David D. Horowitz

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David D. Horowitz, as most Seattle poets know, is Rose Alley Press, which began in 1995, championing poetry in general, meter and rhyme wherever possible, and Northwest poets specifically. Among the many, Rose Alley has published Michael Spence, Joanne Kervran Stangeland, Donald Kentop, and one of my professors from UW days, William Dunlop. David is also responsible — barring a pandemic — for poetry readings in coffee houses and libraries all over the region to celebrate Rose Alley’s anthologies (most recently, Footbridge Above the Falls: Poems by Forty-eight Northwest Poets).

In her cover praise for David’s newest book, Slow Clouds over Rush Hour, Carolyne Wright calls the poet a  “Moralist and wit, latter-day Catullus or perhaps the Blake of Songs of Experience transposed to the 21st century.” But even though many of the poems refer to days and poets gone by, I can’t help feeling they are always a chronicle of our post-modern life, reporting on the political stew, a mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, “the rat race” (and cats, too). As Wright points out, Slow Clouds also captures moments of “quiet enjoyment, when the speaker, a human cog in the corporate machine of his day job, puts aside the allures of overachievement and savors, at evening, ‘this scarlet rose, / Vase, lamplit valley view.'”

I’m compelled to share at least one couplet from Slow Clouds over Rush Hour:

How to Be an Editor

Learn how to use a period and comma
And how to spell “baboon” and “llama.”

And here’s one of those “quiet enjoyment” poems from the last pages:

Glow and Glitter

Gray sunlight whitens undecided sky — and peeks
Through clouds, which start to dissipate. Gold streaks
Help thaw restraint. Another sunny day despite
More news of shooting, theft, and feuding fight.
Where threats and violence might seem the norm,
A simple sunray might enliven, warm,
And calm. So, beauty trickles through a break
And giggles glitter on the city lake
And shimmers, simmers silver surface, streaks
It gold. Through haze, I think I see the peaks.

— David D. Horowitz

 

On April 10 — 1:30-5 p.m. — there will be an actual book-signing, with real live people and everything (with all precautions) at BookTree in Kirkland. In corresponding with David, I also learned that he will be doing a Zoom reading for Edmonds Bookshop on Thursday, April 22, 6 p.m., along with Carolyne Wright, Jim Bertolino, Anita K. Boyle, and Douglas Schuder. (The best place to find the Zoom link for Edmonds is on their Facebook page or at the website, https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org.) Follow this link to learn how to purchase Slow Clouds over Rush Hour as well as other Rose Alley Press titles.

Joy Harjo

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Consider this my little National Poetry Month party for our current United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. There isn’t much I can add to the abundance of material already on the web — reviews, You Tube interviews, music and performance videos — but I can at least point you in their direction.

In addition to being a poet and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer. (Click on her name to find a wealth of information.) She is the executive editor of the 2021 anthology, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, and her most recent book of poems is American Sunrise. In 2016 I read (devoured) her memoir, Crazy Brave, and then gave it to a dear friend. I met Harjo in 1993, when I was serving on the committee for the Watermark Reading Series at the University of Washington, and at one time I had all of her books. There is something about the way Harjo unleashes color and image, the incantatory voice of these books that demands to be shared.

Harjo ends her 1983 book, She Had Some Horses, with these lines (from “I Give You Back”):

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart    my heart

But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.

 

Finally, for a more recent look at her, and her work, click on this video — a kitchen table poem to take with you into your day and your month of poetry:

https://www.joyharjo.com/videos/joy-harjo-read-perhaps-the-world-ends-here

Christine M. Kendall

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At Home on Upper Beaver Creek (2020) is Christine M. Kendall’s third book (after Talk, A chapbook, 1998, and Resting in the Familiar, 2017). To create her books, Christine seeks coaching and input from her writing group, and has the books professionally designed (by Jack Kienast) and printed (by Norman Green of Threshold Documents).  She put together At Home for a show at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington, for the residents of Upper and Lower Beaver Creek Roads where several artists of the Methow Valley reside.

Because I know Christine, I invited her to answer some questions.

1.What is your process in assembling a poetry book? Do you imagine the book — perhaps its theme or title — and write into that, or do the poems come first? 

For both the chapbook and my first collection I had a stack of poetry I had written, some had been published in journals, a few in anthologies, but publishing the poems in a collection was for me a way of giving them a home.

For At Home on Upper Beaver Creek, responding to the call for the Confluence Gallery exhibit was an incentive to create a collection of poetry about living on Upper Beaver Creek and as I began the work, orders to shelter in place began because of COVID.  All but two of the poems in the book were inspired by what I experience here on our 20 acres.  A few of the poems were published previously, but most came to me on daily walks with our dog Gus.

2. How do you decide the order of the poems?

For Resting In The Familiar, my editor, Mary Gillilan, ordered the poems into five sections with poems about family, places I’ve traveled to, general observations, grief, and self-reflection. For At Home on Upper Beaver Creek the book is ordered by the seasons, beginning with my favorite season here, winter.  The sections have a pen and ink illustration for each season (by Kathy Brackett).

3. How do you know when a book is “done”?

I think for me that’s where a good editor comes in.  I hope to do another book as I have a lot of poems that need a good home between covers and someone to say, “enough is enough!”  Also, I need someone who can help me shape the collection into a logical order, as I tend to write on a variety of subjects.

Bellingham poet, editor, and blogger J. I. Kleinberg writes of this book:

In At Home on Upper Beaver Creek, Christine Kendall shares her wonderment at the cycle of the seasons. From her home in Central Washington–a landscape of ancient glacier-scraped, boulder-strewn hillsides, forests, and fiercely nourished homesteads–she shows us the ‘hierarchies and appetites’ of eagles and ravens, torrential rain and fire.

I’m amazed at Christine’s adept switch into “pandemic mode,” her ability to capture the early, difficult months of the lockdown and make us all see that perhaps being in forced seclusion wasn’t a hardship, but an opportunity for sabbatical. My favorite poems here are the ones in which the poet is out walking. Because I have a fondness for coyote poems, this one made an obvious choice to share. We can credit Christine’s dog, Gus, whose perspective reminds us to look at the world through other eyes.

The Prize

The dog brought home a coyote
skull, a bone to him,
a scent, a treasure, not kith
and kin. Stripped clean,
there’s no connection
to howls that prick up
his ears after dark.

No connection to marks
left–intoxicants to sniff–
he knows coyotes by whiffs
on a breeze, he’s seen them
in the distance tracking across
fields. Once, a coyote chased
him, my high-pitched screams
diverting it.

We kept the skull. Hollow
sockets once held watchful eyes,
the cranium a brain, and
ears to hear other packs howl
on hillsides; tonight progeny
will watch a full moon rise.

–Christine M. Kendall

Christine’s books are available from Village Books in Fairhaven, Bellingham, and also through confluencepoets.com, her group’s webpage, which has a shopping section.

The featured photo for this post is courtesy cottonbro from Pexels.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

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I have a modest goal to post something here each week, and this week–quite busy with other things–I thought I’d simply stick in a quote. But the book I picked up was Muriel Rukeyser‘s Out of Silence: Selected Poems, and it inspired me to try a little harder.

In February it was my pleasure to attend a 2-day virtual conference on Rukeyser’s work, reception, and influence.  I knew Rukeyser, previously, from a handful of anthologized poems and her splendid book, The Life of Poetry. I’m still processing all I heard there, reading and rereading her poems; I’ve just begun reading her novel, Savage Coast. (Until a panelist presented on it, I hadn’t known the novel existed.) I particularly enjoyed the presentation by her former student, Dennis J Bernstein, a poet and radio producer who documented Rukeyser in her final years. My friend and mentor, Professor Vivian Pollak, presented on the Elegies and their contemporary reception (often brutal, despite Rukeyser’s ground-breaking work).

I wanted to share a passage from the preface to her poems:

She was never what is sometimes called a poet’s poet–the exquisite practitioner of craft capable of making other poets envy her sheer technical skill. She wrote for a far larger audience, seeking readers in ordinary people, as well as among those who understood the difficulties of modern poetry. “Writing is only another way of giving,” she believed, “a courtesy, if you will, and a form of love.” And so the search for the mot juste gave way to the larger goals she pursued in poetry: “the universe of emotional truth” and “an approach to the truth of feeling.” -Kate Daniels, “In Order to Feel” [Rukeyser’s words, in quotations, are from The Life of Poetry]

This strikes me as a manifesto for writing, something I need to post, and circle back and reread.

The featured photograph is by Imogen Cunningham.