Interview // Amanda Knowles on Rothko, Frost, and Growing Up the Daughter of a Scientist
By Nari Kirk
All posts tagged: poetry and visual arts
Review // Sierra Nelson’s I Take Back the Sponge Cake
By Kristen Steenbeeke, Contributing Writer I grew up on choose-your-own-adventure books, and now that I’m 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 Erdrich’s poetry/art collaboration book “I Take Back the Sponge Cake” is so enticing: The poems are like tiny jigsaws in themselves, connected by choose-your-own-adventure snippets, such as “____ the night from day, O dreamers,” with the option to choose “Rest: to repose” or “Wrest: to take by force.” Depending on the reader’s choice of homonym, they are led to another page, another poem, another of Erdrich’s whimsically sad watercolors. The poems are small and concise but chock-full of their own wordplay and tricks. One highlight was “Pseudomorph,” a word which means “a cloud of ink, …
Picasso, Mon Ami
Picasso, Mon Ami: Dancing Arm-in-Arm with the Master During the 1950s in Provence, John Richardson dined often with his neighbor, Pablo Picasso, whom he says liked to startle supper guests with unpopular foods like Spanish marzipan and ancient Chinese eggs. Richardson, biographer and intimate friend of the artist, spoke to a very full house at Benaroya Hall on December 8 in conjunction with both Seattle Arts & Lectures and the traveling Picasso exhibition whose first stop in the U.S. was the Seattle Art Museum. He is in the process of completing the fourth volume of a four-part biography, the first three of which have taken about fifty years to write. “When the woman changes, everything changes” says Richardson at the very start of the talk, meaning that in addition to the expected “change of dog, change of food, change of house,” the acquisition of new lovers also transformed the way Picasso worked with his paint or bronze or wood. Now well-established, this concept is one of Richardson’s contributions to art history, an observation afforded by …
Ed Skoog: “Space”
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 midnight’s 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 …
Ed Skoog: “Radial”
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 Topeka’s 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 …
Ed Skoog: “Dean”
The second in our series featuring poems written by Ed Skoog in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon. Read the first in the series, “What’s Your Beef,” with an introduction by the poet, here. Dean Less I see you through this stone, displeasure on your face as you wait for me to deliver this short curriculum in repose of armor, of landfall. Begin where we left, red world of symptom such as money and heart. In my deanship I lead a quaint faculty. Learn nothing. Threat of stone is release into the body, John Donne was Dean of St. Paul’s. Born a girl, I’d have been Pauline. It’s good to know your other name. Names are of interest. — 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 …
Ed Skoog: “What’s Your Beef?”
Over the course of the next few weeks, as the Winter/Spring 2010-11 issue of Poetry Northwest (v5.n2) is made ready, we’ll be featuring a series of poems by Ed Skoog written in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon. When asked bout the process of composing these poems, Ed writes that “the question on my side, once I’d agreed to the collaboration, was what form the poems would take in response to John’s photographs. He’d already taken them; I’d already admired them. The photographs were taken around Ithaca, New York, and I recognized only a few of the locations from my visits there. Here in Seattle the March through June I worked on the sequence, it was gloomy and what little light came through the leafing apple tree was lonely. These poems started spinning out from the memory of the photos rather than from direct looking. I worked on them a long time, puzzling them out, puzzling into them, and in the end took them much more seriously than I’d set out to, in order …
LINDA BIERDS Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Durer
You write for burnt glass.
FLOYD SKLOOT
Two Poems
No matter how quickly he moves, time / moves faster.