Mary Jo Salter: “Old Saw”
“How did we lose our charm?”
All posts tagged: Mary Jo Salter
Theodore Roethke Prize 2009
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. _____________________________________________
Mary Jo Salter: “Song of the Children”
From the Spring-Summer v3.n1 issue of Poetry Northwest, “The Political Issue,” we’re featuring Mary Jo Salter’s “Song of the Children.” According to Salter, “‘Song of the Children’ is one of the few poems I’ve written that was ever, in any sense, commissioned. A French friend was helping to put together an international anthology of poems about war, and asked me to try to write one. I saw I had been censoring myself: I had wanted, in some way, to write about the Iraq war, but had held off simply because I had no clue how to do it. The poem—which is partly about not knowing how to speak or write adequately about violence—got written, but the anthology was never published. I was fortunate that Poetry Northwest was interested in my attempt.