SRIKANTH REDDY Voyager, Book 3 (Chapter 6)
Certainly life / burned inside him.
Certainly life / burned inside him.
What is the love that can follow this word?
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 wifeâs 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 Harryâs cottage, where I spent my best summer days as a young teenager. Iâve 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 …
Most poems since 1776 include the lines âit was snowing and it was going to snow,â although only Wallace Stevens in 1917 got it exactly right.
This month, from Andrew Zawacki, an analogue of memory: Andrew notes that â’Videotape’ is a serial poem primarily concerned with landscapeâwhether natural or manufactured, oneiric or simulatedâand with the various media we employ to record, juxtapose, even invent geography, not to mention ruin it. Iâm specifically interested in obsolete technologies, like VHS and Betamax, with their magnetic tape and plastic cassettes, figures of inevitable decay. These date from my childhoodâalso, of course, from the Reagan era, a technocracy of scary proportions (leveled by someone whoâd been a film star). While Iâve tried to leave dramas of selfhood out of these clipsâthe one thing not seen in a visual field is the person behind the viewfinderâ, recalling that a cameraâs lens is termed the âobjective,â a few subjective moments have nonetheless punctured the work. 51âa love song, written while my wife was awayâis among them, with its speakerâs sentiments (nostalgia bordering on pathetic) themselves articulated in an outdated mode.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 …
The next print edition of Poetry Northwest will be the spring-summer issue, due in April 2010. Until then, in addition to our regular monthly highlights from the most recent issue (see Natasha Tretheweyâs âMexico,â for instance), we are publishing new poems by poets we admire as a countdown to and preview of our back-in-Seattle debut. In January, we featured Eric McHenryâs âNew Yearâs Letter to All the Friends Iâve Estranged by Not Writing.â February gave us âHall of Sea Nettles,â a new poem by Paisley Rekdal, rich in sinuous assonance and shifting, sharp-eyed imagery. You can expect to see more poems by Paisley Rekdal in the spring-summer issue to come. Now, on the threshold of our new issue, we are pleased to present Marvin Bell’s “The Book of the Dead Man (The Northwest).” The Dead Man has been a stalwart of Amercian letters since his debut in 1994. His resurrection here is sure sign that spring is upon us again.
The wind shakes the earth / from its four corners
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 Grieveâs 1931 herbal pharmacopoeia. Each poem is about a different plant â from fruits and vegetables to medicinal herbs, psychotropics and poisons â 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 â 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 â 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 …
In celebration of the arrival of the Spring-Summer 2010 issue (v5.n1) of Poetry Northwest on newsstands and in mailboxes, we offer you this instrument of opening by Rick Barot, exclusively online. “I wrote this poem during an autumn residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire,” notes Barot. “Prior to the residency, I hadn’t written a poem in many months, perhaps close to a year. And so my mind was full of half-thoughts and half-images and half-possibilities just waiting for some galvanizing energy to give them coherence. There was a rocking chair in the studio, and I spent nearly all my time in that chair, rocking and reading. On the day I wrote the poem, I was sitting in that chair and opened up Bill Knott’s book of poems The Unsubscriber, a favorite book. Immediately I came across the page that had this as the first line of a poem: ‘The poem is a letter opener.’ I closed the book, knew instantly that Knott’s line was the title of a poem that I wanted to write, sat down at the desk, and …
Zach Savich on Andrew Grace’s Shadeland