Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena

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Perhaps I should cop to my ulterior motive in doing this series.

I am a person who will spend her last dollar on a book. I have a house full of books, a number of them unread, and yet it’s difficult for me to attend a conference or a reading without coming home with … more books.

You know that expression, “like a kid in a candy store.” You can now amend that to, “Like a poet at a book sale.” My ulterior motive, then, is to finally create a good reason to actually read these books all the way through. I bring them home with the best of intentions, and I usually read a poem or two before they find their way to my shelf. Maybe I take them down now and then and read a little more. But I have a bad habit of not taking the time to them all the way through. So that, my friends, is what I’m doing.

Reading Sarah de Leeuw‘s Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015) was, as with the other books, a surprise and a pleasure. It is not at all the sort of poetry I aspire to write; nonetheless, it had lessons for me in how one might think differently about what a poem is, and what it looks like.

Skeena is a book-length poem about the Skeena, the second-largest river in British Columbia. Leeuw is an award-winning Canadian poet, but she also has a Ph.D. in Geology, and the book is a collage of voices and textures, incorporating photographs, First People’s stories, the voice of the river, geologic time and details, and newspaper accounts. The book is not tidy, divided into ragged sections, and often exploding all over the pages, kind of like a river at floodtime. In addition to the artfulness of the poem’s execution, the dust jacket is a work of art. (Designed and hand screen printed by Briar Craig). Skeena was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award: Women Writing the West.

To hear part of Sarah de Leeuw’s interview with Cascadia Poetry Festival organizer Paul Nelson, including a reading of “Rain” (one of the most experimental of the sections) from Skeena, click here.

The blog does not accommodate poems (not easily) that are choreographed, so I’m going to cheat and share a picture. This is a book I would love to pass along to someone worthy, so let me know if you are interested.

Alice Fulton’s Barely Composed

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[This post has been updated. 4/18/2018]

Where to begin? Well, after getting a comment (below) from Alice Fulton, I revisited my other books by her. And she’s right! So she didn’t give me a business card that said “word mechanic,” but she read a poem about some other poet giving her a business card.

Even so, reading her latest book, Barely Composed (Norton, 2015), I can still her crawling under the lines to tinker with the parts. She is a wordsmith of the first order.

Fulton has always struck me as unconcerned with making sense. (Though see the comments.) I think this is because I have always been overly concerned with making sense, with being linear, with telling a story. Reading her work challenges me to be more playful, to take more seriously poetry’s higher calling to something beyond mere “sense.”

And Fulton does play! She plays with  clichés and colloquialisms, tosses in science and politics, and somehow gets away with it all (masterfully). Although these poems predate the 2016 presidential election, their refusal to be linear seems to me strangely fitting for our times, and prescient. (As in “Peroral”: “It’s like a prison that makes itself at home in you, / like so not worth it, so not mattering, and so / fair King of Not, you self-release, secede, sowing / misgivings as you go.”) When her dying mother shows up in the book, even sideways references signaled to me the ways in which the poems offer an alternative way to understand what cannot be understood. These poems, in particular, depict for me a world that has been shaken and shattered and glued back together–maybe–but by a person unable to remember where everything goes.

Once you give up trying to make sense of the poems, the lines begin to sizzle and hum. My initial feeling was that I would not be able to read Barely Composed straight through; then I realized that reading it in one sitting was a very good way to read it–total immersion was what finally helped me drop through my resistance and into the sheer admiration that I felt for Fulton from the very first time I encountered her. The final poem, “End Fetish–An Index of Last Lines,” underscored and clarified for me how Fulton’s individual lines pop with emotion and nerve, and maybe some incantational magic as well.

So here is a poem for you to try out for yourself–a sonnet located near the end of the book:

There Are a Few Things I Need to Get

to sleep. A dreamboat of submersible iron,
a sea that rocks, narcotic clock. I need
our feelings to glide and turn in unison, silversides.
Snow gristle, stenciled trees, an ice-breaker
escort–who needs them? Spring’s your favorite season.
You like its green lotions. Touched by its soft tissues,
you don’t miss the jilted winter. Still,
the figure eight motion of lacing a skate
is soothing. A forever effect. Like everything
you do. I’ve plunged past my crush depth. I can tell
by the way paint flashes and my protective
rubber mask melts on my face. It’s not your doing
I like, it’s you. You and your green emollients. Now let us chill.
After we’re exchanted, we come all so still.

In 2016 Fulton was the Roethke reader at the University of Washington. She signed Barely Composed for me, and wrote: “With thanks for your generous spirit tonight, and gratitude for your presence across the centuries.”

You don’t always have to know what a thing means to appreciate it. And I do.

Christopher Howell’s Love’s Last Number

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I had a lovely day. This morning I saw two old friends, women I met in Nelson Bentley’s poetry workshop 30+ years ago. I had the time wrong to pick up my daughter, by an hour, and so was able to take a walk on a nature trail I discovered between Lynnwood and Edmonds. This afternoon, my husband I went to see The Post, which was splendid, and had dinner out.

Plus: I spent spare moments all day reading this luminous book of poems: Love’s Last Number, by Christopher Howell (Milkweed, 2017).

Choosing which poem to share with you is not easy. One of the things I admire about Howell is that he is able to begin with one subject–the disappearance of the dog he had in childhood, for instance–but deftly shift to something you wouldn’t have guessed was related: “And what of the sea, another sort of road, Beowulf’s / whale road, St. Brendan’s miracle passage.” Except now, thanks to Howell, it’s obvious that they are related.

Many of the poems here reflect on the poet’s experiences in the Vietnam War. Throughout the book, time walks rough-shod over us, and also hauls us back, willy-nilly, into memories that shatter — or delight.

Here is the first poem in the book:

A Short Song

This is a song of our consciousness, that faltering
old man who will never make it across the bridge,
who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack
of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery
and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders
a springtime path between peach trees
and the berries, humming something, forgetting,
and humming again. A song of his wishes
tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat
depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving
out of sight as the sun goes down.
It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness
turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats
to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends
really, and never whispers this
as the old man listens for the one spot of silence
or the one clear voice that might be his.

 

You can buy Love’s Last Number on Amazon: 

Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

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Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book?

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but I’m going to try. (With one opening couplet that reads thus: “Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain. / They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.” What on earth will this poem be about?) It was not the sort of book I normally set out to read in one day. These are poems that one needs to mull over, to live with. Ultimately, it’s a book I will keep on my shelf to reread at a slower pace. A book that I already know will reward rereading.

Here is one prose poem from a series of 6 titled “Another Letter to the Soul”:

4.

You are the sound of rain, if it weren’t falling but rising from below, a ground-nester, not a tree one, such as the bobolink or longspur, created below our feet, like the oil is. Rain in the ears and snowmelt rushing through the heart, a distant sound, as of the past retreating. Though loud, continuing its retreating presence. What can the flood teach me about you? I see frothing at the surface and watch myself pulled in, as if identity were an antithesis to gravity. Yet not knowing is part of you, whether I sink or swim, whether I abandon the body or stay and fight for it. When someone says, “you will know when the time comes,” does she mean the soul speaks? What part, then, indecision, net of doubts we might call debris, web of plastic tape roping off the danger? Mudbanks where the deer’s leg sinks in?

I’ve been fascinated by the soul, by the concept of the soul, since I was a kid. I won’t go into that right now, except to say that Kwasny’s book shows me that I am not alone in my obsessions. (And floods! “What can the flood teach me about you?”) Her poems make me want to open my notebook and write my own meditations, to ride them as far as they will take me, even if I end up falling into a mudbank. First, after all, there’s the soaring.