First poems in one of our last cities

There’s a wikipedia page that makes the claim that the first poem written in Seattle was “Chief Seattle’s Speech of 1854″ (actually published in 1887, two years before Washington became a state), a translation of a translation written almost thirty years after the event, reminiscent of scripture. This set me thinking about Seattle poetry during the pioneer period. Who was writing here before Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke?

Lonnie Nelson, a wonderful woman who attends every Jobs with Justice meeting or action held in the city, has been documenting the city’s labor movement through poems since the 1950s. One of her poems in her collection Hidden Monuments describes the act of clipping and saving poems from the local newspaper in the early 1970s. If I make it to the main branch of the library this week, I’ll try to tease out a few poems from the microfilm collection, see what else was happening in poetry in Seattle in 1887 (also the year the Seattle P.I. was established).

Until then, I’m chewing over this well-worn phrase of Richard Hugo’s: eat stone and go on.

“Monsieur Pierre est mort” by Daniel Gutstein

Thread topic: When you read a prose poem, how do you know if it’s poetry?

I’m reading “Monsieu Pierre est mort” and thinking about how the story level of a poem often shares the structure of a joke. I begin with unlikely premise, examine three examples or as many as the joke will bear, deliver the punch. This poem upends my expectations wickedly by inviting me to ask is this poetry? right up until the punch (line), and then to savor my bafflement as I reconsider the title and wonder at the poet’s skill to hide the meaning of plain language (Mr. Pierre is dead) until it is revealed through the poet’s imagination. It’s ridiculous right up to the “Oh la la” and then quite suddenly sublime.

It’s an old question, but each of us must examine these things for ourselves.

Related question: how do you know when a found poem is a poem?

Recent found poem:

A clown in El Salvador

protests bandits

dressing up like clowns

to rob and kill people

by spitting

a huge ball of fire

into the air.

Seattle Arts & Lectures Season 2010-11

Billy Collins has been on my mind recently, and here he is on the SAL lineup– a rockstar series if you are going to be in the Northwest this fall. That sent me back to my copy of Picnic, Lightening and “Japan”– a poem in page 51 that rings a low-voiced bell through its stanzas. Here’s a shard:

and everytime I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

Given that ‘excruciating’ has a frustrating, onomatopoeic appeal and that ‘pressure’ and ‘surface’ both hiss with “the general kinds of “release” with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar” (Fussel, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, 121), the sounds in this stanza (and throughout the poem) suggest to me not only the ringing of the bell but also “coitus– the physical act of love” (The Big Lebowski). Later in the poem the moth becomes “a hinge in the air above our beds”– the sound of a creaking hinge interchangeable with the (assumed) sound of box springs creaking to the rhythm of “the tongue of the bell, ringing you.”

This is a poem about his favorite haiku, which goes unnamed and under-alluded. It must be a powerhouse of sound sensation:

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

What poems do you want to listen to over and over again?

Bonus: Pinsky reciting “Samurai Song” on an elevator.

Seattle Literary Magazines

An interesting analysis by Matt Briggs, worth the click: Social Network of Seattle Literary Magazines (Print and Web)

experimental poetry thread

“Most experimental poems are at least concerned with the question of existence and/or are ontological in nature. First and foremost the primacy of language is questioned;  second the space in which language is being presented comes up for question.”

Kinsella, John. “Innovative poetry: a common language.” The Literary Review 48.2 (2005): 65. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 9 June 2010.

Please post experimental poems for discussion in the comments.

Expanding our horizons

Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams in 1909:

Lect. I. Learn your art thoroughly. If you’ll study the people in that first lecture and then reread your stuff– you’ll get a lot more ideas about it than you will from any external critique I can make of the verse you have sent me.

Vale et me ama!

P.S. And remember a man’s real work is what he is going to do, not what is behind him. Avanti e coraggio!

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. p 8.

The poems in the summer issue of Eudaimonia, with their themes of broken boundaries and transgressed horizons,  inspire me to think about expanding my horizons as a reader. There are many excellent resources for finding new poetry and new publications on the internet, and epoetryreview.com has linked to Newpages.com, ConstantCritic.com, and PoetryDaily.org since its inception. But where do you go to discover new voices? Which blogs and websites excite you? Enrage you? Where is the pulse of poetry on the net today?

For the inaugural thread of our blog, I’d like to open up for comments about poetry on the web. What are our best and worst resources, and are poets making the best use of the internet? What’s your homepage for new poetry?

Update: This morning I came across Spencer Selby’s List of Experimental Poetry/Art Magazines in one of Lyn Hejinian’s footnotes in Best New American Poetry 2004. I’ll continue posting links to broad resources like this one as I find them.