All posts filed under: Archival Features

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

Theodore Roethke Prize 2010

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Eric McHenry is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Prize for poems appearing in the Fall & Winter 2010-2011 (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.  Read one of the prize-winning poems,“Deathbed Confession,” below, introduced by the author. The Theodore Roethke 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. The man who called himself Dan Cooper — and who came to be known, through a journalist’s error, as D.B. Cooper — probably didn’t survive his jump from the plane. (There was a time when investigators believed that only an expert parachutist would have attempted such a dangerous jump. Now most believe that only an idiot would have.) But if he did survive, I promise you this: nothing infuriates him more than reading about someone’s recently deceased husband or father who with his last breath confessed to being the …

Martha Silano: “Ours”

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I’m not the first person who’s longed to write a poem where Earth and its inhabitants are presented to a being who has no clue about us, and for years I thought about letting loose my inner Margaret Mead right here on my own home turf. My initial attempts to create anthropologist-like poems failed, perhaps because while they shared cool stuff about our “lil” planet, they didn’t add up to much. These failed attempts taught me that I needed to push beyond mere pond side/ highway median reportage. As I began “Ours,” I fell into conveying a more furtive stance which quickly became a shaping mechanism for the poem—I was amused and intrigued by our business-as-usual systems of greed, waste, and overconsumption . . . and war-making.  But more importantly, I was pissed. As I wrote this poem, I was asking myself questions like: when we do find intelligent life forms on some yet-undiscovered exoplanet, will they be torturing each other? Making art? Will they have creation myths? Pilates Nazis? We’ve become fairly accustomed to …

David McAleavey: “Daylily season”

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There’s both turbulence and calm in this piece, something like kneading bread dough. We’d been to see an emphatic production of King Lear with a gangster-era setting; the next day our clothes retained some whiff of the characters’ onstage smoking. (The full slap of Lear is itself sufficient to make you wake up dazed – more than a whiff of smoke remained!) The previous year my mother had died, aged 95, and a couple of months before I wrote this we’d buried her ashes alongside my father’s in an old family plot in Topeka. Lady Bird Johnson made it her cause to beautify Washington DC, in part by planting banks of daylilies along Rock Creek Parkway, and I often drive by a similar bank along I-66 in Arlington. Our house is built on a slope as well, the bank of a small stream, and from inside you can’t see some of the showy flowers in the yard below. I don’t have a shoe fetish, but sometimes a bold pair of high heels makes a direct …

Carol Light: “January Walk”

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“January Walk” began as a post-squall “nature walk” writing exercise, in hushed company with a–fishing now for a suitable collective noun: sord? siege? muster? ostentation?–of eighth graders. Breaking the silence meant yanking the whole skulk back to a fluorescent-lit classroom, and no one wanted to be held liable for that. With sharpened pencils and index cards, we huddled through woods to a duck pond behind the school, recording observations of cattails and red-winged blackbirds, which we later composed into poems. I wrote alongside the flock, and found this poem calling back to an earlier sonnet of mine, started more than fifteen years ago, in a time of far less forgiving storms. Thanks to Kevin for his superior ornithology, and thanks to my Blue Heron brood of writers for walking me through this poem. (Carol Light) — January Walk The wind has twisted the tops of hemlock and fir; cones and needles spatter the muddy path. Rising from nearby chimneys: wood smoke and ash. A cold mist washes my cheek and cattails stir the breeze, climbing …

Jennifer Bullis: “Directions to Pt. Rupture”

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Jennifer Bullis, the inaugural winner of Poetry Northwest‘s contest, The Pitch, writes of her winning poem: I knew I would love writing to Rebecca Hoogs’s prompt, which calls for re-grounding in the language of physical place.  I looked forward to tracing, verbally, one of the routes familiar to me:  the way through sagebrush to a pond in the gully below my house where, as a six year old, I looked for frogs; or the way on horseback through Reno’s outskirts, where, as an adolescent, I’d ride into the foothills to find shade among pines; or the way  up logging roads above the Nooksack River outside Van Zandt, Washington, to the washout at Skookum Creek where, in August, you can be surrounded by tiny purple butterflies. The poem that eventuated, however, had a source far different from personal memory or physical place.  “Directions to Pt. Rupture,” it turns out, was an entirely imagined piece that found its inspiration in language, in the mouth’s commerce with air—in that particular set of vocalizations produced when we stop and …

Rod Jellema: “A Note to the Swedish Mystic Who Wrote that ‘the Wash is Nothing but Wash’”

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This one began, as many of my poems do, with the stirring of a childhood memory brought to mind by a present  experience. Behind our summer place, an old farmhouse in Lake Michigan dunelands, passing our ancient grapevine, I caught the aroma of rising steam that mixed hot grape leaves and my wife’s swim suit and towel, spread out there to dry. 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 …

Andrew Zawacki: “Videotape: 51″

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This month, from Andrew Zawacki, an analogue of memory: Andrew notes that “’Videotape’ is a serial poem primarily concerned with landscape—whether natural or manufactured, oneiric or simulated—and with the various media we employ to record, juxtapose, even invent geography, not to mention ruin it.  I’m specifically interested in obsolete technologies, like VHS and Betamax, with their magnetic tape and plastic cassettes, figures of inevitable decay.  These date from my childhood—also, of course, from the Reagan era, a technocracy of scary proportions (leveled by someone who’d been a film star).  While I’ve tried to leave dramas of selfhood out of these clips—the one thing not seen in a visual field is the person behind the viewfinder—, recalling that a camera’s lens is termed the ‘objective,’ a few subjective moments have nonetheless punctured the work.  51—a love song, written while my wife was away—is among them, with its speaker’s sentiments (nostalgia bordering on pathetic) themselves articulated in an outdated mode.  (We were spending summer in Paris and had just inherited cordial glasses dating from the Second Empire …

AMY GLYNN GREACEN Two Poems

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Exclusive to Poetry Northwest Online, here are several poems from Amy Glynn Greacen’s A Modern Herbal: a manuscript-in-progress that, according to its author, “shares its title with Maud Grieve’s 1931 herbal pharmacopoeia. Each poem is about a different plant – from fruits and vegetables to medicinal herbs, psychotropics and poisons – in some cases directly and in some, obliquely. It plays with botanical metaphors and with the many ways humans use and interact with plants.” 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 …