All posts filed under: Poems

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

Andrew Zawacki: “Videotape: 51″

Published by Staff

This month, from Andrew Zawacki, an analogue of memory: Andrew notes that “’Videotape’ is a serial poem primarily concerned with landscape—whether natural or manufactured, oneiric or simulated—and with the various media we employ to record, juxtapose, even invent geography, not to mention ruin it.  I’m specifically interested in obsolete technologies, like VHS and Betamax, with their magnetic tape and plastic cassettes, figures of inevitable decay.  These date from my childhood—also, of course, from the Reagan era, a technocracy of scary proportions (leveled by someone who’d been a film star).  While I’ve tried to leave dramas of selfhood out of these clips—the one thing not seen in a visual field is the person behind the viewfinder—, recalling that a camera’s lens is termed the ‘objective,’ a few subjective moments have nonetheless punctured the work.  51—a love song, written while my wife was away—is among them, with its speaker’s sentiments (nostalgia bordering on pathetic) themselves articulated in an outdated mode.  (We were spending summer in Paris and had just inherited cordial glasses dating from the Second Empire …

AMY GLYNN GREACEN Two Poems

Published by Staff

Exclusive to Poetry Northwest Online, here are several poems from Amy Glynn Greacen’s A Modern Herbal: a manuscript-in-progress that, according to its author, “shares its title with Maud Grieve’s 1931 herbal pharmacopoeia. Each poem is about a different plant – from fruits and vegetables to medicinal herbs, psychotropics and poisons – in some cases directly and in some, obliquely. It plays with botanical metaphors and with the many ways humans use and interact with plants.” Greacen notes that “walnut trees are the only specimen in the book to rate two poems, probably because my childhood house, the one in ‘Juglans Regia,’ was surrounded by an old orchard. The concept of problematic abundance is something of a recurring theme for me – in this case, not only the literal bombardment with nuts we could never eat but the sense of being inundated by pattern, by repetition, and by memory – a faculty walnuts happen, felicitously, to enhance. Walnuts are cultivated by grafting English walnut branches (commercially valuable nut) onto disease-resistant black walnut rootstock. Ultimately, the black walnut …

Richard Hugo Prize 2009

Published by Staff

Kenneth Fields is the recipient of the Richard Hugo Prize for his poem “One Love,” published in the Fall & Winter 2009-2010 issue (v4.n2) of Poetry Northwest.  Read the winning poem below. _____________________________________________ The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Richard Hugo Prize are 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.  Mary Jo Salter is the recipient of the 2009 Theodore Roethke Prize.  For a list of the previous year’s recipients, visit here. _____________________________________________ ANY CHARACTER HERE One Love +++ Thailand, Laos, Cambodia Buddha’s birthday Four figures, stone to gold One leaning forward, Compassion, ready To move, come back To tell us the house is on fire +++ * * * The tuk-tuk driver Believes We need new clothing +++ * * * Freed the souls of little birds Who let themselves be caged again For seed +++ * * * Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth +++ * …

Theodore Roethke Prize 2009

Published by Staff

Mary Jo Salter is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for her poems “Unbroken Music” and “From a Balcony, Lake Como,” appearing in the Fall & Winter 2009-2010 (v4.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.  Read “Unbroken Music,” introduced by the author, below. _____________________________________________ The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Richard Hugo Prize are 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.  Kenneth Fields is the recipient of the 2009 Richard Hugo Prize.  For a list of the previous year’s recipients, visit here. _____________________________________________

Rick Barot: “The Poem is a Letter Opener”

Published by Staff

In celebration of the arrival of the Spring-Summer 2010 issue (v5.n1) of Poetry Northwest on newsstands and in mailboxes, we offer you this instrument of opening by Rick Barot, exclusively online.  “I wrote this poem during an autumn residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire,” notes Barot.  “Prior to the residency, I hadn’t written a poem in many months, perhaps close to a year.  And so my mind was full of half-thoughts and half-images and half-possibilities just waiting for some galvanizing energy to give them coherence.  There was a rocking chair in the studio, and I spent nearly all my time in that chair, rocking and reading.  On the day I wrote the poem, I was sitting in that chair and opened up Bill Knott’s book of poems The Unsubscriber, a favorite book.  Immediately I came across the page that had this as the first line of a poem: ‘The poem is a letter opener.’  I closed the book, knew instantly that Knott’s line was the title of a poem that I wanted to write, sat down at the desk, and …

Marvin Bell: “The Book of the Dead Man (The Northwest)”

Published by Keetje Kuipers

Marvin Bell’s nineteenth book was the wartime collection, Mars Being Red (2007). His twentieth is 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, a collaboration of seven poets from five countries. Long a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA program based in Oregon at Pacific University. The first incarnation of Bell’s The Book of the Dead Man appeared in 1994 (Copper Canyon). A second volume, Ardor, was published in 1997. “About the Dead Man and the Northwest” is from a new, forthcoming collection of “Dead Man” poems. Look for more of Marvin Bell’s poems in Poetry Northwest in the months ahead. ◊ The Book of the Dead Man (The Northwest) +++ Live as if you were already dead. +++ Zen admonition +++ And the fish swim in the lake / and do not even own clothing. +++ Ezra Pound, “Salutation” 1. About the Dead Man and the Northwest Picture the dead man in two rooms in the northwest corner of his being. In the one, it is day, and in the …