All posts tagged: J. W. Marshall

J. W. Marshall: “Steilacoom and South”

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 …