May 15, 2013

Dear Readers, Spring is in full swing, and so is our next issue of Poetry Northwest, due to hit newsstands and mailboxes  in early June. We’re a little behind our usual schedule, but never fear– the …

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2012 Staff Picks: Four New Additions to Editor Kevin Craft’s Bookshelf

May 19, 2013

NOTABLE BOOKS

Christine Deavel’s Woodnote (Bear Star Press, 2011) is a remarkable book—a book about, among other things, the legacy of books. In vision, and as a physical object, it is a mindful handful: a big square picture window of a book, drawing together many styles. In five sections we encounter an acute, discerning lyricism (“Hidden / as a toy balloon in the sky is / and is not”), personal essay (“But to walk through it, to walk through the snow as it falls, is to walk through another’s memory, even if it is only the land’s”), excerpts of historical records (“The cessions are as follows: / … The December end of the portage place. / Also the overlapping voice of all the lakes”), and, importantly, selections from the diaries of a relative (“A gloomy day :: a delightful day :: A heavy frost but nice day”) who died the year the poet was born.

The cumulative effect of these styles is astounding. Piece by piece, in palimpsest, an image emerges, both vibrant and spectral, of a vanished place, a changing way of life. “Northern rural Indiana” and its ancient forests and native tribes loom behind the daily toil of early 20th century farm life and the speaker’s own childhood memories—yielding, not without ambivalence and telltale struggle (“I squirm to write this”), a self-perpetuating loop of communal revelation, the whole greater than its many moving parts. Woodnote gives us a poet working at every level of the text—precursor & creator, reader &  reviser, editor & archivist—encompassing a veritable ecology of the written word as it records and informs daily life, and pushes into the realms of art. In struggling with her sources, her “desire to make,” Deavel manages to redefine and enlarge our sense of self—“you keep to be kept / watch to know watching”—and reassert the value of even the most humble words to carve out even a changeable place in the ravages of time. The book itself, coherent, collected, emerges as our best defense.

Last fall, Wave Books produced a marvelous three day festival of translation at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Two books featured at that festival are well worth seeking out: Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms, and Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift. Unlike Deavel’s polyphonic sorting through legacies of print, each of these books deals exclusively in lyrical concision, the clarifying image or short-lined stanza poised against a sense of the infinite and the white space of the page. Both poets (Andrade is from Ecuador; Meister from Germany) lived and wrote in the early to mid 20th century, though neither engages directly with history or a specific sense of place. In Andrade’s case, brief “micrograms” (a word he coined to describe his pictographic form) and translations of haiku crystalize a sense of wonder. For Ernst Meister, the background noise is terror—our brief mortality swallowed up by the unknowable recesses of a universe which has no need of us.

Here’s Andrade’s “Macaw,” for instance, in its entirety: “The tropics patch together / golds and fires to make for him / a coat of flags.” Or “Alphabet”: “Bird are / God’s handwriting.” Andrade is a poet of swift, iconic materializations, which the translators (Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta) capture with lightning ease. Things of this world—snails, pears, oysters, blowflies, crickets—acquire an aura of equanimity that admits of a greater design. Another kind of palimpsest emerges in this book: Spanish to English, Japanese to Spanish, the language of metaphor subsuming mortality. Micrograms is a compact book with the macrocosm in its sights.

tumblr_mb4cr1KnFb1qfzpfwFor Ersnt Meister, our mortality cannot be subsumed, only confronted: “To be dead, what / a life, really, / at one with the worm’s / monotony…”. His lyrics (translations by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick) read like existential ripcords, brief incantations aching to confirm our existence against the encroaching void. They read like Heidegger’s Being and Time distilled into shot glasses—dasein with its nose to the ground: “Nothingness wants / to conceal itself / in what is dead. / In this it is / quite real.” That fourth line-break is sly, and indicative both of Ernst’s method and the translators’ transparent care. As memento mori, these poems are chastening, but never downbeat. Time may get the better of us, but language, like care itself, is still a refuge of sorts: “I look at a window, / a square of sky. // You, dear, are still / my dwelling.”

In recent years, Wave has a made a point of publishing unadorned books which focus attention on the words alone. These two collections, each rippling with implication, exemplify the merits of that spare design. Indeed, for these incisive poems and their mirroring source languages, the physical book (another kind of being in time) deepens their affective range.

Is there a more fearful book than the anthology—that doorstop destined never to be read in its entirety, only leafed through, sampled intermittently? Well, The Open Door (University of Chicago Press, edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman) may change all that forever. In short, The Open Door is thrilling, an engaging read from cover to cover—simply as a book of poems, and also as an illuminating tour of the last 100 years of poetry in English. Culling from the century-deep annals of Poetry magazine, the editors have given us, with an ear not for complacent monumentality, but alive to the grace notes of serendipity and eclectic inclusion, a collection of poems that call to each other, in cunning and uncanny ways, across the decades.

From the opening pages, in which Pound’s famous indictum, In a Station of the Metro (printed in its original form, with spacing) gives way immediately to Kay Ryan’s “Sharks’ Teeth” (“Everything contains some / silence.”), our attention is drawn to the ways in which key elements of poetry (the image, in this case) play out in different styles. Likewise, the hard-nosed colloquial irony of August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” looks back on the erudite arch-irony of Eliot’s emergent Prufrock. And so on. Commentary drawn from letters and essays, interspersed throughout, accentuates the feeling of being in a high-stakes conversation as ideas about art and audience ricochet around the mead hall. Imagine Ange Mlinko on a panel with Ezra Pound, etc. The colloquy ends, poetically, with Yeats’s meditation on connecting art to audience and place (“The Fisherman”) and editorially with Monroe’s own notes on audience in a democratic age. All told, this is a book that emphasizes the pleasures of reading while providing an expansive view of poetry’s readership, even as it reminds us how, in an age of proliferating text, a good editor can make all the difference.

—Kevin Craft

2012 Staff Picks: Alexis Vergalla reviews Louise Glück’s collected works

April 18, 2013

Poems 1962-2012
Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
By Alexis Vergalla, Poetry Northwest
I want to start with a disclaimer: I like Louise Glück’s poetry.  I cannot work in a garden beside someone and not think of her …

“A Whole Interwoven Host of Things”: A conversation with artist Gala Bent

April 13, 2013
“A Whole Interwoven Host of Things”: A conversation with artist Gala Bent

Poetry Northwest staff writer Nari Kirk interviewed Ms. Bent via email during February and March 2013.
NK: I’ve read other conversations of yours in which you’ve expressed admiration for the Northwest’s forests, the plant life that’s constantly …

2012 Staff Picks: Justin Boening reviews Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible

March 25, 2013 One Comment
2012 Staff Picks: Justin Boening reviews Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible

Almost Invisible
Mark Strand
Knopf, 2012
By Justin Boening, Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest
2012 was a remarkable year for poetry. From Eduardo C. Corral’s outstanding debut, Slow Lightning, to Jorie Graham’s finest effort in years, Place, there was …

2012 Staff Picks: Carrie A. Purcell reviews Dean Young’s Bender

March 20, 2013

Bender: New and Selected Poems
Dean Young
Copper Canyon Press, 2012
By Carrie A. Purcell, Poetry Northwest Volunteer Coordinator
Dean Young’s most recent collection Bender (Copper Canyon 2012) is aptly titled. In this somewhat lengthy collection (it does cover his …

2012 Staff Picks: Brandon Krieg Suggests Brooklyn Copeland’s Newest Collection of Poems

February 27, 2013
2012 Staff Picks: Brandon Krieg Suggests Brooklyn Copeland’s Newest Collection of Poems

Siphon, Harbor by Brooklyn Copeland
Reviewed by PoNW Associate Editor Brandon Krieg
 
Few young poets have their eye trained so intently and convincingly on the human relationship to the other-than-human as Brooklyn Copeland in Siphon, Harbor (Shearsman, …

Afterwords: David Wagoner at Seattle Arts & Lectures

February 10, 2013
Afterwords: David Wagoner at Seattle Arts & Lectures

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 …

Better than a tweet #helloyellow

January 31, 2013
Better than a tweet #helloyellow

From the poet Carolina Ebeid:
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here in my yellow bird of good tidings.
Frustrated with my writing. Spent the day working for only a few phrases on paper. They would throw me out of the hive, if …

Last Year in Quotes! (We’re Glad We Took Notes.)

January 29, 2013
Last Year in Quotes! (We’re Glad We Took Notes.)

January 5
Jason Witmarsh, Writers on Writing Lecture Series
“Occupy that critical part of your brain–the thing that says, ‘this is useless’–and give that part of your brain a crossword puzzle, while the other part writes.” (J.W. on: …

Poetry Northwest Suggests: First of Winter Outings

November 4, 2012
Poetry Northwest Suggests: First of Winter Outings

 
Pencil these bad boys in!
November
11/13: Hugo House, Tuesday from 8-10 pm. Poetry Northwest suggests the Castalia Reading Series: This month the student readers will be Patrick Milian, Sarah Galvin, Darren Davis, and Katie Hoffman. The alumna reader …

Fall & Winter 2012-13 Issue Now Available

October 18, 2012
Fall & Winter 2012-13 Issue Now Available

Our Fall – Winter 2012-13 Issue is now available. Featuring cover art by Seattle artist Gala Bent, word sculptures by California artist Cheryl Sorg, and a raft of new poems by Rebecca Hoogs, Troy Jollimore, …