All posts filed under: Archival Features

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

Stephen Kampa, “Watering the Garden (Till It Bursts into Flame)”

Published by Staff

While some poems originate in incident and others in image, this poem arose from a musical motif that guided me forward (impatiens, portions), backward (patience, potions, passion’s), and then beyond as I explored other musical themes and variations (plots, spots, touch-me-nots; “rung to hear her wring harangues”; “wedded bliss” and “weeds that blaze,” “forages” and “for ages”). Listening to that music, I found myself writing a vignette about one of those homely, undersung virtues, which in addition to patience could include chastity, temperance, or humility. They are such painfully unsexy traits! Yet I believe that steadfast kindness, even in something as simple as sharing a little neighborly gardening, can invite grand passion, one that generates enough heat to be worth the wait. For that kind of passion, perhaps it helps to have a little magic—a secret potion—and all the better if that potion should be patience, finally getting its due (here in the poem if nowhere else) as not merely a sexy potion, but the sexiest. (Stephen Kampa) — Watering the Garden (Till It Bursts …

James Bertolino, “Waves Again”

Published by Staff

The Pacific Ocean has a huge presence in the Northwest—we live in a region where it’s likely everybody has, or would like to, experience ocean waves. And I mean physically, as symbol, and in the way the Pacific figures in stories and myths that have emerged over the generations. I wrote this poem as a way to both examine what I know about waves and to think in new ways about this planetary phenomenon. While I’ve lived within a few hours’ drive of the Atlantic or Pacific for over 30 years, my entire life has been spent close to water: ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers and the sea. Sometimes a wave is a ripple, sometimes a tsunami, but always an aspect of the dynamic life of water. Earth is the planet of water in this star system. (James Bertolino) — Waves Again What has not been said about ocean waves? That they resemble white chicken feathers in the wind? Or cream cheese icing on a carrot cake after you’ve dragged greedy fingers through it? Waves have a sense of …

MATTHEW OLZMANN
Notes Regarding Happiness

Published by Staff

Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that message nineteen times on your Facebook page. What I meant to do was wish you a happy birthday.  Instead, here are thirty random characters followed by fifteen more followed by an exclamation point! These messages must look like a language from the future, classified codes that will take years to decipher. They aren’t.  The only thing those signals say is that I’m bad at computers the way continents are bad at crossing oceans to touch the other continents, or the way planets are bad at breaking their orbits and setting off on their own.  Even light has limitations as, eon after eon, it barrels forward, unstoppable.  Yes, light is bad at changing its mind, so it continues to tumble in the same direction, the way I continue to pummel the same enter key, amazed each time at all the nothing that happens. So technology also can be accused: let no wire go without blame, no microchip be absolved. Remember when that plane left Brazil and was gobbled up …

Jeffrey Harrison: “Custody of the Eyes”

Published by Staff

I’ve loved Hopkins since I was in college, and over the years have often returned to his amazingly energetic poems and vivid journal entries. But it wasn’t until I was preparing to give a talk about him a few years ago that I read a biography (actually, two). I became fascinated by his pivotal years at Oxford, where he came under the influence of his teacher Walter Pater’s Aestheticism just as he was feeling the pull toward Catholicism. After his conversion, he gave up poetry, only returning to it after a seven-year struggle to resolve (partly through his theory of Inscape) the contradiction between his love of earthly beauty and the demands of his religious calling. (Obviously, more was at stake for him than for those of us writing poems today, who might feel at most a vague guilt at perhaps being too attached to the pleasures of description.) Some of this is in the poem, and some behind it, my main focus being the strange (to most of us) notion of one of the …

Tomas Tranströmer: “Haikudikter”

Published by Staff

Congratulations to Tomas Tranströmer, long-awaited and much-deserved winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011. In honor of the occasion, we’d like to make available a recent piece by the Swedish poet, originally published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Poetry Northwest (the “political” issue). —   Haikudikter 1. The power-lines stretch through the kingdom of frost north of all music. * The white sun trains alone, running toward the blue mountain of death. * We must live with the small script of the grass and the laughter from cellars. * The sun is low now. Our enormous shadows. Soon, everything will be overtaken. 2. Orchids. Oil tankers glide past. The moon is full. 3. Medieval stronghold, alien city, cold sphinx, empty arenas. * The leaves whispered: a wild boar at the organ. And the bells rang out. * And the night pours from east to west at the speed of the moon. 4. The presence of God. In the tunnel of birdsong a locked gate opens. * Oak trees and the moon. Light and silent …

Carolyn Kizer: “Jill’s Toes”

Published by Staff

As summer burns to its dry end here in Seattle, we bring to a close our series of tributes to founding editor Carolyn Kizer with a look at a recently discovered poem. Featured in a recent article at the The Seattle Times, read “Jill’s Toes” (also in Poetry Northwest Spring/Summer 2011 v5.n2). Here’s hoping that with our contributors you’ve enjoyed revisiting the work of this essential writer. For a list of links to those contributors’ letters, essays and poems, visit here.

Patricia Lockwood: “History of the House Where You Were Born”

Published by Staff

I was reading some Alice Munro, buzzing out of my mind on P.G. Tips. Alice Munro was describing a woman in an Observation Car looking out at the vast Canadian prairies. “What the heck is an Observation Car,” I said to myself. (I find that as a writer it often helps not to know what anything is or what it looks like, because then you can just imagine whatever you want.) So I pictured a big bovine caboose meandering serenely across the grasses, enormous glass windows for its eyes. “Oh my gosh what would its steaks be like, oh my gosh what would its jerky be like?” I wondered, and pictured the Observation Car shot dead and lying on its side. I’d been thinking a lot about prairie towns and railroad towns and small towns in general, and I’d been thinking a lot too about the concept of specialty stores: model train stores that sell you both the railroad and the small town itself; and frame stores with their hanging disembodied rows of gold and …

J. W. Marshall: “Steilacoom and South”

Published by Staff

Late summer, and even the gods need a little R&R.  J. W. Marshall shares a few thoughts on this poem’s experience: 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 …