Poetry is alive and well in the Northwest

by Bill Andrus
East Oregonian’s book review editor

LONG JOURNEY: Contemporary Northwest Poets
Edited by David Biespiel
Oregon State University Press
Paperback, 352 pages

Biespiel has done a great job of gathering new, mostly unpublished poems. Some of the poets are native Northwesterners, but most have origins elsewhere and have landed here at various stages of their lives.

The collection features the work of about 80 poets from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska, from all sorts of backgrounds, although, not surprisingly, creative writing professors seem to dominate and most live west of the Cascades.

In his foreword, Biespiel takes issue with the idea of poetry of a place. He says there's no regional voice in poetry, no Northwest School. The writers in this collection are Northwest poets, but their backgrounds are so varied and they write in such a wide range of styles it would be impossible to say they're part of an identifiable school determined by place.

I wasn't so sure he was right, so I set out to see if I could decide if he was (or maybe I was trying to prove him wrong). There's a fascinating section of biographical details at the end of the book that revealed a handful of the 80 poets were from Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington. Could I find a regional difference between their poems and the poems of writers from west of the Cascades?

The answer was yes and no, proving Biespiel's point. For example, there's a strong whiff of our own area in the poems of Katrina Roberts, an English professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, born and raised in the Northeast and an Eastern Washington resident for about a decade. I think if a neighbor of Roberts reads her poems, he or she would recognize their own backyard. But a poem by Jarold Ramsey, who was raised on a ranch near Madras and has returned to live there, submitted a poem that could be set in any 1950s third-grade classroom (although it was probably in Madras).

The Northwest landscape and even the land east of the Cascades figure prominently in many of the poems. A couple of the poems by Richard Kenney of Seattle are a road trip, the musings that might fill your thoughts west-bound on the long stretches of Interstate 90 in Montana and Eastern Washington. In a poem titled "The War," Canadian poet Patrick Lane sets the reader down in a hot summer day in the Okanagan country of British Columbia.

So the landscape of the Northwest is often there, sometimes very subtly, but the poems are about much more - about how we go about living. It's more a sense of our time than a sense of place that defines these poems. Reading poetry makes for tangled thoughts and, in my case, tangled writing. I'm not sure if what I just wrote here makes any sense at all. I should leave that kind of thing to real poetry critics. What I should say is that the poems chosen by Biespiel are fresh and exciting, a pleasure to read. Maybe there is a regional poetry here in the Northwest, defined by its accessibility and clarity.

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(A postscript about a poem in the book by my favorite Northwest author, "Watching the Fractal Set" by Ursula K. LeGuin. It demonstrates the power of a poet to describe even something as indescribable as fractal geometry. To see what she's talking about, Google "Mandelbrot" and click on Video.)

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Bill Andrus is the East Oregonian's book review editor. Contact him at bandrus@my180.net.