovelier As They Fall”

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The Fall/Winter issue (v5.n2) of Poetry Northwest is beginning to arrive now in mailboxes everywhere; and with it–in the northern hemisphere, at least–the longer nights and falling leaves of autumn.  To mark both of these arrivals, we bring you, this week and next, two riffs by Eric McHenry on Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”  A third appears as “Stay” in the current issue of the magazine. The Lovelier As They Fall (1) Fall’s first gold is green. The leaves give up their sheen for texture and a tinge. Their edges curl and singe. Then, like a book of matches, the whole crown kindles, catches, and glows against the lawn. So day goes down to dawn. — Eric McHenry’s first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser Press), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Common Knowledge, Seattle Review, The Guardian (U.K.) and Slate. He teaches creative writing at Washburn University. Next: more from Eric McHenry’s “The Lovelier As They Fall”

Ed Skoog: “Space”

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The fourth and final in our series featuring poems by Ed Skoog with photographs by J. Robert Lennon.  Read the first, and Ed’s introduction to the series, here. Space wants to be held away from its surface, between shape and place. Looking for solace, do I walk or drift? For protection, I wear a soup pot. When I call out sweet, when I try to get it alone, late and talking in the pool light glow. Across midnight’s white tile floor, like cough medicine, or the grass stains on her rugby shirt. In dark basement, saying her name toward the vernal scent of vetiver. Sacked city we are fleeing, bright on our backs. — Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.  He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University.  He lives in Seattle and teaches at Everett Community College. J. Robert …

Ed Skoog: “Radial”

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The third in our series featuring poems by Ed Skoog written in response to photographs by Robert J. Lennon.  Read the first, “What’s Your Beef,” introduced by the poet, here. Radial More and more the radial makes a horrible noise. My tires and I are made to the worksong noonwhistle of Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Topeka’s limited, endless grid, building two wheels into my surname rolling further from home & harangue to slash tires, shoot out lights, break into the old hospital to get high, admire the radical simplicity of whistling, which, not radial nor rubber, is air, — Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.  He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University.  He lives in Seattle and teaches at Everett Community College. J. Robert Lennon is a novelist and photographer living in Ithaca, NY.  He teaches writing at …

Ed Skoog: “Dean”

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The second in our series featuring poems written by Ed Skoog in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon.  Read the first in the series, “What’s Your Beef,” with an introduction by the poet, here. Dean Less I see you through this stone, displeasure on your face as you wait for me to deliver this short curriculum in repose of armor, of landfall. Begin where we left, red world of symptom such as money and heart. In my deanship I lead a quaint faculty. Learn nothing. Threat of stone is release into the body, John Donne was Dean of St. Paul’s. Born a girl, I’d have been Pauline. It’s good to know your other name. Names are of interest. — Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.  He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University.  He lives in Seattle and teaches …

Ed Skoog: “What’s Your Beef?”

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Over the course of the next few weeks, as the Winter/Spring 2010-11 issue of Poetry Northwest (v5.n2) is made ready, we’ll be featuring a series of poems by Ed Skoog written in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon. When asked bout the process of composing these poems, Ed writes that “the question on my side, once I’d agreed to the collaboration, was what form the poems would take in response to John’s photographs. He’d already taken them; I’d already admired them. The photographs were taken around Ithaca, New York, and I recognized only a few of the locations from my visits there. Here in Seattle the March through June I worked on the sequence, it was gloomy and what little light came through the leafing apple tree was lonely. These poems started spinning out from the memory of the photos rather than from direct looking. I worked on them a long time, puzzling them out, puzzling into them, and in the end took them much more seriously than I’d set out to, in order …

Rod Jellema: “A Note to the Swedish Mystic Who Wrote that ‘the Wash is Nothing but Wash’”

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This one began, as many of my poems do, with the stirring of a childhood memory brought to mind by a present  experience. Behind our summer place, an old farmhouse in Lake Michigan dunelands, passing our ancient grapevine, I caught the aroma of rising steam that mixed hot grape leaves and my wife’s swim suit and towel, spread out there to dry. The scent, blended with fresh lake breezes, took me fifty miles and seventy years downshore, to my Uncle Harry’s cottage, where I spent my best summer days as a young teenager.  I’ve remembered the mysterious, almost intoxicating smell on hot days there that wafted from his big tangled grapevine. It was wet towels, hot leaves, swim suits, and also the fresh lake air gently lifting the leaves from beneath. There was almost certainly something vaguely spiritual, blended with something indistinctly and beautifully sexual, in the memory that has stayed so long. In his little book of poems, translated from the Swedish, Tommy Oloffson, a true heir of the Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg, is …