All posts filed under: Poems

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

NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Mexico

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Mexico began as an attempt to make sense of a memory that has stayed with me all these years. As a small child on vacation with my parents, I managed to step off the pool’s edge into deep water before either of them saw what I was doing. I must have been in there only moments, but I have carried with me the image of the sunlight coming in above my head, my mother’s frantic response, and then later—as if it were part of that moment—the sound of water coming from the bathroom and the slant of light on the tiles in our hotel room. When I began writing the poem I did not know what those images would give way to, nor that—because my mother is no longer alive—I would see in that imagery the blueprint for the loss to come. (Natasha Trethewey) Mexico It always comes back like this: light streaming in, the sound of water in a basin I know is white my mother’s footsteps on the tile floor; and the long …

ERIC McHENRY
New Year’s Letter to All the Friends I’ve Estranged by Not Writing

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I’m sorry, first of all,for the impersonalmedium. It’s midnight and I’m spreadso thin I just about said spin so thread.Sage came home with a strip of masking tapeacross her lunchbox: PLEASE SLICE EVERY GRAPE.And there again I’ve put a blameless childbetween us like a human shieldagainst accountability, and thenacknowledged it. And there again.As though by self-embarrassment aloneI might regressinto a truer self, becoming smalland solid as the last matryoshka doll;as though that might redressthe failings up to which I’ve failed to own:I’ve identified too closely withmyself, or with my sympathetic myth.I’ve acted as though it were all an act —the first of five — and called the fact the brutal fact and failed to callthe fourth wall a wall.And all while waiting for the world to dropthe dozen of us at a common stopso you could keep me company again,which would require the world to be a train.The world’s a wheel. The world’s a rolling pin.The world is spinning thread and spreading thin.I can’t imagine what this goes to proveexcept the obvious — I’d rather …

Bruce Beasley: “Year’s End Paradoxography”

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I had been reading about the ancient literary collections in Latin and Greek called ‘paradoxographies,’ which were assemblages of brief notations of bizarre occurrences considered portentous, bewildering, wonderful, and strange: monstrous births, miraculous weather phenomena, astonishing reports of the barely believable but urgently interpretable events of the world. This poem came to me first through a series of urgent dreams: lines that later made their way into the poem reciting themselves insistently over and over until I woke up and scribbled them down. I found pages the next morning with strange paradoxical fragments and urgent pieces of prophecy and advice scribbled all over them, lines I had forgotten I had dreamed or written down, which seemed paradoxigraphical itself. The poem’s fragments of strangeness came out of those lines. This is the first poem for a manuscript I’m finishing called PARADOX DOXOLOGY that considers the strangenesses and wonders of the turn of the 21st century, from robot public service operators to genetic engineering to mood-altering neurosurgery: a ‘paradoxography’ for the new millennium. (Bruce Beasley) Year’s End …

Sara Wainscott: “The Apprentice Making Paint”

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I am interested in the way poems allow scenes to overlay one another, in the relationship between image and reflection, in the simultaneous workings of internal and external worlds. Mostly, though, I have a lot of fondness and respect for ‘shit jobs’ and the lessons I learned by working my way up. (Sara Winscott) The Apprentice Making Paint A stupid boy, crying into the lapis lazuli again and rubbing his punished head. The mortar and pestle, very blue, and his runny face hued by the costly grime— a waste of ultramarine, the most unyielding stone, so hard to grind by hand. Half-filled flasks of linseed oil, spilled pot of rabbit skin glue, husks of roaches. The boy, sighing, holds the stiffest brushes to warm under his arms. The window’s writhing landscape, the hollers from the damp street, the coal-sellers, the basket-vendors. The raving rooster woman wrings her cloak. The still canvases on the wall—unfinished portraits, hunting scenes—most of all the wonderful archangel drying leisurely in a vermilion sky (mercury and sulfur need tending as they …

Wendy Willis: “A Virtuous Wife”

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“Who can find a virtuous wife?” is the opening line of Proverbs 31:10 and begins an acrostic poem—each line starting with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, undoubtedly creating an easy way for the virtuous wife to recall that she must consider a field and buy it and plant a vineyard and strengthen her arms and clothe her household with scarlet. As for this poem, I wanted it to wonder about virtue, to occupy two minds, to scratch what itched, to listen for the birdcalls, inside and out. A virtuous wife does not eat the bread of idleness. (Wendy Willis)

Danielle Chapman: “Meet Me in Hollywood”

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This month we’re featuring Danielle Chapman’s poem “Meet Me in Hollywood,” which appears in Poetry Northwest Fall-Winter 2008-09 v3.n2. According to Chapman, “If there’s anyone lurking in the shadows of this poem, it’s probably Allen Ginsberg. I’ve always felt a bit conflicted about his work; of course as a teenager I guzzled down “Howl” as if it were a ritual libation; then, as a college student, I dismissed it as dated and a bit silly; but, when I reread it again as an adult, I was overcome by the power of its ecstatic perception. While its peyote-dream quality can seem schticky to an ironic reader, it’s ultimately triumphant in harnessing visionary experience, territory which is uniquely suited to poetry. This poem pays homage to the sort of mystical openness that Ginsberg accessed, but it’s also an indictment of the flophouse romanticism that we’ve inherited from his generation. “

David Ciminello: “Love, Lorena”

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“Love, Lorena” appears in the current issue of Poetry Northwest, our sixth in the new series. Of his poem David Ciminello writes, “as a writer I am most concerned with the musicality of language and how certain notes can be struck with the right word choice and word order.I also consider myself a visual writer. I like to work from images.

Susan Kelly-Dewitt: “His Perfume”

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“His Perfume” appears in Poetry Northwest Fall-Winter 2008-09 v3.n2, our sixth in the new series. Of her poem Kelly-DeWitt writes, “we usually think of perfume as something attractive—so I wanted to play off of that idea in this poem. It’s a poem about the body as flesh, a thing in and of itself, that has a life of its own apart from the consciousness that inhabits it, with a death and a perfume of its own making. The poem is written in unrhymed tercets; tercets have a shape and pacing I’m comfortable with.

P. K. Page: “Improbable Concept”

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For January & February we’re featuring P.K. Pages “Improbable Concept,” which appears in the current issue of Poetry Northwest. Page writes, “‘Improbable Concept’ is written in the seductive and challenging glosa form, which dates back to the l5th century Spanish Court. The lines of the opening quatrain are chosen from the work of another poet; they are followed by four ten-line stanzas, whose concluding lines are taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth—I suppose a liking for crossword puzzles helps!”

W. S. Di Piero: “Raven”

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To end the year we’re featuring W.S. Di Piero’s “Raven,” which appears in the current issue of Poetry Northwest. “Years ago I read the opening phrase in a field guide’s description of a raven,” says Di Piero, ” and it stuck with me: ‘Big black bird.’ I see ravens out my window every day and appreciate their don’t-mess-with-me posture and gliding maneuvers. (Crows don’t glide.) Apparent monochromatic blackness with endless flashing inflections — that’s one definition of good style. They have no songfulness, just a marvelous variety of noises and calls, which recommends them to poetry but not to pretty poetry. “Most of my books contain a poem about a bird, none from a birdbrain’s consciousness, though: they all in some way are about hunger, appetite, or aspiration that sounds like fury.” Raven Ratso pigeons strictly for the birds. Morning vocalizing to settle one’s nerves. Practice makes perfect. Hello high wire art, and come back O red-tail youth. Upstart. Hair bulbs down there. Feed and need. Sunshine so justified upon my wings and I sing …