All posts filed under: Archival Features

A fresh look at poems and essays previously published in the print edition.

Adrienne Raphel: “Confession”

I wrote “Confession” in the winter, recently after I had moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, MA. I’d moved from a rambling attic apartment with secret unfinished rooms to a partially furnished attic studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. My writing space was the floor. The convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy contains small, individual cells, like a beehive, that monks would use for devotion. Each cell is bare save for a simple fresco by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico. My room in Cambridge hardly had a monastic aesthetic; books and clothes were piled in geological strata. Every so often, I would find a bee feebly circling around the lampshade, or a couple of dead bees in the windowsill. “Confession” came to me after receiving a phone call very early in the morning from a friend whom I hadn’t spoken with in months. I don’t know why she chose that morning. She was in a difficult relationship, unhappy, isolated, yet surrounded by a city; I was feeling adrift and lonely, uncertain …

Robert Wrigley: Two Poems

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 …

James Tate: “Leaving Mother Waiting for Father”

Leaving Mother Waiting for Father The evening went on; I got very old. She kept telling me it didn’t matter. The real man would come back soon. We waited. We had alarms fixed, vases of white and purple flowers ready to thrust on him should he. We had to sell the place in a hurry; walked downtown holding hands. She had a yard of blue material in her pocket: I remember that so well! She fell asleep and a smile began to blister her old mouth. I propped her against an old hotel and left without any noise. — James Tate (1943-2015) was the author of more than twenty collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer-Prize winning Selected Poems. His Dome of the Hidden Pavilion will be published in August 2015 by Ecco Press. — “Leaving Mother Waiting for Father” was published in the Summer 1968 issue of Poetry Northwest, and appeared in The Oblivion Ha-Ha. — photo credit: Peace Lily BW | (license)

Rich Ives: “The Old Woodcarver”

As I pieced together the verbal knife strokes of “The Old Woodcarver,” I was remembering German imagist poetry and thinking about the Native view of animals as so much more than what we call “totems.” I tried to capture a woodcarver aware of his subjects as not only emerging from the wood, but entering him, playing an intimate part in his life, a process the artist must surrender to more than create. We sometimes refer to lucid dreaming in relation to such ideas, but it’s more like lucid sleeping, the acceptance of the value and importance of where our internal experience takes us when we invite it, as we do falling into sleep, a choice but an acceptance as well of what is both part of us and beyond us. This is a process that continues into waking, when we allow it, overcome by it as we find ourselves entering the dream creatures awakened in the life already around us. The knife is the instrument of separation that also creates. We may use many things …

Broc Rossell: “It becomes necessary to live”

This poem came out of a few different impulses…at the time I wrote it I was reading Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: thinking about the ways in which responsibility and love are inextricable and limitless, and how the only way the external world doesn’t completely overwhelm me is by virtue of the fact that I can ingest it with my eyes. There’s also a strong elegiac streak in here. I lost my best friend when I was twenty, and while that is literally half a lifetime ago today, I don’t think those losses ever leave… I wrote him a number of short poems describing the ways my life was now different than it was, like being able to pay rent (when I last saw him we lived in his car), and one of those short poems made it in here. Visually, the central image of the yellow dress is a portmanteau of a few lines from an album he and I used to listen to. In the end, however, I’m not sure if the poem is more weft …