Weekly poems, selected by the editors. Featuring new work as well as poems from our rich archives.
This month we reach back into the archive and feature Joyce Carol Oates’s “Like This…So This.” The poem appeared in the Autumn 1969 of Poetry Northwest. Also appearing in that issue: Kenneth O. Hanson, C.G. Hanzlicek, Stephen Dobyns, and Jay Wright.
On March 21, 2007, in Portland, some 400 people crammed the sold-out Wonder Ballroom to hear to hear the former poet laureate speak, read poems, & launch the Music Issue. Robert Pinsky condemned educational administrators who want to break the chain of culture by cutting funding to music, arts, & creative writing programs. “Woe unto them,” said Pinsky, who also read recent & new poems, & closed the night with an electrifying reading of John Keats’s hymn to music & poetry, “Ode to a Nightingale.“ Listen to an excerpt of his performance exclusively through Poetry Northwest Online:
In the spring of 1975, my grandmother boarded a one-way flight from Saigon to California. She joined a massive wave of postwar refugees desperate to escape Vietnam’s newly communist government; over the next two decades, millions like her would scatter and resettle across the globe. I wrote this poem trying to fathom the meaning and impact of relocation on such an epic scale. My portrait of the Willards is admittedly a touch sarcastic—I was picturing the white-picket realm of Donna Reed and Ward Cleaver, where an Asian face in the neighborhood would be just about as unexpected as a colossal bovine on the front porch—but I also see sincere pathos in Mr. Willard’s attempt to restore familiar logic to his corner of the world. I close the poem with an unresolved silence because while I think that Americans today acknowledge significant debt to all our combined histories of border-crossing and culture-blending, we still haven’t figured out how to shed our reliance on binary conceptions of us and them.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon is this month’s feature. We’re delighted to present his essay about the differences between writing song lyrics and poems, “Between Rail-End and Rail-End,” as well as the lyrics to his song, “Most of the Time.” Both the essay and the song appear in The Music Issue (Spring/Summer 2007).
No matter how quickly he moves, time / moves faster.
barback / have filled sinks with ice, the town is primping its diversions
Meghan O’Rourke’s “Elegy, 1972” appears in the Fall-Winter 2006-07 (v1.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest. Of her poem she writes: ” ‘Elegy, 1972’ was written after I had been thinking a lot about the fact that most elegies are for people the author knew, but sometimes it is the people one doesn’t know for whom one feels the most poignant or pressing sense of melancholy. Elegiac loss, in other words, is a metaphor for bigger kinds of spiritual loss, and it’s possible to represent that loss by writing an elegy for the unknown—in this case, say, by writing about a grandfather who died before the speaker was born. “It’s common to wonder (or worry) about what we will miss out on after we die, but much less common to worry about the events that took place before our birth. This seemed both natural and odd to me — natural, because we know certain things about life before our arrival, and odd, because of course we don’t really know all that much about it. It took a …
A blindfolded rhinoceros / is being lifted / out of the water.
This month we reach into the archives and feature Thom Gunn’s “Modes of Pleasure” which appeared in the Winter 1960-1961 issue of the magazine. It ran alongside poems by Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Vladimir Mayakovsky, William Stafford, Sister Mary Gilbert (now known as Madeline DeFrees), among others.
One could hold up a leaf as a fine example of yellow’s / exacting workmanship.
