Summer & Fall 2019
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All posts tagged: Eric McHenry
Theodore Roethke Prize 2010
Eric McHenry is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for poems appearing in the Fall & Winter 2010-2011 (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest. Read one of the prize-winning poems,“Deathbed Confession,” below, introduced by the author. The Theodore Roethke Prize is 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. To read the work of last year’s recipient, visit here. For a list of past winners, visit here. The man who called himself Dan Cooper — and who came to be known, through a journalist’s error, as D.B. Cooper — probably didn’t survive his jump from the plane. (There was a time when investigators believed that only an expert parachutist would have attempted such a dangerous jump. Now most believe that only an idiot would have.) But if he did survive, I promise you this: nothing infuriates him more than reading about someone’s recently deceased husband or father who with his last breath confessed to being the …
Eric McHenry: from “The Lovelier As They Fall”
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”
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”
ERIC McHENRY
New Year’s Letter to All the Friends I’ve Estranged by Not Writing
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 …