July 2015

FEATURED POET: TIM McNULTY is a Northwest poet, essayist, and nature writer.  His work draws from a long-standing engagement and regard for the natural world and its inhabitants. He is the author of three poetry collections: Ascendance, In Blue Mountain Dusk, and Pawtracks, and ten poetry chapbooks, including Cloud Studies, and Through High Still Air: A Season at Sourdough Mountain.  Tim is also the author of eleven books on natural history, including Olympic National Park: A Natural History, From the Air: Olympic Peninsula, and Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park.  Tim has received the Washington State Book Award and the National Outdoor Book Award.  He lives with his family in the foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains, where his is active in wilderness and conservation work.  Tim's website is timmcnultypoet.com

MOON, HORSES, AND GROUNDFOG

A corner of dream opened

into night--soft ring

of the bell mare, close

to the open shelter where I slept.

A low fog had moved up from the river,

and the dark shapes of horses grazed

knee-deep in silvery light.

In the hazy reach between sleep

and waking,

I was among them, tasting the fog

that was our ground.  It was cool,

and smelled of leafmulch,

of dampened ash,

and the slow breath of a glacier.

The moon stood still in a spruce tree,

and the sound of the river

moved away over polished stones.

I was midpoint on a journey

I had forgotten I'd begun,

and the dust of winter stars

covered the empty shoes beside me.

― In Blue Mountain Dusk―Broken Moon/Pleasure Boat Studio, 1992

DIVERS

Before practice the divers walk

on their hands along the far edge of the pool. 

Their reflections in the still, blue water

merge with their actual selves,

palm to palm,

hand-stepping delicately along the curb

like mythic creatures—half liquid,

half vapor, long-limbed and angelic—

feeling their way

along the verge of earthly elements.

In minutes they will hurl themselves

swanlike through the unhurried air,

spin like tumbler pigeons

and rip the clear surface water

sleek and powerful as dolphins.

But now, as the girls move delicately

as water striders, bound neither by earth

nor gravity nor time, they are most themselves.

―Ascendance―Pleasure Boat Studio, 2013

WRITE YOUR POEM!

Tao Qian (365-427) lived in China when the word poet conjured up two images.  One was a court appointed position.  In that case the poet was a postal worker or DMV clerk of some stature much like our current federal system for any clerical service of education, health or welfare.  But anybody from the FBI to the meter maid understood their role. 

The other image was that of Han Shan and others who traded celebrity/bureaucrat status for farms and hill country.  Tao Qian knew both worlds.

He was fired when the new administration came in.  He walked away from the bureau. Tao Qian paved the way for later Chinese poets to explore the connection of the poet to nature, much like Tim McNulty does in his essays and poems.  

How much of the poet inhabits the poem?  How much of the poem inhabits the poet? Where is nature in that border.  Seeking to dissolve that line came to be an attempt at becoming one with the Tao.

What is your poem?  Look at it on the page.  Type out two copies.  Throw one in the pond and watch the ink run.  Does your poem invade the world or discover the world?  The questions drive your next line break.  Write your poem.  Hand it to your aunt who has Alzheimer's.  If she smiles then you succeeded.  Write your poem.

RETURNING TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY (I)

Young, I was always free of common feeling.
It was in my nature to love the hills and mountains.
Mindlessly I was caught in the dust-filled trap.
Waking up, thirty years had gone.
The caged bird wants the old trees and air.
Fish in their pool miss the ancient stream.
I plough the earth at the edge of South Moor.
Keeping life simple, return to my plot and garden.
My place is hardly more than a few fields.
My house has eight or nine small rooms.
Elm-trees and Willows shade the back.
Plum-trees and Peach-trees reach the door.
Misted, misted the distant village.
Drifting, the soft swirls of smoke.
Somewhere a dog barks deep in the winding lanes.
A cockerel crows from the top of the mulberry tree.
No heat and dust behind my closed doors.
My bare rooms are filled with space and silence.
Too long a prisoner, captive in a cage,
Now I can get back again to Nature.

Tao Quin

June 2015

FEATURED POET: Matthew Brouwer is a performance poet and teaching artist residing in Bellingham, WA. His work bridges the worlds of spoken word and literary poetry to create a style that can be both evocative and subtle, enlivening and profound. He has performed throughout the US and been featured in regional literary, performance, and visual arts showcases such as Cirque, Phrasings, and Strands.  Matthew leads workshops and retreats for teens and adults, coordinates the Whatcom Juvenile Justice Creative Writing Project, and has facilitated Kintsugi: a writing circle for people suffering chronic medical conditions. In April he released his first full collection of poems, Stories We Must Tell, which details his lengthy journey of descent and recovery after a backpacking injury in 2009 slowly stripped him of the ability to walk. More on Matthew at www.matthewbrouwerpoet.com

VIDEO: Matthew Brouwer

Back Home, Week Five

Three times now

I have seen the Trickster

The latest in broad daylight

ears propped

padding down my lane

Now I am sure it must be a sign

What he wants

I don’t know

or maybe I do

Five months

unable to walk right

and now this wheelchair

beside my bed

Childhood room where I lay

refugee camp of all my things

Dad snoring in the room above

Mom tossing

Sleep doesn’t seem to help

a thousand prayers neither

Dreams still come

but these days

I play catch and release

Doctors think I’m nuts

parents, too

And what good am I to friends

except a burden to their minds?

Everything gets stripped

and beneath a single question

Who am I?

Without my scribbling hands

without my scrambling legs

Just a mind

rising in the night

full of words

VIDEO: Matthew Brouwer

And then the Moon

scratched me on the arm with its white hand

and I took hold the rope that hung

from its luminescence

and swung out over gardens

and fields

and lakes and hillsides

and forests

and the birds who were sleeping in them

Over newlyweds and divorces

and children in their animal pajamas

and the grandpas who could no longer

rise to lift them

And the horses in their barns

and the girls who every afternoon

forgot their loneliness to ride them

Over townships and cities

and playgrounds and water fountains

and empty parking lots and churches

and places where the dead collect

beneath the grass and stones

After the dream I was still in bed

when I was visited by foxes

and they rubbed against my arms

with their silken tails

until I too smelled like a creature

of the foliage

And I knew from them my life was the one thing

I could not have

unless I did not try to hold it

But there I sat

as if before a hundred miles of mountains

aching to be crossed

and the compass I had been given

I’d not yet learned to read

But that in the crossing I would learn to read it

and when I came to the river at the edge

that becomes a mouth

WRITE YOUR POEM

What is the relationship of your poem to silence?  Notice that Matthew's video's offer the viewer an entirely different experience.  

It makes you wonder about the brogue of Dylan Thomas and if he read the poem for his father when he wrote the refrain, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"

The spoken word has as much impact on the poem as the choice to use elements of prose over musical forms.

Why do you make the choices?  There's no right or wrong answer.  Write your poem.  Ask yourself why you write with or without form.  For a spoken word or a silent study.  When you are done thinking write it first on paper and then lean over the river next to your house and write it with your finger on the surface of the water.  Watch your poem flow with the Tao to another sea of words down river.

May, 2015

FEATURED POET: Caleb Barber holds a BA in English from Western Washington University, as well as an MFA in poetry from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. He has lived in Arizona, Montana, and Alaska, but he currently resides in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, where he works at an aerospace machine shop. He is an avid bike commuter and runner, and is a pretty good banjo player to boot. He has been widely published in literary journals, notably in Fulcrum, New Orleans Review, Los Angeles Review, and he was given a feature in Poet Lore. His first book, Beasts and Violins, is available from Red Hen Press. The title poem appeared in Best American Poetry 2009.

IN A TWILIGHT TOWN

At these hours a girl shows me the scar

she earned after her father’s chainsaw

bucked against her calf while he evened

the backyard stumps.  “It cut clear to my meat,”

she says.  “They had to fly me to the city.”

The rough, shiny lump is not grotesque. 

Her leg has grown around the wound

same as how trees will hatchet swings.

She stills wears skirts, for now, because

her body won’t be a woman’s for a few

more years, and free magazine offers

don’t come this far out in the country.

The bald slice through one eyebrow is either

from barbed wire or dog.  Could have

been her brother, before they sent him

to that school for boys just like him.

I’d like to hear about all those goldfish

that never survived through winter

on her parents’ porch.  I’d like to know how

the couch felt when it froze through.

But the plane for the mail route is spinning on

and this place will always be her stop. 

The night makes us all older, and just walking

toward it, she covers her thighs with the dark.

IN THE BASEMENT APARTMENT

My landlords who live upstairs begin

construction projects around 10pm

and finish arguing by six

the next morning. Their voices

are loudest in my back bedroom

near a duct, so that is where

I sometimes stand, one ear toward

the ceiling, trying to decode their grudge.

What begins with snaking

the bathroom sink, becomes war over

their daughter’s drinking.

Drywall repair actually concerns

a lie the wife told seven years ago.

Once, they decided one of them

would “just have to go,”

but they uncovered how to open

the kitchen windows instead. 

Someday, we’re all going

to find out what really happened

on that trip to New Jersey.

WRITE YOUR POEM

Caleb's poems remind you of a William Carlos Williams or Raymond Carver poem by offering you pictures.  We are inundated with images but his poems force you to slow down and wonder. They offer you humans.  Small moments of humanity.

What do your poems offer in the way of small moments of humanity?  Boil it down. Drink some tea.  Write your poem and blot the paper with the tea bag.  Send a copy to your mother.

April 2015

FEATURED POET: James Bertolino taught literature and creative writing for 36 years at Washington State University, Cornell University, University of Cincinnati, Western Washington University, and retired from a position as Writer-in-Residence and Chair of Creative Writing at Oregon’s Willamette University in 2006. His books have issued from publishing programs associated with Brown University, Cornell University, Princeton University and Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as Copper Canyon Press, New Rivers Press, Granite Publications, Cherry Grove Collections and World Enough Writers. His 12th volume of poetry,Ravenous Bliss: New and Selected Love Poems, was published by MoonPath Press in 2014.  He lives near Bellingham, Washington with his wife, artist and poet Anita Boyle.


VIDEO: JAMES BERTOLINO

Dishonesty

Chocolate-covered evil

with shattered almonds

waiting to inflict

sweet wounds.

==

The love song

of the mosquito

is often aborted

by a slap.

A wet red spot

many times larger than

the flying beast

achieves

something like

genius.

==

Look between your bare knees

and you might find a tiny moon,

its orbit pulled back and forth

by your knee-caps.

==

Some dishonesty

is very creative,

and should be appreciated.

          ==

Our Golden Collie

We were living across the street from

railroad tracks in Ashland, Wisconsin—

which was much larger, and many miles from

tiny Pence, Wisconsin where, when I was four

and my oldest sister nine, I unintentionally drowned

her puppy in a pond. She never forgave me.

It was the first time in my life that I was

associated with evil.

That day in Ashland I was playing outside

with our collie. We never kept her tied, or on

a leash, and when I heard tires screeching

on the road I ran around from the back of the building

and almost stepped on our dog, as she howled

and dragged herself away from the road.

I got my wagon, carefully lifted her in, and carried

her to the backyard, where I settled her into the grass

below the kitchen window of our apartment.

The lady upstairs, who was a kindergarten teacher,

had heard the car braking and seen our dog.

I soon found out she had called the police.

When the cop arrived he asked to see the dog.

He then told me she was suffering pretty bad, and

was too busted-up to survive. He said to head around

to the front, and halfway there I heard him shoot his pistol.

Without saying a word to me or anyone else,

he got back into his squad car and drove off.

When I found her dead, I held her sweet head and cried.

           I had just started second grade at a Catholic school,

and told my mother I did not want to go back.

I was sure that our beautiful collie being dead

was God’s punishment of me

           for having drowned my sister’s puppy 

            

WRITE YOUR POEM:

For Kin or King?

Poetry shares an odd quality that faces all artists.  Why do we do it? There poems written for our children. "Twas the Night before Christmas" was penned by a lawyer for his children.

Is your poetry for an audience with a soul or a commodity of ancient tradition.  Beethoven wrote symphonies and thousands of people compete to play in orchestras that play those symphonies.  Seth Godin calls these musicians victims of a well dressed sweat shop.  They play for the king.  They play for the court.  These musicians are driven by rote work and fear.  Love is mixed in their somewhere but the script is always the same.

Ancient China had its courts.  Poets in those courts were victims of a well dressed sweat shop.  So was their poetry. Praise came for those who could conform to the rules.  Invention and experimentation was left to hermits in the hills.  Admired but starving.  Who are you? 

As we practice any given craft something gnaws at the back of our soul. that we are practicing the art that reconnects us to our best selves or we are doing a math problem.  Ancient China put built poetry into their version of the SAT for a good job.  There's no clean answer.  Write your poem.  Wherever you are the world needs your work.  Write. Create.  Be the best part of your self and give it to the world.  Dance your dance. Write your poem.

March, 2015

FEATURED POET: Tess Gallagher:  Her ninth volume of poetry, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, was made available October 2011 from Graywolf Press. Other poetry includes Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Amplitude.  Gallagher’s The Man from Kenvara: Selected Stories was published fall 2009.  In 2008 Blackstaff Press in Belfast published Barnacle Soup—Stories from the West of Ireland, a collaboration with the Sligo storyteller Josie Gray.  Gallagher is also the author of Amplitude, Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, and two collections of short fiction: At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and Other Stories. She also spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners as a single volume first by Jonathan Cape in the UK in fall of 2009 and now forthcoming in September 2015 by Vintage.  Most recently she companioned the production of the film BIRDMAN, directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, which uses a story and a poem of Raymond Carver’s.  The film garnered four 2015 Oscar awards.  She spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland where many of her new poems are set, and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington.

*Bio adapted from Academy of American Poets.  Poems used with permission. Images of Tess painted by Alfredo Arreguin.

   



During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading

Mira, like a white goddess, is translating

so my left ear is a cave near Kotor

where the sea lashes and rakes

the iron darkness inside

the black mountains.  Young and old, the poets

are letting us know this sweltering night,

under a bridge near a river outside

Karver Bookstore at the beginning of July,

belongs to them.  They clear away debris

about politicians and personal suffering,

these gladiators of desire

and doubt, whose candor has roiled

me like a child shaking stolen beer to foam

the genie of the moment out of

its bottle.   The poets’ truth-wrought poems dragging it

out of me,  that confession--that I didn’t have children

probably because in some clear corner I knew I would have left them

to join these poets half a world away who, in their language

that is able to break stones, have broken me open

like a melon.   Instead of children, I leave my small dog, quivering

as I touched her on the nose, to let her know it’s

me, the one who is always leaving her, yes

I’m going, and for her I have no language with

which to reassure her I’m coming

back, no—what’s the use to pretend I’m

a good mistress to her, she who would never

leave me, she who looks for me everywhere

I am not, until I return.  I should feel guilty

but the Montenegrin poets have taken false guilt off

the table.  I’ve been swallowed by a cosmic

sneer, with an entire country behind it where

each day it occurs to them how many are still missing

in that recent past of war and havoc. 

Nothing to do but shut the gate behind me

and not look back where my scent

even now is fading from the grass. Nostalgia

for myself won’t be tolerated here.  I’m just a beast

who, if my dog were a person, would give me a pat

on the head and say something stupid like: Good dog.

I Have Never Wanted to March

or wear an epaulet. Once I walked

in a hometown parade to celebrate

a salmon derby. I was seven, my hair in

pigtails, a steel flasher strapped diagonally

across my chest bandolier-style

(in Catalan bandolera from banda––band

of people–and bandoler meaning bandit).

My black bandit boots were rubber

because here on the flanks of the Olympics

it always rains on our parades.

I believe I pushed a doll buggy.

I believe all parades, especially military

parades, could be improved if

the soldiers wore bandoliers made to attract

fish, and if each soldier pushed a doll buggy

inside which were real-seeming babies,

their all-seeing doll-eyes open

to reflect the flight of birds, of balloons

escaped from the hands of children to

hover over the town—higher than flags, higher

than minarets and steeples.

What soldier could forget

collateral damage with those baby faces

locked to their chin straps? It is

conceivable soldiers would resist

pushing doll buggies. Bending over

might spoil the rigidity of their marching.

What about a manual exhorting the patriotic

duty of pushing doll buggies? Treatises

on the symbolic meaning would need to be

written. Hollywood writers might be of use.

Poets and historians could collaborate,

reminding the marchers of chariots, of

Trojan horses, of rickshaws, of any wheeled

conveyance ever pulled, pushed or driven

in the service of humankind.

I would like, for instance, to appear

in the next parade as a Trojan horse. When

they open me I’ll be seven years old.

There will be at least seven of me

inside me, for effect, and because it’s

a mystical number. I won’t understand

much about war, in any case—especially

its good reasons. I’ll just want to be pushed

over some border into enemy territory, and

when no one’s thinking anything except: what

a pretty horse! I’ll throw open myself

like a flank and climb out, all

seven of me, like a many-legged spider

of myself. I’ll speak only

in poetry, my second language, because it

is beautifully made for exploring the miraculous

ordinary event––in which an alchemy

of words agrees to apprentice itself to the possible

as it evades the impossible. Also poetry

doesn’t pretend to know answers and speaks best

in questions, the way children do

who want to know everything, and don’t believe

only what they’re told. I’ll be seven

unruly children when they open me up,

and I’ll invite the children of the appointed enemy

to climb into my horse for a ride. We’ll be secret

together, the way words are

the moment before they are spoken—

those Trojan horses of silence, looking for a border

to roll across like oversized toys

manned by serious children—until one horse

has been pushed back and forth

with its contraband of mutually pirated children

so many times it will be clear to any adult watching

this unseemly display, that enemy territory

is everywhere when anyone’s child is at stake, when

the language of governments is reduced to ultimatums,

when it wants to wear epaulets

and to march without

Its doll buggy.

But maybe and edict or two could be made

by one child-ventriloquist through the mouth

of the horse, proposing that the advent of atrocities

be forestalled by much snorting, neighing, prancing and

tail swishing—by long, exhausted parades

of reciprocal child-hostages who may be

rescued only in the language of poetry

which insists on being lucid

and mysterious at once, like a child’s hand

appearing from under the tail

of the horse, blindly waiving to make sure that anyone

lined up along the street does not submit entirely

to the illusion of their absence, their

ever-squandered innocence, their hyper-responsive

minds in which a ladybug would actually fly away,

with only its tiny flammable wings,

to save its children from the burning house.