All posts tagged: Christine Deavel

Afterwords // Unauthorized Whitman

Published by Jack Chelgren

by Jack Chelgren Poetry Northwest Staff   The Unauthorized Readings: Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself August 13, 2013 at Fremont Abbey Arts Center   On Thursday night, poets Adam Boehmer, Christine Deavel, James Hoch, and Janie Miller kicked off a new poetry series, the Unauthorized Readings, with a hearty and variegated performance of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”  A crowd of about fifty gathered in the basement of the Fremont Abbey Arts Center, where the four readers took turns delivering selections from the poem, each with no small measure of zeal.  Theirs was a skillful and imaginative rendering of Whitman, with each poet’s distinct reading style highlighting the competing tones that cycle throughout the work: playfulness and hysteria, didacticism and uncertainty, mysticism and sexuality.

Notable Books: Christine Deavel, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Ernst Miester, and The Open Door

Published by EC

NOTABLE BOOKS 2012 Christine Deavel’s Woodnote (Bear Star Press, 2011) is a remarkable book—a book about, among other things, the legacy of books. In vision, and as a physical object, it is a mindful handful: a big square picture window of a book, drawing together many styles. In five sections we encounter an acute, discerning lyricism (“Hidden / as a toy balloon in the sky is / and is not”), personal essay (“But to walk through it, to walk through the snow as it falls, is to walk through another’s memory, even if it is only the land’s”), excerpts of historical records (“The cessions are as follows: / … The December end of the portage place. / Also the overlapping voice of all the lakes”), and, importantly, selections from the diaries of a relative (“A gloomy day :: a delightful day :: A heavy frost but nice day”) who died the year the poet was born. The cumulative effect of these styles is astounding. Piece by piece, in palimpsest, an image emerges, both vibrant and …