Afterword // The Being Beyond Terror: Alice Notley for Seattle Arts & Lectures
by Jay Aquinas Thompson | Associate Editor
by Jay Aquinas Thompson | Associate Editor
a game, something someone / played, once.
“I believe poetry is language’s most radical possibilities, possibilities which include prose and what prose is capable of expressing, but with the freeing capability of moving beyond limiting grammatical structures and linguistic norms as needed.”
“The shine of the river. Geese. Visitors putting their feet up. The wheezing chest.”
By Keetje Kuipers | Associate Editor “Maybe, actually, the model is actually just conversation, the kinds of conversations we had before our technologies made it difficult to spend face-to-face, uninterrupted, engaged, intimate time talking to another human being.”
On the chair next to my packed suitcase the books are teetering in their tower. I know they cannot all go along, but at the moment I cannot choose between them because each one is my favorite child. In the days before departure, their spines stack up, swap out, rearrange themselves like parakeets startling off a branch and settling back down.
Two takes on Carson & Friends’ performance Tuesday, May 13 at Town Hall by Jack Chelgren & Cali Kopzcick. Two takes because how many eyeballs did you wish you had that night? The Maximalist: Anne Carson at Seattle Arts & Lectures by Jack Chelgren, Special Projects Intern During the Q&A after Anne Carson’s performance at Seattle Arts & Lectures last week, someone in the crowd asked Carson if she’d ever considered translating the New Testament. Carson cooed wistfully, thought for a moment, then replied, “No—the New Testament’s too minimalist for me.” A warm chuckle rose from the crowd, filling the dim, vaulted ceiling of Town Hall. But for all the ironical self-parody of her answer, it’s conceivable that Carson wasn’t really joking. She is an artist and intellectual whose work consistently shatters our rote expectations of poetry, smashing divisions of ancient and modern, lyric and academic, fictional and historical, personal and mythical with the zeal of Hektor chopping down the Achaian ranks in Homer’s Iliad.
People chuckled, but it wasn’t affectation: Hicok seems like the kind of man who has trouble keeping either his mind or his body in one place for very long.
by Jennifer Crowder Poetry Northwest Contributor David Wagoner appeared January 16, 2013 as part of SAL’s Poetry Series, reading from After the Point of No Return, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). An audience of devotees nearly filled the Nordstrom Recital Hall and Wagoner, an icon among the northwest poetry community, did not disappoint. The poems in this latest collection are reflective in a manner that only a half-century’s backward glance could provide.  Although Wagoner ranges across familial relationships, generational transition, nature, what was done and what left undone, collectively, the poems have an atmospheric stillness and balance.  They offer clear-eyed, unsentimental, but generous insights. The most striking poems are those about the difficulties of aging. Wagoner writes of finding that his body “…disobeyed / its own commands to its own purpose,” and his tone in these poems blends regret, disbelief, levity, and transformation. In “Listening,” Wagoner considers hearing loss:  “…vibrant / with the white noise and the equally beautiful / white silence of snow.” Most poems reveal a poet who, if not yet fully at home …
Rebecca Hoogs: “What word should never be used in a poem?”