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Features from the Poetry Northwest‘s deep archive.

COREY VAN LANDINGHAM Epithalamium

Published by Staff

Because I’ve seen the way a body looks preserved, I turned away from you. That’s the most that I could do. Distance, dear, makes the heart grow weary. The scene where I’m your citizen, but am touching myself inside a stranger’s apartment as, in Yemen, an American drone kills 14 at a wedding, mistakenly. Mistakenly, I chose the hydrangea, whose large pink blush has been said to match the size of a sender’s heart. When not pruned properly, the flowers sag, begin to break. Once, you fed me heart on a skewer. After, I read the animal would be inside me forever, idea that made me sick for days. Now, my autoerotic display, while, in Yemen, vehicles still are smoking. Distance makes easy unmanning the hands. I hasten to compare the scene where I’m such a terror in that dress, where the flowers are all a mess, and I’m gussied up. I’m turned on by men I’ve never met. What a wedding photographer, as anyone poses candid for the drone. But, no, I’m only posing …

Robert Wrigley: Two Poems

Published by Staff

It may be that the only thing these two poems have in common is that they were written by the same poet, and that they were published in Poetry Northwest, one a quarter century or so ago, the other quite recently. “Dust” was written about the time I was, you might say, entering into the possibilities of rhyme (it was accepted, as many were in those days, by David Wagoner, to whom I offer my thanks); “Hanging Laundry On a Windy Day in Assisi,” was written in Italy this past May, and it suggests that those possibilities have stayed with me.  Rilke said, “Rhyme is a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences,” and that strikes me as one of the finest things anyone’s ever said about a poetic technique. Among other things, the first is about getting very dirty; the other is about the joy of clean laundry. But both are very much about the places in which they occur. I am, it has been pointed out, a “poet of place.” That’s not something I …