VALERIE MEJER CASO Five Poems
knowing that the mask is more an image
knowing that the mask is more an image
I have forgotten where I placed my glasses. / I remember watching a boy roast and eat crickets.
On September 13th, the APRIL book club gathered at Little Oddfellows in the Elliott Bay Book Company to discuss The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa.
Poetry Northwestâs monthly podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets. Each episode features lively conversation between writers in a different location. Episode 10 features Sierra Nelson with Johnny Horton rowing around the edge of Seattle’s Union Bay. Topics of discussion include finding the right director for your dream-poems, silence, frog song, collaboration, John Donne’s “Relic,” humor & wit, poetry as technology, and encountering the brink.
By Maggie Trapp
Poetry Northwest‘s monthly podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets during the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Seattle. Each episode will feature lively conversation between writers in a different Seattle location. Episode 4 features Kevin Craft interviewing Zach Savich. Their conversation takes place at the Washington Convention Center in Seattle. Topics of discussion include George Oppen, where the eyes go after reading a great line of poetry, creative community and collaboration, and Zach Savich’s most recent collection of poetry, Century Swept Brutal.
Conducted by Rich Smith | In practice, comedians remind me so much of poets because you write your poems in seclusion and then you try them out on an audience. I might even respect comedians more than poets. If you say a line of poetry and nobody claps then you don’t give a shit because that’s just what happens at poetry readings.
By Kristen Steenbeeke, Contributing Writer I grew up on choose-your-own-adventure books, and now that Iâm older, it seems poetry has always been a choose-your-own-adventure lying in wait. You know: the wordplay inviting one to interpret the work how they wish, then that interpretation branching off into some other dimly-lit pathway, which branches to another, and sooner or later one ends up out of the forest altogether and at some dark-blue lake, teeming with fish. This is why Sierra Nelson and Loren Erdrichâs poetry/art collaboration book âI Take Back the Sponge Cakeâ is so enticing: The poems are like tiny jigsaws in themselves, connected by choose-your-own-adventure snippets, such as â____ the night from day, O dreamers,â with the option to choose âRest: to reposeâ or âWrest: to take by force.â Depending on the readerâs choice of homonym, they are led to another page, another poem, another of Erdrichâs whimsically sad watercolors. The poems are small and concise but chock-full of their own wordplay and tricks. One highlight was âPseudomorph,â a word which means âa cloud of ink, …
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 midnightâs 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 …
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 Topekaâs 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 …