All posts tagged: politics

MICHAEL HEFFERNAN “They Always Say He Marks the Sparrow’s Fall”

Published by Staff

It seems I must have gone into a tailspin brought on in part from madness already there, compounded with much that came on by the minute, and found myself on top of a high curb that felt to me like a bridge or a cliff edge on which I rocked and then quite literally emptied myself like a chamberpot into l’AbĂ®me. At the time I was, in fact, speaking quite good French, about any number of things that came to mind though I was an audience of one, and at that one nutjob, who was alone in knowing what the hell he was talking about for Christ’s sake, and since nobody was there to ask me that, I wasn’t very likely to ask myself; and therefore didn’t, but instead just stood there muttering about la poĂ©sie de l’hivernage, in a guttural mumble like a corner-boy giving out upon la pluie, la neige, mĂŞme quelque catastrophe diluvienne, or equally likely Professeur Michaud pacing around in his brown plaid double-breasted suit, from the crinkly left cuff of …

Mary Jo Salter: “Song of the Children”

Published by Staff

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.