Deborah Woodard

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HUNTER MNEMONICS, Deborah Woodard. Hemel Press, 2008, illustrated by Heide Hinrichs, $6 paper, http://www.4h-club.org/hemel.html.

It seemed like cheating to include  this slim chapbook of only 5 prose poems in my month-long read-a-thon, so I read it twice. The images are dream-like, or they are like images drawn from a fairy tale you heard as a child and have never since been able to find. It casts a spell. Certain motifs repeat and repeat, poem to poem, like stones you might step on to cross a creek. It immerses you in something, but when you emerge, you’re not quite sure what it was.

I heard Woodard read these, and afterwards I couldn’t get them out of my head, so I contacted her and she gave me a copy. Does it depict a walk in the woods as a child, to a town that no longer exists? Or is it a walk in imagination? Here’s an excerpt from the first poem:

It was quiet here, a silence blunt and practical that tied its laces. And Al’s
was no name but a joke the trapper painted across the cover of the well.
I found tin cans and a pair of antlers that almost brought back the tang of your shot,
the monotony of its tuft of smoke. When we got in the clear, we’d reached the cabin.
I imagined red plaid beckoning us forward, milkweed’s limbs akimbo.
But I didn’t understand why Jerusalem was just a few miles up the road,
or why the town was weaker than its well. So I drew down a flap of the grey sky.

Woodard teaches at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and I have a not-so-secret desire to take a class from her.

Karen Whalley

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MY OWN NAME SEEMS STRANGE TO ME, Karen Whalley. Off the Grid Press, 2019, 65 pages, $16 paper, www.grid-books.org.

I have known Karen Whalley for at least 30 years and consider her one of my dearest friends. All the more amazing, then, that her poems continue to surprise me, and make me swoon. But don’t take my word for it. To quote the late Tony Hoagland (himself, a national treasure) from the book’s cover:

These beautifully clear, meditative poems have it all; dexterously situated in daily experience, they meet with the difficulties of lived life, with a deep, often heartbreakingly honest and humane insightfulness. Fluent, full of breakthroughs and surprises, these extraordinary poems never seem to falter; Whalley is an extraordinary poet, and this is a book in a thousand.

I had a terrible time trying to pick out just one poem to share. This is the first poem in the book:

Naming It

Before dawn, from the gully where the creek abides
A bird whose name I do not know practices
Its five-note song, and I am a girl again
Sitting at the piano repeating a simple scale.

The bird sings, the sun rises, as if there were a connection,
And my feet do not reach the pedals as my hands
Spread, like wings, across the keys. The wound

Is easier to name: the father did not love,
And after that it was the husband, but the bird and the piano
Remind me of that man who read the same book
For thirty years, memorizing each sentence

As a way to perfect his understanding
Of the book whose name I never learned.
I would see him each morning on the corner
Waiting for the bus, the book spread

Across his hands, like wings at rest, peering into the pages
With his glasses slipping farther down his nose
So he had to tilt his head back as he stood there–

Dissolved into his book, like the bird dissolving
Into morning, the way the piano dissolves into the box of memory.

Crysta Casey (1952-2008)

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GREEN CAMMIE, Crysta Casey. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, #205, Seattle, WA 98105, 2010. 47 pages, $12 paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

Many years ago now, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I enrolled in an evening class to study the writing of poetry with Professor Nelson Bentley. It was not the usual sort of class. Beginning, intermediate, and advanced poets were all thrown in together, along with a few graduate students. And there were some former students who wandered in and out. Crysta Casey was among this latter group. An unforgettable human being. Poetry, she said, was saving her. Reading her book today took me back.

The Sane and the Insane 

My thoughts are more exciting
when I’m not on meds.
On medication, I think
of vacuuming the carpet
to get rid of any bugs
Bonnie may have left
when she curled into a fetal position
on the rug last Sunday.
At three a.m., she lit
three cigarettes at the same time,
put them in the ashtray
and watched them burn,
said, “Kaw, globble,”
so I called 911. The medics were nice
when they took her to the hospital.
She put on her boots
without socks, did not lace them–
I had to give a poetry reading
the next night. “Don’t rock,”
I reminded myself, “that’s a dead giveaway.”
I think it was Robert Graves who wrote
in The White Goddess, “The difference
between the insane and poets,
is that poets write it down.”

 

Sierra Nelson

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THE LACHRYMOSE REPORT, Sierra Nelson. Poetry Northwest Editions, 2000 Tower St., Everett, WA 98201, 2018, $29, https://www.poetrynw.org/.

Here’s another northwest native, but with an entirely different aesthetic than yesterday’s poet. Elizabeth Bradfield describes the sensibility behind The Lachrymose Report as a “bright, bird-mind” that “sees the world and its questions in the best kind of strange light.” Reading it again today, I felt I was hanging out with a mind at play in the fields–and deep in the mucky ponds–of language itself.

Here’s a sample:

Pilgrimage

Pilgrim–
Awake to bells with no melody or reason.
You were given this tongue and body
and all day long your life rings you,
rings you for what you are worth,
but you can’t hear it amidst the pound
of traffic, heat, and senseless shouting.

Sit down by the fountain
outside the closed church
and listen to water
diffusing into light.

All pilgrims’ feet are painted black.
It is good if you’ve lost something–
your map, your luggage, your companions,
your favorite ring, your last coin,
your metal heart, your language.

Go to the marketplace.
Touch everything, pilgrim.
Let every cloth remind you
that you have hands.

Let your eyes go blind
on their clever toys and cheap purses.
Pay the toll to the King of Fleas,
his plastic cane rapping
on the world’s refuse.

In the heap, find a book of poems
written as if in your heart’s own tongue.
Did you know you were hungry as this, pilgrim,

here by the clamor of handmade wind chimes
and songbirds for a penny? Happy
as you are, despite everything,
cracking open a seed.