All posts tagged: collaboration

Ed Skoog: “Dean”

Published by Staff

The second in our series featuring poems written by Ed Skoog in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon.  Read the first in the series, “What’s Your Beef,” with an introduction by the poet, here. Dean Less I see you through this stone, displeasure on your face as you wait for me to deliver this short curriculum in repose of armor, of landfall. Begin where we left, red world of symptom such as money and heart. In my deanship I lead a quaint faculty. Learn nothing. Threat of stone is release into the body, John Donne was Dean of St. Paul’s. Born a girl, I’d have been Pauline. It’s good to know your other name. Names are of interest. — Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.  He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University.  He lives in Seattle and teaches …

Ed Skoog: “What’s Your Beef?”

Published by Staff

Over the course of the next few weeks, as the Winter/Spring 2010-11 issue of Poetry Northwest (v5.n2) is made ready, we’ll be featuring a series of poems by Ed Skoog written in response to photographs by J. Robert Lennon. When asked bout the process of composing these poems, Ed writes that “the question on my side, once I’d agreed to the collaboration, was what form the poems would take in response to John’s photographs. He’d already taken them; I’d already admired them. The photographs were taken around Ithaca, New York, and I recognized only a few of the locations from my visits there. Here in Seattle the March through June I worked on the sequence, it was gloomy and what little light came through the leafing apple tree was lonely. These poems started spinning out from the memory of the photos rather than from direct looking. I worked on them a long time, puzzling them out, puzzling into them, and in the end took them much more seriously than I’d set out to, in order …