All posts tagged: Rich Smith

Rich Smith: “Ordering A Skinny, Sugar-free Vanilla Latte on the Cusp of Natural Catastrophe – Tod Marshall’s Bugle”

Published by Staff

Bugle Tod Marshall Canarium, 2014 All of our friends are dying or dead and the world is melting, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on jokes and poetry and a general sense of wonder, right? In Bugle, Tod Marshall answers that question by saying: “Well, it’s complicated.” Marshall looks on our urban world of skinny lattes, naked meth freaks and plastic bag fees and sees in it the human impulse for (self-)destruction. He sees how we express that destructive impulse in the way we interact with the natural world and with each other, and he does not like what he sees. So he does what any concerned, motivated-but-slightly-disheartened citizen might do: he puts his lips to the mouthpiece and sounds out this admonition: Let’s just watch a rerun on Nature: “The Funkiest Monkeys.” What mother spewed us out? Vagina slime then tubes, semen from a spout. The speaker who emerges from Marshall’s horn is bleak-funny, obsessed with the past, powerless against the encroaching natural apocalypse, partially to blame for that apocalypse, and …

The Fridges of Famous Poets

Published by Staff

Curated by Katharine Ogle Associate Editor     Rilke’s Lemon A lemon came home from the grocery, nestled in the net bag with the rest of the produce, but he hadn’t bought it. How did you get here? Rilke puts the lemon in the fridge next to the lemon juice. Someone has cut a slice from it. Like the corpse of a saint, the lemon remains fresh and sweet-smelling for a suspiciously long time. Rilke thinks: Like a girl almost or like the refrigerator gremlins who eat electricity to stay alive, you have to learn to live with longing. You just have to learn to live with longing. Every waking moment, the lemon is rolling slowly looking for the fridge within the fridge that it knows is there. –Sarah Kathryn Moore   All’s Despite (or, Paul Celan’s Fridge) shellacked and scrubbed green, yawning fingernail caught in a sunken jamb, wailing tin mantras; color of fresh- puckered mint on a rubberrack next to two carrots ocher-stain blush in so styrene a crypt (o and who levered …

Afterwords // Naming the Animals: Stephen Burt on The Nearly-Baroque in Contemporary Poetry

Published by Staff

By Rich Smith Poetry Northwest Contributing Writer The talk was held in a conference room on the second floor of the Communications Building on the UW Campus. Weird room! (Good light, though. Lots of lamps.) Weird time! 6:00PM on a Friday, a fact that was not lost on Mr. Burt. However, he drew a good crowd—maybe 30 people, nearly all with notebooks on their laps. Burt speaks clearly, loudly, and with authority. He was a casual dresser, though, in a striped long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, clear-framed glasses, Chuck Taylor’s with colorful laces, and sporting silver nail polish on modestly trimmed nails. I thought the fingernail polish was a nod to the theme of the talk, and I was admiring his commitment to the bit, but when I asked him about the polish later on in the evening he said he just liked to wear it. In short, I was ashamed. Especially three days later, after reading his beautiful essay about the newly released anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Anyway, the …