The scent, blended with fresh lake breezes, took me fifty miles and seventy years downshore, to my Uncle Harry’s cottage, where I spent my best summer days as a young teenager.  I’ve remembered the mysterious, almost intoxicating smell on hot days there that wafted from his big tangled grapevine. It was wet towels, hot leaves, swim suits, and also the fresh lake air gently lifting the leaves from beneath. There was almost certainly something vaguely spiritual, blended with something indistinctly and beautifully sexual, in the memory that has stayed so long.

In his little book of poems, translated from the Swedish, Tommy Oloffson, a true heir of the Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg, is very much au courant with perhaps thousands of poets in the West who ally themselves with the monist thinking and art that comes out of the East. His fine little poem about a clothesline of laundry strung out in the wind is mostly in praise of the wind, air, breath, moving spirit. I thought immediately of Richard Wilbur’s great poem about the same subject, “Love Calls us to the Things of this World.” But Wilbur’s poem is not at all ethereal. His clothesline is “all awash with angels,” but seizes the heft of the physical – laundry for lovers and nuns in dark habits and for the backs of thieves.

The physical stuff – the laundry – that  Oloffson tries to transcend – “the wash is nothing but wash” – is what I now know to catch and hold.  I resist the lure of the immaterial. Memory from youth matures into insight. The second grapevine, and my wife in material detail, and even words themselves incarnate as ink on paper – these embody the holy, and “the wind is nothing but wind.”

Oloffson’s poem, in mid-course, became the catalyst that got me unstuck, uncertain as I was about where to go with my two grapevines. His poem gave mine something alluring and strong to push against. It forced me once more to create, rather than to talk about, an old theme of mine: how the disembodied spirit is made real by inhabiting physical bodies. -Rod Jellema

A Note to the Swedish Mystic Who Wrote that “the Wash is Nothing but Wash”

It’s here again—that late afternoon wind
off the lake. It rises up and offers
incense of lifted hot grape leaves
infusing a laundry-like steam
of wet towels and swimsuits
tossed on the vine to dry. Above, two herons,
buffeted toward inland horizons,

and now she is walking up the two-track road
from the mailbox, slowly, reading a letter.
Once again I know what’s holy is not wind,
it is leaves and wet clothes, words on paper,
waves breaking off their sentences, her hair
blown across her mouth, her own way of walking.
The wind, Tommy Olofsson, is nothing but wind.

___

Rod Jellema‘s Incarnality: The Collected Poems, 1970 – 2010 is forthcoming in the Fall of 2010 (Eerdmans). He is the former director of creative writing at the University of Maryland. His last book, A Slender Grace, won the Towson University Prize in Literature.

History of Televison

We learned lately that everything ever shown on television had been staged, even the news, even the documentaries and Welcome Back Kotter. In reality, the things that had happened had happened in slightly different clothes: Wider lapels, or skinnier ties, or a more reflective sheen on her sequin dress. No camera, we were told, could ever have picked up those sequins.

History of Love

Most poems since 1776 include the lines “it was snowing and it was going to snow,” although only Wallace Stevens in 1917 got it exactly right. Since 1776, I have caused you heartache, I know, except for 1995, when we were in Chicago and happy in a way that was both fragile and fast-paced, like we were outrunning some terrible collapse. Wallace Stevens was dead and all around us, mostly in the nonsense of the car alarms, the snow plow on Lake Shore Drive, the lake itself with its waves frozen into place. Ice means: this is no permeable surface. You will not sink and drown, but neither will you be enclosed.

History of MacGyver

MacGyver, aged 17, escapes a locked car using a toothpick and a can of aerosol. MacGyver, aged 8, plunges twelve stories into a dump truck. He emerges unscathed, carrying a nearly translucent umbrella. MacGyver, aged fourteen months, establishes contact with a friendly behind enemy lines using a pacifier, an English muffin, and a Glock. MacGyver, in utero, counts his possessions: ten soft fingernails, a fine, potentially braidable hair covering everything, any number of already vestigial parts: the muscles of the ear, gills, the tail bone, the tiny appendix.

___

Jason Whitmarsh earned his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Washington. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Yale Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Fence. His book, Tomorrow’s Living Room, won the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.

Videotape: 51

Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center

of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,

an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut

at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the

curtains ormolu:
++I miss you

is what I want to say
like a rocket

remained from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,

wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some

private Soviet
Union you & I—

—

Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). He is coeditor of Verse.  His translation of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck.

“Videotape: 51” appears in Poetry Northwest Spring/Summer 2010 (v5.n1).

We’ll Always Have Carthage

The head must bow to the heart,
which is why I always look down;
if the earth is round and round
I’ll be wrong until the ends of it.

Beautiful, you said, and meant
the sea.  Reminding me –
there are walls to be built,
rocks carried.

Now I can’t meet you
or your eyes – just the boats
below in the harbor,
burning.

The wind shakes the earth
from its four corners;
the flames are picking up,
or is that me shaking?

Look, I’m right – the sun is underwater.
Now get out of here with that lion’s skin
on your back.

—
SIERRA NELSON is a co-founder of literary performance groups The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society. Her work can be found in Forklift, Ohio; Thermos; Diagram; Fairy Tale Review; and other locations. She currently guest writes for Kenyon Review’s blog, and her chapbook with artist Loren Erdrich is forthcoming.

“We’ll Always Have Carthage” appears in Poetry Northwest Spring/Summer 2010 (v5.n1).

Greacen notes that “walnut trees are the only specimen in the book to rate two poems, probably because my childhood house, the one in ‘Juglans Regia,’ was surrounded by an old orchard. The concept of problematic abundance is something of a recurring theme for me – in this case, not only the literal bombardment with nuts we could never eat but the sense of being inundated by pattern, by repetition, and by memory – a faculty walnuts happen, felicitously, to enhance.

Walnuts are cultivated by grafting English walnut branches (commercially valuable nut) onto disease-resistant black walnut rootstock. Ultimately, the black walnut rejects the graft – but it can take 75 years to do it. I find this amazing, and it has challenged how I think about identity – is the grafted tree an English walnut or a black walnut? Hence, ‘Juglans Nigra’ takes the loose form of one sonnet grafted onto another.

Two poems, two trees. Or, two aspects of one tree. Even with plants, which I suppose don’t have a psyche until we anthropomorphize one into them – it gets complicated fast.”

A Modern Herbal: Juglans Regia

Abundance was a plague upon that house.
Thirteen trees, their lower limbs ghost-gray
And knothole-pocked, shaded the yard by day
And nightly, when the wind came up, would douse

The place in storms of walnuts. They’d take root;
Ruin the turf, when yanked out, leaving scores
Of little shut-fist shapes, permanent scars
On the garden. They attracted squirrels. They’d rot.

What nut had planted them? One tree produced
More produce than a family could eat.
And worse, it was their habit to secrete
A toxic ooze that doggedly reduced

To mush whatever flowers were installed
Around them. All through fall it was our job
To save the lawn from walnuts, and to fob
Them off on neighbors. Every week we hauled

Bushels of them onto the concrete floor
Of the garage. Deft hands were called for. Zeal
Or hesitance could punish fingers, deal
A death-blow to the nut, or both. Before

A final hammer tap or turn of vise
Defaced the shell, you’d see things: perfectly
Miniature skulls, their physiognomy
Suddenly clearer in their sacrifice,

Disturbing, owl-eyed faces. A design
So often replicated that I thought
It must mean something (what, though?). I had not
Read them, but there are herb-lores that assign

Palliative meaning to a plant that bears
Resemblance to a human body part.
Paracelsus had believed the heart
Was cured by heart-shaped leaves. Perhaps the pairs

Of strangely cortical walnut hemispheres
Were meant to remind us of the mind, the grave
Wizening a warning: walnuts stave
Off Alzheimer’s, and stroke, so it appears

The old Doctrine of Signatures might yet
Be onto something. But I really did
Hate those nuts, the more so if I thought they hid
Some dire message. And lest we forget

Or tire of trying to parse it, they tattooed
Our hands with stains and webs of hairline cuts
Until our fingers seemed as seamed as nuts
Themselves. As though it were contagious. Blacked

With tannin and contorted into claws
From hammering, my hands in firelight
Appeared transfigured, monstrous, when at night
We lit the spent shells. In the crackling pause

Before flame claimed them, they would weave a cloak
Of carbon; even emptied they would not
Burn clean. But now and then the heavy smoke
Enveloped us like incense, and bespoke

A meditative work: in those long dusks
The ring of hammers on the cold cement
Repeated so relentlessly it went
With us to sleep. We dreamed of hammered husks,

Of movement that became transcendently
Repetitive, a rosary of blows
From which a complicated truth arose
Over and over. Sometimes you could see

Whole worlds in nutshells – sometimes just the face
Of the squirrel skeleton we found one year
In the woodpile. It had starved, an ear-to-ear
Grimace permanently held in place

By the walnut that had lodged between its jaws.

A Modern Herbal: Juglans Nigra

You’re in an archetypal family drama
And like so many things it would be droll
If it weren’t the whole of your existence. Trauma
Now seventy years old takes and takes its toll:
You’ve had a long, productive life, of course,
But where were you in all of that? The fruit
You bore was not your own; it was brute force
Alone that had disguised you to the root
In someone else’s leaves. Now you become
You again, limb by limb. No doubt you’ve asked
Yourself what makes us who we are (the sum
Of what is done to us; quintessence masked
By histories of struggle that transform
By scarring? Or does something else inform

Identity – do each of us contain
Some fundamental grain of deeply buried,
Immutable truth?) and seen that both pertain
To you, and to the foreign branches married
To your gnarled trunk. You’d all but been remade,
Become another tree. But now your wild
Side’s showing, and the husbanded charade
You lived is over. Finally reconciled
To be one thing, you’ve cast aside a graft
That represented most of what you’d been,
Regenerating beautifully, a raft
Of fertile new limbs. And, as you begin
Anew, a ring of seeds, dropped by the old
You, sprout. Another lifetime’s stranglehold.

—

Amy Glynn Greacen is a poet, novelist and food writer.  She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at Mount Holyoke college and Lancaster University, England.  Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The New Criterion, Southern Poetry Review, The Potomac Review and The Best American Poetry 2010.  She lives near San Francisco with her family.

Two poems, “A Modern Herbal: Nocotiana Tabacum” and “Inscription” appear in the Spring & Summer 2010 issue (v5.n1) of Poetry Northwest.

The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Richard Hugo Prize are 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.  Mary Jo Salter is the recipient of the 2009 Theodore Roethke Prize.  For a list of the previous year’s recipients, visit here.
_____________________________________________

One Love

+++ Thailand, Laos, Cambodia

Buddha’s birthday
Four figures, stone to gold
One leaning forward,
Compassion, ready
To move, come back
To tell us the house is on fire

+++ * * *

The tuk-tuk driver
Believes
We need new clothing

+++ * * *

Freed the souls of little birds
Who let themselves be caged again
For seed

+++ * * *

Sacred figures draped in yellow
Bas-reliefs crumbling away
Wat overgrown returning to earth

+++ * * *

I am built like him
Great fan-shaped leaves,
Ears veined to cool the blood
We are above the earth, riding it
Our Burmese mahout whispers
Boy, boy
Slaps the insects, smack
On the rough head
Easy with his charge
Rumbling downhill

+++ * * *

Green butterflies like leaves
Like sails along the bank
Sail through the air
Leaves returning to trees

+++ * * *

Polite shy Thais
Bamboo rafts adrift
Greetings, the wai
“We smile, it does not mean
Our hearts are not breaking”

+++ * * *

Rolling through these jungles
News footage in my head
I don’t have to spell it out

+++ * * *

We are all clay
Hands are kneading me
Pummeling, pulling, smoothing
I can’t stand the maleficent thoughts
Evaporating into the scented breath

+++ * * *

Cleansing sweat
Rivers and streams
Coursing in and out
The unceasing
Buddha heart

+++ * * *

Elegant little ville
Low sugar palms shagged
Everywhere
The world reels, new tourist shots
The smell of Deet in the morning

+++ * * *

I feared seeing it as a boy
Then thought I never would
Mekong
The wake of empires
Spreading out

+++ * * *

Lao river fish
Perfumed
Sweet tamarind sauce,
Water cress, oil and lime
Small sliced tomatoes

+++ * * *

Dark stridulations. We watch
Lord Dragon Gecko
Devouring insects
And pray for more

+++ * * *

Up river to see caves
Of images, we make friends
Coming and going, the world
Coursing to see
Ideas of itself

+++ * * *

The waiter has relatives in California.
You should visit them we say.
“Impossible. Young people
Are not permitted to leave”

+++ * * *

New friends from Scotland,
Italy, Kuala Lumpur,
Stories, explosive
Laughter, the way
Of the world
Hilarity of those
Who can come and go

+++ * * *

The promised guide
Does not appear
We gladly pay
Anyway

+++ * * *

Twenty uniformed men
Behind desks
Without a smile
Stamping our passports

+++ * * *

Magnificent ruins,
Forest and culture
In symbiotic rush

+++ * * *

Hair-like gold and beetle wing
Intricate as circuits in a chip

+++* * *

Angkor Wat
Khmer Rouge killed everyone
Who knew what it was
Except the killers

+++* * *

Rama and Sita
Lovers for all time.
He didn’t believe she was faithful.
She was. Same
Same

+++* * *

Oxen and families
On the same plot, viral
Crossover, fertilizer
And gasoline for sale
At the same stand

+++* * *

Duch is on trial today.
Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old
Party pols are trembling
He’s not the only one

+++* * *

Our driver says his English name is Dave.
“Want to see Killing Fields?” “No, Dave,
It’s too sad.” “Very sad. Killed
Three million people, including
My own father. He was
A doctor. I was two months old.
I have two sisters. I am
The baby of the family”

+++* * *

I tell this to the charming man
At the desk. “My father too.
I never saw my father’s face,”
He gestures, “I was in
My mother’s stomach”

+++* * *

I try to tell Nora about it in the van
Between sobs

+++* * *

Decimated
An entire country
Many times over
Some for wearing glasses

+++* * *

So many cries
Paris has done
Paris has undone me
The pitiless elegance of colony
Its tattered banners
And the flags without a single fold
The cudgel
Of Duch and his superiors
How many of them still at large
The diamond drill of sightlessness
Like a poetics not to be vocalized
No breath shaping and turning a syllable

+++* * *

Luck alone or Karma
We were born where we were

+++* * *

Orange juice in Thailand
Lovely green-skinned tangerines
Beauty and beautiful manners
I’ll remember
It wasn’t an apple
In the garden
John McPhee tells us
It was an orange
Zest stinging the eye
I understand

+++* * *

All travelers in the world,
Some coming in, some going
Out of it. Everyone
Is alive right now.
Nora, we are united
Thirty years in this world
One love, one heart

+++* * *

We nearly risk it all
Our last night in Bangkok
Wild ride from the Night Market,
Rainy streets, maniac driving our tuk-tuk
“I am champion driver”
No kidding. We decline
The Ping Pong tour
Whatever the fuck that is
But feel we’re taking it anyway
Wild night wild night
Bouncing from side to side in the little car
Laughing all the way home

+++* * *

The world is dark
With us. Even
Electricity darkens.
Only a few—
Honored in crumbling ruins
Built by darkeners darkened
In their turn—
Only a wild heedlessness
A spare carefulness for those we love
Suffice

—

Kenneth Fields is professor of English at Stanford, where he has taught in the Department and in the Creative Writing Program for more than 40 years. He has published many essays on American literature, many of which will be collected in a volume, On the Loose. He’s published several books of poetry, the most recent being Classic Rough News.

photo by Michael Malyszko

Mary Jo Salter is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for her poems “Unbroken Music” and “From a Balcony, Lake Como,” appearing in the Fall & Winter 2009-2010 (v4.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.  Read “Unbroken Music,” introduced by the author, below.
_____________________________________________

The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Richard Hugo Prize are 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.  Kenneth Fields is the recipient of the 2009 Richard Hugo Prize.  For a list of the previous year’s recipients, visit here.
_____________________________________________

“Unbroken Music” is one of a number of tributes—the others were prose—that I have written to honor my late friend, the marvelous poet Amy Clampitt.  Some people really don’t die, and I have found in the years since Amy’s passing in 1994 that she is not only a continuing presence, but an increasingly vivid presence.   I was born in 1954.   Amy and I met in 1979.  As one of her executors, I have by now read journals of hers that go back to the 1940s; in a sense, then, I have finally met her before I was born.

The events in “Unbroken Music,” a poem written in 2007-8 and then allowed to sit for awhile before I sent it to Poetry Northwest, really happened.  Of course, it never matters whether the events creative writers record were “really” like that.   Nevertheless, it is true that I stumbled on a old journal of Amy’s written in Bellagio, Italy just before I myself went to Bellagio.  It is true that I discovered in my walks there an old gravestone whose highly legible epitaph was the solution to a hardly-legible scribble I had found in her journal. Amy had been moved enough by the drowning in 1890 of a stranger that she had recorded its particulars.  I don’t believe in fate, but the coincidence of my finding both journal and gravestone made me believe I had no choice but to write about Amy yet again.

The first section of the poem, “Lenox, 2007,” has a title that is clearly my own, but all of the other sections are named after published poems of Amy’s.  I don’t want to send the reader on a useless search, so I should point out that a few of the italicized quotations are from her private journals.  I hope some of these will be published one day.  A fuller account of her life will be available this fall, when her Selected Poems will be published by Knopf.  No full biography has yet been written of Amy Clampitt, but the chronology I provide as editor of the Selected may answer some fascinating questions raised by her poems.

+++++-Mary Jo Salter

Unbroken Music

+++++for Karen Chase and Caolan Madden
+++++______________________________________

IN LOVING MEMORY
OF
SIDNEY HERBERT BRUNNER
OF WINNINGTON CHESHIRE
AGED 23
WHO LOST HIS LIFE
IN SAVING HIS ELDER BROTHER
FROM DANGER OF DROWNING
ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF SEPTEMBER 1890
HIS BODY WAS RECOVERED
FROM THE LAKE ON THE TENTH
AND LAID HERE
ON THE FOLLOWING DAY

THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE

++++++++++—Epitaph in a foreigners’ cemetery, Bellagio, Italy
+++++______________________________________

+++++we drop everything to listen as a
+++++hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
+++++hesitant, in the end

+++++unbroken music.

++++++++++—“A Hermit Thrush”
++++++++++++ Amy Clampitt, 1920–1994

1. LENOX, 2007
From an overlooked trunk
in your New England attic,
and bound in a week
for Lake Como, I happen

on your small, marbled notebook
from the same place, begun
the same week of May
sixteen years before.

At seventy-one
you’d have three years more.
Surely you thought
you’d have longer: spring

days to clean out
what you never meant,
or meant no one to read
(even us, the ring

of the last ones, the trusted
who sat at your bed).
But then, as you said,
in time everything

we save will be lost.
And who could read your scrawl—
like a lizard darting
from a stone wall?

2. RAIN AT BELLAGIO
Thunder wakes me:
electrical storm behind
the mountains but no
skeletal hand
of evidence, no rain, just a flash
of a dream and almost afraid
to look at it

I reach for the little book
I brought on the plane.
Open it and truly
read for the first time.
Crumbled like
crackers in bed, pressed
flowers I can’t name

spill from the sheets
of dated poem-notes
5/21/91
moonlight on the wet flagstones
and the picayune
twin columns
of expenses

taxi $3.25
tip 50 cents
apportioned between yourself
and H, your lover
of decades by then.
Comically undomestic,
hopeless really, but ever

the Depression-era
Iowa farm girl so
haunted, so imprinted—
in sophisticated,
well-heeled, celebrated
old age—by the fear
of poverty.

I didn’t fully know;
still now, surely,
have no right to. Guarded
in what you said
even in solitude; peevish
perhaps but decorous,
you’ve left here only

tantalizing scraps
of Jamesian prose:
To that towering pompous stick
of an academic
she has, Dorothy W.-like ,
given up her life.
To wish them gone is so rude

that one resists it, and
becomes the more put off.
Oh, I can just hear you!
Did hear you, only today,
for the first time
in years, on my laptop
cleverly set up

to obliterate distance:
google, double-click, play
audio: dead
distinguished poet
reciting in her proud,
high-pitched, breathy, not
entirely misremembered voice

a poem about the call
of a hermit thrush. Impossible
to achieve back then
the high-tech séance (yours
was the Italy
of the last gettone
jammed in the slot

of the bar’s one phone,
the slow, shrugging Italy
of francobolli
licked for luck onto cards
destined not to arrive
at their destination). Radically
old-school anyway, you

traveled via the QE2
and your manual typewriter.
And your scribble
in journals: what terrible
penmanship, Amy, when
will you learn to correct it?
In loving memory

of Sidney…of Stanley…who?
A graveyard you visited
near here, apparently.
You took the time to
copy the epitaph
whole, and almost
wholly illegibly.

An hour has passed.
Three a.m. The storm’s
now moving in on
the villa you stayed in
and pounding the moonless
flagstones. Static
hissing, a long-playing record.

3. THE HORNED RAMPION
Bookmarked—by violets, I think—
the page of field notes is itself
a plot of withered, once-wild jottings
to make sense of later     rock rose (pink)
candy tuft     erinus alpinus

wood sage?     cistus (shrub)     nightshade
with tiny white clusters     myrtle     daphne
What’s this then?     horned rampion
Oh! it’s her first thought for her last
enraptured botanical poem a spiny,

highly structured, blue-purple star
Phyteuma     Bellflower family:
rare at first sighting, the rampion
would be rampant just days later. This
was the wildflower she’d plant

as if by happenstance at the end
of the poem, where a volume
of Encyclopedia Britannica
(frequent companion, from which whole
paragraphs were duly typed

and inserted into correspondence
she hoped was edifying) falls
open at random—was she lying
to get at something true?—upon
its genus, species, and illustration.

For her, the trouvé had been old love
reopened daring words    still quivering
but who’d believe her notebook fallen
open to the seed of her poem
about another book fallen open?

4. A SILENCE OPENS
Down at the lakeside, pleasure boats like toys
are glinting, tethered to their tinkling buoys

like spinning tops at last come to a stop
but for the slightest bobbing…as I’ve followed

my nose, the scented hedgerows, to end here,
unable to botanize; can hardly tell

one boat from another. Educata
one of them is called: I write that down,

absurdly, and with a heavy skeleton key
issued to the lucky ones like me

let myself out the gated come-and-go
Eden to Pescallo. A fishing village

sloshed at the margins, wind-and-grit-eroded
cobbles boldly throwing back the sun.

Chastening, and happily so, to stumble
like Alice (in your favorite book) upon

such rough, offhand perfection, facing page
of privilege, steep alleys flanked and straitened

by fitted jigsaw walls from which fiori
spontanei sprout sideways from the mosses

that seem to mortar one rock to another
in matrices, in story upon story. At a wrought-

iron gate, I glimpse it now: can see beyond
your phrase truncated entrance to the olive

groves of Pescallo whose mystery made me wish
you’d lived to finish, start, a poem about it.

What life isn’t truncated, a path
that vanishes to a point of no perspective

upon itself again? The silvered heads
nod on the olive trunks; are ancient, wise,

indifferent as I turn to cross another
threshold of surprise just up the road:

the planted slabs of a little cemetery.
Come in. No gate, no lock, and as if these

lines were chiseled just for me: IN LOVING
MEMORY OF SIDNEY HERBERT BRUNNER

OF WINNINGTON CHESHIRE Look! AGED 23
WHO LOST HIS LIFE IN SAVING HIS ELDER BROTHER

FROM DANGER OF DROWNING Yes, this is the one
HIS BODY WAS RECOVERED and was tossed

the wreath WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE.
No wonder you had copied it all out

in spidery haste, the prairie-poet drawn
time and again to drownings—of fishermen

in Maine; of the broken, heavy-lidded, stone-
pocketed Virginia Woolf who blamed

no one; of Keats at 25, whose lungs
filled with a choking liquid, and who called

out famously to erasure Here lies One
Whose Name is writ in Water. And here’s the flip

side of serendipity (my guide
thus far): it’s this, the accidental horror,

young life cut short, the petrifying thing-
not-supposed-to-happen. But what was?

You and I used to say there was no fate,
only “the coincidence factory,” and so what

to make of this?—that our young hero’s corpse
surfaced in 1890 on the date,

the very date, September tenth, when you
would meet your death in Lenox, a hundred four

years later? Nothing. Happenstance. As is
my coming on it, noting it, or opting

to remember him or you; to use my life
to set these words still quivering to paper.

5. MATRIX
After all that, you didn’t quote it. Laid
poor Sidney so deep in your final book
that nobody reading faceless in their nook
outside the walls, the name and birthplace of
the Englishman who drowned there could unearth
a shard of identity. Homage instead
to wordlessness, to the silent, stubborn worth
not only of the forgotten but of forgetting.
I’m packing up. Taking a cue from love
as defined by you, or in a phrase of letting-
go that itself was soon shucked off: such
infinitudes of things that lived—
+++++++++++++++++++++++So much
for them, a memory-virus in our blood
that surfaces to scar us, disappears
awhile, is survivable. Who will trouble
to cobble together what we did or said,
how will they choose? Finally unable
to salvage one word more, I see ahead
only to Lenox, to returning all your green
thoughts to their resting place. Amy, where
could I pick your flowers, take up your snakeskin
of Eden left behind but in the fierce
desire to live my own days, light as air?

—

Mary Jo Salter is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  She is the author of six books of poems, most recently A Phone Call to the Future (Knopf, 2008).

Here at Poetry Northwest, we don’t just want you to read good poems every day. We want you to think like a poet. We want to get you writing.

Poets know the creative impulse is self-perpetuating. Among many possible responses (such as heightened awareness, or the urge to hug strangers in darkened bars), reading poems we like often stimulates to urge to write poems. So, after you’ve had occasion to delve into those poems gathered in our pages for your reading pleasure, we invite you to try your hand at out quarterly contest, The Pitch.

Here’s how it works. Four times a year, once each season, we invite a notable writer to draw up a writing prompt, an invitation au voyage. You, the poet, take up the challenge, and produce a poem according to the specifications outlined by our guest.

To submit your work, simply email it as a Word.doc or pdf attachment to thepitch@poetrynw.org (only these formats can be accepted) and include in the email message your name, address, phone number, and month/year of birth. One entry per person. Please include your legal name in the email address, even if you wish to be represented on our site by a pseudonym. See our complete Rules of Engagement here.

Two finalists will be selected by the editorial staff for a public vote. The finalists will appear on our site at the end of the quarter for which their pitch submission is received: for spring, June 15; for summer, September 15; for fall, December 15; for winter, March 15. Voting will last three weeks. The winner will be published on the site in perpetuity, and will receive a one-year subscription to Poetry Northwest.

Our inaugural contest, Pitch #1, is provided by Rebecca Hoogs. Among her many engagements and achievements as a writer, Rebecca Hoogs is the curator of Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series. She is a locality, and a universe, unto herself. But don’t take our word for it. Check out this interview she did with Richard Hugo House’s Brian McGuigan.

THE PITCH (1)

Find Direction Out

In the age of map apps galore we’re losing the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of personally-delivered directions. No longer am I the 5^th house on the left, the big blue one across from the Dijon-mustard colored one with a tarp for roof. These days, I am where the dot (that’s you) stops moving. No longer do directions include landmarks that both the director and the directee remember, historical references that no longer exist. No longer do directions involve recollections of what happened—or might have happened—there. Remember that Greek place we ate at the night we broke up, the one that was soon after demolished and is now a fancy-schmancy condo? Turn left there.

This month’s pitch, inspired by the return “home” of Poetry Northwest to Washington State, is to write a poem that gives or gets directions to a particular place. And unlike Google maps, we don’t care if that place exists and we certainly can’t tell you how long it might take to get there (though it will be longer in traffic, that’s for sure).

Welcome home, Poetry Northwest.

~~~

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, Grenade. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2004) and Artist Trust of Washington State (2005). She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator and host for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

The Pitch appears quarterly, in spring, summer, fall, and winter, on the Poetry Northwest website.

To enter, fill in the information on the page entitled The Pitch. One entry per person or e-mail address. Entries must be in English. Entries that are lost, late, misdirected, garbled, or incompletely received, for any reason, including by reason of hardware, software, browser, or network failure, malfunction, congestion, or incompatibility at the Web site or elsewhere, will not be eligible. Poetry Northwest, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to disqualify any person tampering with the entry process, the operation of the Web site, or otherwise in violation of the rules. It further reserves the right to cancel, terminate, or modify any Pitch not capable of completion as planned, including infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, force majeure, or technical failures of any sort.

Entrants represent and warrant that their Submission is their original work, it has not been copied from others, and it does not violate the rights of any other person or entry.

All entry materials become the property of Poetry Northwest and will not be acknowledged or returned. The copyright in any submission shall remain the property of the entrant, but entry in The Pitch constitutes the entrant’s irrevocable, perpetual permission and consent, without further compensation or attribution, to use the Submission and the entrant’s name and city and state for editorial, advertising, commercial and publicity purposes by Poetry Northwest, in any and all media now in existence or hereinafter created, throughout the world, for the duration of the copyright in the Submission. Poetry Northwest shall have the right to edit, adapt, and modify the Submission. Each entrant releases and discharges Poetry Northwest, the judges, any party associated with the development or administration of the Pitch, from any and all liability in connection with the Pitch, including without limitation, legal claims, costs, injuries, losses or damages, demand or actions of any kind.

Two finalists will be selected from each Pitch by a member or members of the editorial staff of Poetry Northwest. Each finalist’s Submission will be published on the Pitch page, along with each finalist’s name and city and state, at the end of the quarter/season for which the Pitch is posted. All decisions of the editorial staff are final and binding.

The winner of each contest will be the person whose submission received the greatest number of valid votes from the public and who satisfies all of the rules. One Vote per person or e-mail address. Please click on Vote for Your Favorite for details on how to vote for particular finalists and on the deadlines for voting.

The editorial staff will tabulate the Votes and announce the winner on the Pitch page. All decisions of the editorial staff are final and binding.

The Qualified Winner of each Pitch will receive a permanent publication on the site, plus a year’s subscription to Poetry Northwest. If the winner cannot be contacted or does not respond within three (3) days, an alternate winner may be selected, at the sole discretion of the Judge(s).

Subject to all federal, state, and local laws and regulations. Void where prohibited. The Prize is not transferable.

All entries become the property of Poetry Northwest for the duration of the contest, and will not be acknowledged or returned. Rights revert to each participant upon publication, or expiration of the quarterly contest.

Except where prohibited: (i) acceptance of the Prize constitutes consent to use winner’s name, likeness, and winning entry for editorial, advertising, and publicity purposes, without further compensation; (ii) winner may be required to sign an affidavit of eligibility and copyright transfer/liability/publicity/permission release. If the winner is deemed to be a minor under the jurisdiction of his/her residence, the parent or legal guardian must execute the necessary affidavit and release. Affidavits and releases must be returned within ten (10) days of attempted notification or an alternate winner may b

The Poem is a Letter Opener

and it is the letter that is answered
or not answered, held first by the uncle
who sorted it on his graveyard shift
in the postal service warehouse,
after which it became the postman
going from box to box, each box
a particular face like a dog’s, the dog
that is also a poem, its eyes dark
like the water in a well, its fur smelling
like grass that is also a poem, green
and exclamatory in spring, later
turning the color of rubber-bands,
which are also poems, holding
together the pencils, the tip-money,
the small stone in the sling-shot right
before it takes flight, the stone that
looks like a tiny skull, granite like death,
a piece of the night left in the middle
of the day, which is also a poem,
starting with its whisper campaign
of morning light, the light touching
the clean sidewalk, the light touching
the sign in the window that says
“No Crying Allowed In This Shop,”
the sign itself a poem, like the dusk
that comes like a cowl around us,
to the sick uncle, to the thieving uncle,
to the uncle who sleeps in the day,
his sleep careful as a tea ceremony
or a poem, a poem that is old and full
of days, a poem like an old china
plate that is the color of time, the dusk
having its supper of fog and people
walking through the fog, the fallen
leaves in the parks like strewn credit
cards, which are also poems, like
the typewriter writing the letter
one little tooth at a time, one love at
a time, in our city of paper and crows.

—

Rick Barot has published two books with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and the winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Artist Trust of Washington. He lives in Tacoma, WA.

“A Poem is a Letter Opener” appears exclusively at Poetry Northwest Online. Rick Barot’s “Song” appears in the Spring-Summer (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.