–

Custody Of The Eyes
(Hopkins)

To look at the world
with devotion,
giving all of himself
to what was given,
sometimes gave him
so much pleasure
he thought it must be
a sin, distracting him
from his devotion
to God. Therefore
the eyes for a while
had to be taken
into custody
like a pair of criminals,
kept in the flesh-and-
bone cell of the head,
their gaze cast down
in penitence,
the eyes themselves
watched over
to prevent them from
looking at anything
more than was needed
to get through the day.
For weeks or months
at a time, and once
for half a year,
he denied himself
the beauty he knew
more acutely than others,
as if reducing each thing—
flower, stone, bird—
to a single word,
stripping it of the
singularity
he loved to describe
in rushing phrases
that spilled down
his journal’s pages.
But when the penance
ended, his eyes
flew out
into the open sky
and over the fields,
innocently coming
to rest on each self-
expressing element
of creation
with such delight
and gratitude
he couldn’t keep
the words from
pouring out of him.

–

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poems—most recently Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books), which was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize in 2008—as well as of The Names of Things (2006), a selection published by the Waywiser Press in the U.K. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, he has recent work in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, AGNI online, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. For more information, visit here.

• Please join us for our annual Fall Fundraiser & Hootenanny at the historic Columbia City Theatre in south Seattle.

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Join us as we celebrate the sister arts of music and poetry on November 13th. Poetry never sounded so good!

–

History of the House Where You Were Born

First it was the house where you were born—
born tragically, with an Appearance—and so
many people crowded to see that the house
mistook them for hungry, and you balanced
your reflection on the blade of a knife
and said, “I have slices to sell them,”
+++++and the house where you were born
+++++++++++++++became a butcher-slash-
window store,
++++++++++where squares of glass were carved
one by one off the clear animal itself. Your father
the butcher took huge joy in riding out on the plains,
out into railroad country, ignoring all warm blood
in his path, and staring instead at sparse escaped
herds of black Observation Cars, who grazed on
what grass there was. He shot them and carried
them home on his shoulder, and you grew up loving
strong wild strips of them. Their numbers dwindled,
the survivors grew smaller, and he was forced to sell
their skins for spectacles instead. Then nothing was
left but the gold and black bones, and he hung them
and called it a frame store. You never saw clearly before,
surrounded by flashing glass, so lift your head and look
+++++around: your landscape is taken over by Frame Store,
++++++++++++++++++++Frame Store as far as the eye can see.

The frames hang straight and still know nothing.
They believe they are still the body of their animal,
strung and stood up with wire, filled with fat
organs of baby looks. The walls of the frame store
are worse: they were given good coats of white;
they felt paint stroked on and knew what they were:
“I feel hundreds of buffalo nudes being driven off
a cliff,” proclaims the whitest one. Another, even
whiter, feels paint that paint puts on: rouged cheeks
in a row, silver frost
+++++++++++++++on fruit, and rainbows on raw meat.
One feels, still on the palette, blood next to clear blue sky.

+++++++++++++++And all feel glass panes everywhere.
+++++++++++++++And you are the butcher now; you wipe
+++++++++++++++blood on your blue apron. Then the walls
+++++++++++++++that surround you know they are white,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++are sure they feel a picture
+++++++++++++++of the knife-sharpener finally going too far.

–

Patricia Lockwood‘s poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, and other magazines. Visit her at emperoroficecreamcakes.blogspot.com.

I find I’m liking local poems as long as they are not shackled to an incident. And I like experiential poems when the experience happens within the reading/writing of the poem, not when the experience is something the poem points to from a distance. And I like thinking of the poem as an excursion, like a train ride, getting on at the first word and off at the last. Steilacoom and South does report an experience on a Seattle to Portland Amtrak ride but hopefully the ride on the poem is three dimensional, four counting time, in and of itself.

–

Steilacoom and South

We were gods on holiday
who’d stumbled on
a local god at work. Until then
no one had been loud.
Look at that!
the boy said and we
who swam along with him
inside the Amtrak Coach did look.
A man stood in a boat as
ingenious as a button
in a button hole.
The sun threw echoes
all across the water.
Pole bent hairpin in one hand
with a net in his other he
ladled up a King from
the dazzle. Though he couldn’t hear
we sang a brief applause to him
that trailed off just how
a salmon sounds
in the bottom of an aluminum boat.
And next we passed of note
a field of stumps and tractor ruts
sign on the fence there reading
More Estates Are Coming.
Then came Portland’s string of condos
like stacks of glassy tackle boxes
and the speaker’s admonition
Don’t forget your luggage
when you leave.

–

J. W. Marshall‘s poetry has appeared in several magazines, most recently Raven Chronicles,
Seattle Review, Talisman, and Field. His first full-length collection, Meaning A Cloud, won the
2007 FIELD Poetry Prize and was published in 2008 by Oberlin College Press. He, along with
his wife, Christine Deavel, owns and operates Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle.

–

One day Carolyn called me up and said “Let’s go over to Duke.  There’s an eminent scholar who is going to lecture on Mayakovsky and another poet you may know.”  The eminent scholar turned out to be Harvard professor Roman Yakobson, the world-famous linguist and one of the last survivors to the Soviet Union’s “New Lef” period, which roughly coincided with the flapper era here and ended with the accession of Joseph Stalin, as it did here with the coming of the Great Depression. So we piled into the Camaro and off to Durham we went.

The hall was long, narrow, high-ceilinged and ornate, with floor-length curtains.  The whole effect was chapel-like, except for the chairs, which were in a kind of faux-Empire style, with pastel cushions and oval backs, the kind of furnishing my bottom was to become familiar with in following years when I attended AWP and MLA conventions and sat through countless readings, symposia, appreciations, lectures, and plenary sessions.  The aisle was right down the middle, and the room was full except for the first row.  It looked like the entire professoriat of the university–a complete set of “budge doctors of the Stoic fur,” in Milton’s wild phrase, but Carolyn began to make her way regally down the aisle, paying no mind to the glowering, mostly bearded audience, with me as unlikely escort to claim, as by right, the first-row seat.  If the room had been an orchestra pit, she would have picked the concert master’s chair.  We sat, two by-no-means small individuals, on the front row, and professor Yakobson was duly introduced.

The subject was Vladimir Khlebnikov’s “Sound Poetry,” an experimental super-onomatopoeic genre that sought to liberate words from their signifiers.  Yakobson had been an intimate of Mayakovsky and Yesenin—and presumably of the ancient Lily Brik, Mayakovsky’s lover, who lived on the upper east side of New York.  So to me he was history itself, and as a new Russian and English double-major, I looked forward eagerly to his report from lost time.  Professor Yakobson emerged, a tiny man in a brown suit with a shock of silken hair that stood straight up. He said some words by way of introduction to Khlebnikov’s project, and then began to recite the poet’s “cricket poem,” consisting of a series of vowel-less ticks and pops.  No sooner was he underway with an impassioned rendition to the deferential, if perplexed, audience, than Carolyn pulled out a compact and brush and proceeded to groom and adjust her coiffure with lengthy strokes, followed by her pulling the remaining hairs from the bristles and dropping them on the Duke University carpet.  Then she would consult the compact mirror, tilting her head and offering the glass first her face full-on, then in partial profile.  The good professor darted annoyed looks at Carolyn, but she was not seeing them and he continued dutifully with his recitation.  When she was satisfied with her own result, she thrust the compact and brush into her clutch and looked up, as if to see what manner of man was making these extraordinary noises in the name of poetry.  Famous already for taking the measure in a glance, she sat for the rest of the lecture with a look of bemused tolerance on her face.  As for me, I sat beside her with a combination of astonishment, pride, and outrage at my teacher’s behavior.  I was embarrassed too, but the chutzpah itself diminished the negatives.  When I mentioned this anecdote to my 20-year-old (Carolyn’s granddaughter) recently, she replied, “Perfect!”

–

David Rigsbee is the recipient of the 2009 Black River Poetry Prize from Black Lawrence Press for The Pilot House (2011) and is winner of a 2011 Pushcart Prize for work published in The Red Tower:  New and Selected Poems (NewSouth Books 2010).  His new collection, School of the Americas, will be published next spring by Black Lawrence Press.  He has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets.

In the second movement of her sophomore collection, Iteration Nets, Karla Kelsey details the process of echo and alteration by which she remixes lines from authors including John Clare, Graham Greene, and Lyn Hejinian:

what was said? Parison? Comparison uttered after a silence dampening off the corn? Pair a son. Pear in sun. Pare the sun so that the roses glow forth. Bad this son. Pad a song. Sad too long in higher red asking to thank, to atone, to bask the centuries away.

This associative stammer pops delightfully, like letters in a Boggle board, as it hotwires a misheard phrase. But Kelsey’s sonic playfulness is hardly free play. She anchors meaning as each iteration shoots forth, not refreshing the slate but adding to it: the pared sun circles back to bask us; the roses’ red returns after sadness. Because language lives in time, Kelsey’s playfulness thanks and atones for each move it makes, whatever freewheeling half-prattle forged it. Although our speech may be fragmented, such “speaking / flames // splinter // over darkness.”

Iteration Nets is conceptually complex. The second movement flushes the book’s initial sonnets into meditative prose; the third chips the prose’s grand domes into evocative shards, recalling the poems of Gustaf Sobin and Ronald Johnson’s erasure of Paradise Lost. In mining these constraints, Kelsey continually arrives at poetry that is not only conceptual but gorgeously consequential. Even readers skeptical of anything influenced by Stein will find stunning lines and riveting music in the book’s most abstract passages. These lines can be both hotly effusive (“I loved him like the little bird shot through with here we have pastured. I loved him like the little bird on this western plane folding into mountains where wild horses tie land and a cry perforates thin air”) and classically honed (“the snow / blooming // redbud”). Such moments advance the collection’s sensuous inquiry into perception and transformation.

The book’s re-iterating method is inspired by Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic versions of Catullus, which feel most poignant for their hairpin avoidance of nonsense. Similarly, Kelsey’s poems thrill because their free-falls land in unexpected nets, the “branch that snaps promising a diffusion of light” becoming “metaphor, birds arcing triangular through sky, light thickened then fled in a slant shower.” Because she takes the falling seriously, the nets that accommodate it are equally harrowing.

Particularly in the sonnets’ “bare sad hymns” of “brittle down,” the aural richness puts a fresh catch in one’s step. As in the sonnets of Berrigan and Donne, this tripping pitches the reader forward into “Day new rose,” which “Spans full. Blissed hull.” When the second movement’s “long beautiful sentences” enter to “hum in my brain,” the conceptual effect is as bodily as moving through the rooms of a Roman bath, “flying through tall buildings” where “the day went and I gleamed open.” Iteration Nets is a virtuosic collection, steeped with “life / pulsed through / sun” and lush faith in “the view / tethered to / the mind.”

—

Heavenly Questions
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
FSG, 2010.

The formal virtuosity in Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s most recent collection, is devastating. Through six linked meditations in insistently regular blank verse (in the first poem, the eleventh syllable winking at the end of “Whose heaven rotates taking its own measure” feels jarring), Schnackenberg examines the “mortal body, spectral to the core” of her dying husband. The grief that follows “the fifth surgery / Of five” shows this elegant and capaciously intelligent poet—in the same phrase, Schnackenberg can treat mathematical and theological infinity—moved to simple plea: “No questions anymore. Just say he’ll live.”

Among Schnackenberg’s singular range (“Intangible, the fabric tourniquets / The seraphs tie and tie with anxious hands— / But when they turn, to see it for themselves, / Atoms unbind, down to their nuclei”), this plainness is heartbreaking. Yet Heavenly Questions is not a portrait of a poet reduced. Instead, the depth of its lament elevates art’s “self-organizing equilibrium,” as though by making “myriads appear, self-multiply, / And multiply again” verse can play Scheherezade, letting dying happen “in slow motion, slower still, / And slower still.” Like a lullaby that savors the wakefulness it dispels, Heavenly Questions rests near the cusp of death, at the “still-unbroken substratum of wonder,” honoring how the dying lived “open-handed, unafraid.”

To make more time exist, Schnackenberg finds forms that change the clock, relishing paradox, riddle (“What can’t be stood outside of, looking on? / What is the all in all in all in All?“), and conversational sancta (“He thanked me even then”). She lingers on surfaces, depicting an imagined banner with “a woodcut surgeon opening a book / Of workshop woodcuts, skilled, anonymous” and a frontispiece that shows “Renaissance physicians, crowding near.” And she details the marvels and myths at the roots of science, as though she can find alternate medicine in “forgotten thought-machines, / And wonder-works, dismantled on the sand: // A ship, reduced to ashes by a mirror; / A planetarium of hammered bronze.”

Following Schnackenberg’s bluntest presentation of her husband’s death (“I swayed, dead on my feet, among the living, / Then stood away. Still his wife. / But couldn’t draw one breath on his behalf. / Nor add a single heartbeat to his life.”), the final poem adapts a bedtime story about the origins of chess from the Mahabharata. Through the tale, through chess’ absorptive spell, Schnackenberg charms more time from an evening’s hour, although “all that could be done had now been done.”

Earlier in the collection, Schnackenberg describes Archimedes subdividing earth so it can “materialize, and dematerialize” into numberless grains, as well as a legend that Hagia Sophia “lay under a spell such that no one / could count” all of its doors (“Another door was always added: one”). Heavenly Questions’ final poem adds one night, one more speech after the “apparition of the body scan.” When the poem fails to stop time, as even verse so supersaturated with curiosity and care must, there is not lament but silence. It breaks off, as “here the god of writers broke his pen.”

—

Zach Savich is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Firestorm (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and a book of ardent prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand (Rescue+Press, 2011). He serves as Book Review Editor with the Kenyon Review. His writing has recently appeared in journals including Gulf Coast, A Public Space, and Oh No.

Editor Kevin Craft interviews the prolific poet and visual artist from the far northwest.

Derick Burleson is the recipient of the 2010 Richard Hugo Prize for poems published in the Fall & Winter 2010-2011 issue (v5.n2) of Poetry Northwest.  The Hugo Prize is awarded to recognize the best work published in Poetry Northwest each year. There is no application process; only poems published in the magazine are eligible for consideration.  To read the work of last year’s recipient, visit here.  For a list of past winners, visit here. Read “Certain Frequencies,” one of the winning poems, following the interview.

—

KC: How long have you lived in Alaska? How’s the writing life, far north style? In other words, in what ways does Alaska get into your poems?

DB: I’m just finishing my 10^th winter in and around Fairbanks, Alaska, and I’m eager for spring to make its way north. Right now, though, I’m in Nome, teaching a weekend writing course at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Northwest branch campus, sitting with nine other writers as we all work on projects, writing from our life experiences. The course is titled Writing Ourselves, and we’re a diverse group, in terms of age and in cultural background and the stories we’ve heard and shared this weekend range from going down to the swimming hole in the deep South, to how grandma used to prepare minced polar bear and serve it with walrus flipper. As we write, we can look out the window at the still-frozen Norton Sound and gaze into the distance where sky meets sea ice. All this to say that during the past decade Alaska has become a part of me molecule by molecule, literally, with every Copper River red salmon and moose roast and wild blueberry I’ve eaten. On the dinner menu tonight, musk ox steak and king crab. My third book, Melt, forthcoming this fall from Marick Press, is a book-length poem, a meditation on global warming. Things are changing fast here in the far North, and I’ve seen the dramatic effects of climate change in just the decade I’ve lived here. The book is part ode to the incredible beauty of this place, and part elegy for what is currently being transformed. I can’t imagine myself ever living anywhere else, and the poems I’m currently working on reflect the power of that feeling.

DB: I began painting and writing poetry in my sophomore year of high school, and pursued each with equal passion. When I got to the university, I began to take drawing courses. My first semester was wonderful, but in the second, I ran into a teacher who convinced me that I had zero talent and should give it up. And I did, to my long-term regret, and focused my energies on the poetry. But three years back, when my now eight-year-old daughter and I were spending hours and hours with crayons and magic markers, I decided to get us some paints and canvases for a more permanent medium, and we’ve both been going great guns ever since, to my eternal delight. In the same way that I can lose myself during an intense writing session, the process of painting turns time to no time for me and hours can pass while I’m at the easel without my noticing. Now I go back and forth between poem and paint, and both continue to produce delightful sleepless nights since I’m a nocturnal beast. I’m glad I came back to painting after too many years of not, and I think it’s driving my poetry into places it hasn’t visited before.

DB: In my backpack right now are Sky Burial by Dana Levin, Lighthead by Terrance Hayes, Archicembalo by G.C. Waldrep, and The Burning House, a new novel by Paul Lisiciky, so these are the books I’m reading, and rereading now. But in the packet for the class I’m teaching are some writers I return to over and over for my own work and pleasure, and for sharing with my students: Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine, Richard Hugo, Sylvia Plath, Czeslaw Milosz, Ruth Stone, Mark Doty and Frank O’Hara. I also have sections of books by Ernestine Hayes, a Native Alaskan memoirist, Harriet Jacobs, Malcom X, and an essay by E.B. White. That’s just a partial list of the work of my elders that keeps me alive as a writer. I came to poetry when I read John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in my sophomore year in high school, and reading constantly is how I’ve kept writing poems ever since. I don’t imagine that process will stop any time in the near future.

—

Certain Frequencies

My hands reached out and plucked
the blueberries from their tiny bushes
on the tundra we were on the tundra
picking blueberries my daughter and
me we picked and we picked while
the sun cut a sharper angle across south
now it was August. My hands reached
out my fingers twirled each blueberry
from its stem my hands filled and emptied
into my bucket and so did hers child
filling her own bucket now. The sun
broke through scattered shower raindrops
sliver and slow against storm cloud sun
shower and the tundra pulled me in
pulled me closer now beyond the berries
beaming now in shortwave frequencies
violet indigo cerulean azure the cloud
the whole tundra beamed back and pulled
me into it moss and lichen miniature
alder willow birch beaming back fall
in every frequency my eyes could see
and some they couldn’t crimson arterial
cream chameleon chartreuse sunshower
blueberries filling our hands our buckets
our tongues our mouths pulled me into
tundra smaller and smaller. I stood up to see
and the horizon whirled until the mountain
fixed it the glacier fixed it and I knew which
direction was which. My hands reached out
and lifted my daughter across the swampy
crossing lifted her across onto the tundra
our hands reached out our fingers we filled
our buckets we knelt on the tundra our hands
reached out filling and slept there that night
the wind blew the moon rose we slept full
and when she woke she told me she dreamed
of her mare there on the tundra with her.

—

Derick Burleson’s latest book of poems, Melt, is forthcoming from Marick Press this fall. His first two collections of poems: are Never Night (Marick Press, 2007), and Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Poetry, among other journals. He directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers.

—

I was in my mid-20s, living in Portland, Oregon, and newly enrolled in my first poetry writing workshop at Portland State University. My teacher, the wonderfully avuncular Primus St. John, gently broke the news, with each poem I brought to class, that I wasn’t quite yet Sappho.

I wasn’t titling my poems, claiming I was following in the footsteps of Emily Dickinson, but when Primus shook his head and laughed at this defense, I took his advice. In retrospect, it makes sense that I would be taking my cues from Dickinson. Having just spent four years at a prestigious liberal art college in the Midwest, I received my BA in English without being asked to read or analyze a single poem by a contemporary female poet. Indeed, most of what I’d read in a half dozen English courses had been written by men, mostly white men at that. But titles or no titles, if I knew one thing by the end of the term, it was that I would be writing bad poems for a long, long time.

For the next two terms I studied poetry with Theodore Roethke/Elizabeth Bishop protégée Henry Carlile. As I later learned when I went to seek my fortune in the MFA program at the University of Washington, Henry taught poetry much in the Roethke and David Wagoner tradition, asking no less from us than to read every book of poetry ever written in English. His syllabus included a long, long list of poetry books, many of which the Multnomah County Library held for me on their dusty, inviting shelves.

It was at this juncture that I began reading the poems of Carolyn Kizer. She had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Yin, one of my favorites because it deals directly with issues of feminism and creativity. I didn’t know enough about  poetics to comprehend her brilliant facility for composing in fixed forms (pantoums, Juvenalian hexameters, etc.). Instead, I was immediately attracted to her work for its subject matter—female friendship, parenting, war, nature vs. humankind, motherhood, anti-segregation sit-ins, Vietnam, and physics, to name a few—proudly adding to my poetry shelves every book she’d written up until that time.

In the summer of 1987, I was lucky enough to land a spot in one of William Stafford’s famed workshop classes, and one evening Kizer showed up for cocktail hour. I had not yet published a single poem, so there was no chance of buying her a drink, but I do recall the buzz and excitement as it was called to Stafford’s attention that Kizer would be showing up. When she walked into the room, it was obvious her poetry peers adored her. I remember wishing I could approach her, but I was not only a novice poet, I was a shy one, too. But I do remember her gravelly, booming voice, and I couldn’t help but nod in agreement that she did resemble, in strength and tenacity and fearlessness, a condor.

It wasn’t until much later that I bothered to learn that back in the 1950s, Kizer married, had three children in three years, and, upon divorcing her husband in 1954, simultaneously became a single mom and a fledgling poet. In her Paris Review interview with Barbara Thompson Davis in the spring of 2000, Kizer recalls how, sitting in a class with James Wright, Jack Gilbert, David Wagoner, and Richard Hugo (“a nest of singing chauvinists”), she didn’t take herself seriously as a poet, “but then again, most women poets of my generation did not take themselves seriously—I was almost middle-aged before the idea penetrated.” She goes on to say that it was Roethke who got her to take poetry, and in turn her own attempts, as seriously as the male poets who surrounded her. When she showed her poem “Pro Femina” to this male posse, they reacted negatively, so negatively, in fact, that Kizer all but threw the poem in the trash. Eventually, Ralph Humphries and Robert Fitzgerald salvaged it from the rubbish bin, praising its meter while keeping mum on its subject matter, a stinging commentary on the history of female oppression and submission to the patriarchy. But hexameter be damned; it’s the subject matter that got this poet fired up and inspired:

Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient
Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released
Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,
Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s
Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,
Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine
Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,
In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.
Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!
Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.
The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness.

So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:
Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else.
You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?

What pomegranate raised you from the dead,
Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?

Kizer, through poems like this one, and whether I was conscious of it at the time or not, played a huge role in encouraging me, and others like me, to be brave, to write with wit, passion, and irreverence about not only once-forbidden subjects such as foot-binding, labor pains, control-top panties, mashed Gerber peas, and the inherent problems with the word “vagina,” but about traditionally male subjects as well: rocket science, unbridled consumerism, political unrest, and war. For her imaginative genius, for her agility with assuming personae (her poem “Fanny” is written in the voice of the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson), and for her ability to pursue poetry at a time when her contributions to discussions about craft were less than well-received (“they would act as if I hadn’t spoken, as if I were wallpaper”), I tip my hat and heart to the woman who through her example, inspired and buffeted me, like Chaucer’s Criseyde, to become my own woman wel at ease.

—

Martha Silano‘s most recent book of poems is The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Martha teaches composition and creative writing at Bellevue College.

—

If you’d like to con/tribute – the remembrance of an encounter with Kizer or her work, a close reading of  a poem, a letter to the editor, etc. – please write us at: editors@poetrynw.org, with the subject line “Kizer tribute.”

—

I’ve long been struck by the final gesture in Carolyn Kizer’s poem “Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve,” addressed to one who’s tried to take her own life: “No Way of knowing its strength, or your own, / Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs / In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters / Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signaling, / Self-amazed, its willingness to endure.” We’ve recently lost important poets—great women—to suicide. Their tragedy reminds us the world is hard, indeed, and unfair to so many women in countless ways. And also that an individual life, even one apparently lovely, is simply inscrutable. I’m buoyed at least by the sustaining insights these poets have left in their stunning, tumultuous wakes.

Kizer has long said what she wants in a language that defies convention and expectation. She knows endurance. Admittedly, I’m drawn to poems of hers that speak not directly about gender politics, rather about that age-old mind-body question… but that’s my own leaning: how spirit inhabits the meat-world; what of an ever-after? Bearing children has heightened such questions for me, deepened each vantage; I’m grateful for anyone’s translation of the quotidian into the miraculous. There’s such savageness around the globe, endless hardships of body and mind the human spirit must wake to and withstand— experiences staggering to contemplate, yet made real by those who write some semblance of them into existence for the rest of us. Kizer has always looked unflinchingly at the hard cold facts of the world as it is, even as she pushes it towards that sweet music it might become.

Similarly, I appreciate Kizer’s work in linguistic translation (from the Chinese, Yiddish, Macedonian, Urdu, etc.) and how her engagement in this enterprise prompts her expansive voice to find resonant corridors in the echo of the ghazal, for instance, appropriated for her poem “Shalimar Gardens.” One of poetry’s great pleasures is precisely the power of an individual formal choice to underscore complex intention—how idea and gut sense can inhabit and construct (through provocative syntax) the fascinating rooms (stanzas) of a poem’s architectural (and visual) argument. Listen to the satisfying sonic transitivity of its opening three couplets:

In the garden of earth a square of water;
In the garden of waters a spirit stone.

Here music rises: Barbelo! Barbelo!
Marble pavilions border the water.

Marble petals of lotus bevel
The edge of the pool.

The lilting anapestic/iambic climbing in the first couplet draws me, then gives way to the torque of trochaic/dactylic falling meters at odds with the word “rises” in the next few lines (underscoring that divide between a body’s gravity and ethereal music), and then returns, up-swinging, to offer aural resolution as all aligns along the pool’s edge. I like the concision here, the measured eye, the mind’s cartographer charting (in reined lines) the geometrically stunning space of terraces, basins, pathways; and the simple way Kizer invokes a notion of substance and ornamentation—fretwork and fruit trees, sheen of pale polished stone, plashing of hundreds of fountains—out of which inspiration ascends in song.

More descending in the penultimate couplet seems apt, as do consonant pairings: “Here spirit is married to matter. / We are the holy hunger of matter for form,” before the poet, recalling the traditional maqta, summons herself (with the takhallis): “Kizer, you…” and, in a striking reversal (rather than sculptor carving rough rock to release the spirit within)—claims (dramatically) instead to “Enter into the dark world forever / To die again, into the living stone.” Here is the poet’s own death—albeit (and thankfully!) in a world made only of words—translated into eternal reincarnation through that which is most elemental.

My mind spins within my skull; I’m grateful to Kizer for her provocation, for her willingness to affix the laser beam of her eye to that which is directly before her, as a record of her singular perspective in our shared world, and for the sustained lamentation and communiqué of her song.

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Katrina Roberts has published four books of poems: Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; and How Late Desire Looks. She is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English & the Humanities at Whitman College. Her work appears in places such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets.  She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, founded Tytonidae Cellars and the Walla Walla Distilling Company in southeast Washington State, where they live on a small farm with their three young children.

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If you’d like to con/tribute – the remembrance of an encounter with Kizer or her work, a close reading of  a poem, a letter to the editor, etc. – please write us at: editors@poetrynw.org, with the subject line “Kizer tribute.”