Winter & Spring 2018
Featuring John Ashbery, Catherine Bresner, Meredith Clark, Olivia de Recat, William Fargason, Dobby Gibson, Richard Kenney, Owen McLeod, Allison Morton, Alyson Provax, Elizabeth Scanlon, Sarah Sloat, Bianca Stone, & more
All posts tagged: Richard Kenney
Richard Kenney: “And More Vivalding”
“Green ferns bend a breeze / under summer’s awning”
Jill Twist: The Only Thing, a Photo Essay
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
Richard Kenney: “Civics”
Sub-rosa cues on race— / the gutter-tongue that plays / to an ever-baser base— / what’s so hard to see?
Hello Goodbye Hello
Kevin Craft (Editor 2010 – 2016) Signs Off Most poetry readers I know chuckle wearily at the steady stream of “poetry is dead” articles that have appeared with astonishing tenacity in various venues, including The New York Times, these past few years. The authors of these articles agonize in some way or another over poetry’s irrelevance to modern culture: poetry is too abstract and obscure, they argue, too much an insider’s game, divorced from the real wants and needs (to borrow a phrase from Whitman’s early review of Keats’s poems) of actual bodies in the 21st century. But why should poetry worry over its relationship to popular culture? Must it be popular (or topical) in order to be vital, in order to sustain a reader, or fortify a readership? What happens to those who win (or live by) popularity contests in the contemporary cultural grind? We know all too well that the speed of the attention-getting news cycle is debilitating. Presidential primaries come and go, talk radio blathers on, discourse hardens, partisans lob grenades …
Richard Kenney: “Be Still My Heart: A Closer Look at Biology in Relation to Metrical Forms”
I don’t think we have iambic meters because we have a duple cardiac rhythm; neither do I think for a moment that they have nothing to do with each other.
Spring and All: New Issue, New Editors, New Books
Poetry Northwest changes editors, and adds a publishing house SEATTLE, WA – Poetry Northwest (the region’s oldest literary magazine, established in 1959) has just published volume 10.2 in its New Series, marking the completion of a vibrant decade of the magazine in its expanded format. The Winter & Spring 2016 issue features new poems from Joan Swift, who first contributed to the magazine in 1959, and Tod Marshall, who was recently appointed the fourth Washington state Poet Laureate. It includes exceptional new work from a wide range of poets, such as Laura Da’, Rebecca Hoogs, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Keetje Kuipers, Richard Kenney, Claudia Castro Luna, J. W. Marshall, Katrina Roberts, Rich Smith, Nance van Winckel, and many more. The magazine also continues a long tradition of exploring the interconnectedness of poetry and the visual arts. The current issue features three unique series of images from prominent Northwest artists, each series interwoven with the text: David Hytone supplied the gorgeous cover; Emily Gherard works shadowy wonders with graphite; and Kelly Froh, light-hearted comic genius, riffs off poems by Hoogs and Smith. …
Interview // Trimpin
Contraptions for the Human Instrument: A dozen questions for sound sculptor Trimpin by Claire Sykes
Richard Kenney: “Muse Interviews”
Richard Kenney This month we feature a poem by Richard Kenney, “Muse Interviews,” from the Spring-Summer 2006 (v1.n1) issue of Poetry Northwest. Asked for a few remarks about the poem, the author writes: “The poem is an attack. Trapped in prose between the poles of explanation and ducking, I’d lean to the latter and say something like: insofar as satire is Calliope’s cautering iron, here’s a hiss for all of us. Pressed toward the prolix pole, I’d change the subject and inquire: is there a compound word for anvil-envy among hammers? Would it derogate the great poetries of Latin America or Central Europe, say– our teachers in many things– to note pressing political and formal errands closer to home, where all roads lead, evidently, somethwere between the Imperial Dream and McStupid? Somewhere amidst the wet Kleenex of our guilts and grievances and the shrinking fluids of our irony, American poets will have to find ink for the record. Should this strike us as a smaller artistic problem than Whitman’s? Do we have the instruments? Just …