We won’t stop publishing the magazine, but we’ve come to realize that there are things we can do online that are impossible in print. For one thing, we can publish more of the amazing writing we receive, in a more timely way, and make it available free to readers around the world. In recent years, the ever-growing volume of submissions we’ve received at the magazine has meant that we can take only a small percentage of the writing we admire, and the time between acceptance of a submission and publication has grown to almost two years. KR Online will allow us to double the amount of terrific fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews we can publish, and we’ll be able to get it to you more quickly.

What won’t change are our editorial standards or the production values we bring to the magazine. The literature we publish in KR Online may be a little edgier, a little more experimental, and certainly more timely, but everything we publish will be held to the same high standards and expectations as The Kenyon Review.

If you’re not a KR subscriber, you’ll now be able to be a KR Online reader as easily as checking any online news or gossip site. We want to make great writing available to everyone who feels its call. That’s one thing that online literary magazines can do, but like everything else on the web, you have to know where to look to find quality. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last year looking at the growing number of online literary magazines, and there are a lot of terrific ones out there. In fact, sometimes it seems like there are more magazines than readers. What KR Online offers is our guarantee of the same high editorial and production standards that we’ve brought to The Kenyon Review since 1939. Over the years, we’ve published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O’Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin. Short stories published in KR have won more O. Henry Awards than any other literary journal, and many poems that first appeared in the magazine have become modern classics. Now you can find the next generation of great writers at KR Online.

We’ll also be publishing regular reviews of new books, as well as thoughtful essays on more established writers. As reviews vanish from print publications, online literary journals will become the serious reader’s source for reviews of the latest fiction and poetry. We’ll be able to offer commentary on the books that are important right now, bringing them to the attention of readers around the world.

So take a look. Tell us what you think! We’ll be listening, making changes and improvements over time. Come back and visit us regularly, and we think you’ll find that KR Online will become an important part of your literary world.

Talking in bed ought to be easiest

Lying together there goes back so far

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside the wind’s incomplete unrest

builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind

Or not untrue and not unkind.

The connection between baseball and poetry has been written about by others more capable than myself so I’m going to be sourcing lots of stuff for this post.  First off, here is one of my favorite statements about baseball that points out the shared emotional space between poetry and baseball: 

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”—A. Bartlett Giamatti
 

Then there’s this quote from Robert Frost:
 

“Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”
 

And this from Levi Stahl, who has a terrific essay up at the Poetry Foundation’s site about poetry and baseball:
 

“Baseball’s very rhythms are those of poetry, acknowledging that if everything can change in a moment, then attention to those moments is an essential duty.”
 

One of the poets most famously obsessed with baseball was Jack Spicer, who I have written about before.  Here is what poet Peter Gizzi says about how baseball helped formulate Spicer’s poetics, followed by two sections from Spicers “Poems for the Sporting News”:

For Spicer, baseball offers an ideal correlative to poetic composition with its model of mutuality, reciprocity, fraternal competition, gaming, and even “stealing” for the greater good. Neither player nor poet can exist alone. Both are absolutely dependent on the rules of their trade, their ability to cheat, the existence of tradition, and the regionalist team spirit of their peers. In addition to undermining the militaristic seriousness of the avant-garde, Spicer’s baseball vocabulary offers a joust at Olson’s theory of composition by field, especially considering it as the very heart or projective center of the ideal city, Olson’s “polis.” (from Jacket #7)

              3

Pitchers are obviously not human. They have the ghosts of dead people in them. You wait there while they glower, put their hands to their mouths, fidget like puppets, while you’re waiting to catch the ball.
You give them signs. They usually ignore them. A fast outside curve. High, naturally. And scientifically impossible. Where the batter either strikes out or he doesn’t. You either catch it or you don’t. You had called for an inside fast ball.

The runners on base either advance or they don’t

In any case

The ghosts of the dead people find it mightily amusing. The pitcher, in his sudden humaness looks toward the dugout in either agony or triumph. You, in either case, have a pair of hot hands.

Emotion

Being communicated

Stops

Even when the game isn’t over.

                4 

God is a big white baseball that has nothing to do but go in a curve or a straight line. I studied geometry in highschool and know that this is true.

Given these facts the pitcher, the batter and the catcher all look pretty silly. No Hail Marys

Are going to get you out of a position with the bases loaded and no outs, or when you’re 0 and 2, or when the ball bounces out to the screen wildly. Off seasons

I often thought of praying to him but could not stand the thought of that big, white, round, omnipotent bastard.

Yet he’s there. As the game follows rules he makes them.

I know

I was not the only one who felt these things.

There are many poems about baseball, but most of them are so heavily nostalgic or silly that as a genre, I have to say that the baseball poem is pretty dreadful.  The most successful examples seem to be when, like Spicer, the poet uses the game of baseball as a vehicle for telling us something about life or art itself.  The following two poems are, I think, good examples of this, first in the Williams Carlos Williams poem in which he explores the menace inherent in the nature of crowds, and next in the Marianne Moore poem that draws the parallels between baseball and writing. 

William Carlos Williams

“The Crowd at the Ball Game”

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal -

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut —

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight - it
is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

Marianne Moore

“Baseball & Writing”

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement -
a fever in the victim -
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited? Might it be I?

It’s a pitcher’s battle all the way - a duel -
a catcher’s, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
back to plate. (His spring
de-winged a bat swing.)
They have that killer instinct;
yet Elston - whose catching
arm has hurt them all with the bat -
when questioned, says, unenviously,
“I’m very satisfied. We won.”
Shorn of the batting crown, says, “We”;
robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
“Going, going . . . ” Is
it? Roger Maris
has it, running fast. You will
never see a finer catch. Well . . .
“Mickey, leaping like the devil” - why
gild it, although deer sounds better -
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
one-handing the souvenir-to-be
meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
He is no feather. “Strike! . . . Strike two!”
Fouled back. A blur.
It’s gone. You would infer
that the bat had eyes.
He put the wood to that one.
Praised, Skowron says, “Thanks, Mel.
I think I helped a little bit.”
All business, each, and modesty.
Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
In that galaxy of nine, say which
won the pennant? Each. It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
by Boyer, finesses in twos -
like Whitey’s three kinds of pitch and pre-
diagnosis
with pick-off psychosis.
Pitching is a large subject.
Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
catch your corners - even trouble
Mickey Mantle. (”Grazed a Yankee!
My baby pitcher, Montejo!”
With some pedagogy,
you’ll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees. Trying
indeed! The secret implying:
“I can stand here, bat held steady.”
One may suit him;
none has hit him.
Imponderables smite him.
Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
require food, rest, respite from ruffians. (Drat it!
Celebrity costs privacy!)
Cow’s milk, “tiger’s milk,” soy milk, carrot juice,
brewer’s yeast (high-potency -
concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez -
deadly in a pinch. And “Yes,
it’s work; I want you to bear down,
but enjoy it
while you’re doing it.”
Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
if you have a rummage sale,
don’t sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion.

Combine grapes and melon. Add rum. Set it alight.

…Or at least that’s how I remember many a dessert recipe from an amusingly vintage cookbook, With a Jug of Wine by Morrison Woods . The first edition was from 1949, but I’m pretty sure mine was from the early 60’s. Many of the recipes were taken from his newspaper column, “For Men Only,” and they seemed intended for a bachelor aiming to impress, despite rudimentary kitchen skills. Hence the preference for finishing a dessert by lighting it on fire. Dramatic. Manly. Extremely simple.

In this interview with Dmitri Nabokov, Steve Coates recalls that Vladimir Nabokov’s wife saved a finished draft of Lolita from the flames. (She, as his amanuensis and editor, was saving her own opus, too.) And one reads of this from time to time, these sacrificial burnings born of frustration, defeat, or just the simple wish for a clean slate.

I can imagine these feelings. But it’s hard to imagine having one paper draft, a single embodiment of all one’s labor. Not just the labor of writing, but also of typing, correcting, retyping, and so on.

If I wanted to destroy my manuscript, wipe it off the face of the earth, it would involve hitting delete, then shredding the contents of my virtual recycling bin. Just not the same as watching the pages blacken, curl, then float skyward, never to return…

In the digital age, what becomes of this urge to destroy? By what means the satisfying digital destruction? Or is there really no substitute for fire?

For many writers, who labor in obscurity and can only dream of the recognition that the Nobel Prize brings, this kind of complaint sounds perverse, even ungracious. From the cheap seats, it looks like the Nobel isn’t a curse, but an act of cultural canonization by which writers who have already enjoyed critical success are given the popular attention they deserve. Some become best-sellers for the first time in their careers, although this effect apparently doesn’t extend to poets or novelists with unpronounceable foreign names: the novels of 2002 winner Imre Kertész remain largely untranslated into English, and Derek Walcott has complained that the increase in his book sales didn’t come close to making up for the disruption to his writing. (Still, the prize money – which amounted to almost $1 million – allowed Walcott to build “a very nice house in a very nice little bay in St. Lucia with a studio,” so we shouldn’t feel too badly for him.) The prize may make it hard to write, but that’s partly because it often comes late in a writer’s career, when his or her creative energy may already be diminishing. Lessing acknowledged as much in her BBC interview, saying that she doesn’t have the energy to write novels anymore: “This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plughole.”

But then, this conflict between writing and literary success goes deeper than the flood of media attention that comes with the Nobel.  Writing is a solitary occupation, but publishing is a business based on celebrity. Writers work alone, and need that solitude to allow their imaginations to work, but we long for public acclaim and need readers to validate our work with their attention. Without readers, we’re like prophets hallucinating in the desert with no congregation to terrify with our visions. Writing is private, but literature is an act of communion. It’s the congregation that makes the prophet: without them, he’s just another madman howling in a cave.

Most writers find that by choosing literature, they’ve chosen exile in the desert. In our culture, to write is to cast seeds onto dry, stony land. Winning the Nobel, in these terms, is like getting caught up in a flash flood roaring down through a rocky arroyo: the sudden inundation is even more devastating because it takes place in such a parched landscape. That may partly explain why Lessing’s complaint about the draining away of her creative juices has spared a novelist like Philip Roth, despite his advancing years. In a sense Roth is lucky that he’s never won the Nobel, so he’s never suffered its other – psychological – effect, in which winners seem to feel that their best writing is now behind them and become stilted and self-considering in their last work. But then Roth has already gone through his own version of the flash-flood of media attention early in his career. One might say that the desert in which he wandered for many years was one of his own making – a desert of the ego. Yet he seems miraculously to have emerged from it a better writer as old age has brought its humiliations. (Either that, or he had an agent sharp enough to specify a minimum number of literary triumphs on his contract with the devil, so that now he has a whole workshop full of scribbling demons at his service, churning out one great book after another to fulfill the fine print.)

And that reflects a sad truth we have to acknowledge: humiliation is better for a writer than winning the laurel. Writers are god-like in their imaginations but pathetic in the world. We may try to cultivate humility, but the truth is that it’s simply an attempt to claim a virtue out of necessity: writers have no choice but to be humble, since the world offers us so many humility lessons. But in the strange wasteland of the human psyche, that’s exactly what tempts so many writers to cast this cloak of humility aside and reveal their raging egos. Most writers want more attention than the world concedes to them, so we drink, or teach, or seduce the young to get our fix. Some edit. Some even blog.

But I have to ask: why did we come to this desert, anyway? Did we expect the sky to rain down honey on us? (Try advertising.) Or did we come because we’re caught up in a prophetic fever, and the harshness of this life inspires visions? The truth is that most of the writers I know aren’t egotists, or at least not most of the time. We might wish for success, but most of us accept that writing is as much a spiritual discipline as a career. Given our choice, we embrace our solitary lives and wish for attention not so much for ourselves as for our work. If we dream of literary success, it’s not for the wealth or the fame. (Let’s face it, the rewards of even the greatest literary success, J.K. Rowling excluded, are sadly modest by contemporary standards of wealth and fame.) Every writer begins as a reader, and so we know the power literature has to shape our lives. We want to work that miracle ourselves, so we crouch in our desert caves, longing for rain, but ready to embrace the wind if the visions will come.

Many poets would instinctively cut the opacity and the interiority out of this poem in favor of straight imagery and profundity. They would skim the “pure and lucid wisdom of the Buddha” off the top and leave the rest to rot. And for good reason. It’s terrifying to see someone purposefully leave all of it in—no one would accept such a submission!—but by doing so, and by addressing the struggle between private thought and public expression as the major theme of his work, Whalen’s poetry shines.

So true! It seems a habit of an overly workshopped mind to cut to the elevated and profound and “leave the rest to rot.” In a fiction workshop I attended last year, Chris Bachelder made the case that workshops have the unfortunate tendency to remove bumps. But some works are bumpy, and should remain that way. Excising such bumps takes away the work’s singularity.

Whalen’s poems are full of bumps. One finds them even in very short poems. Here’s “Old Age Echoes”:

Lately I’ve seen myself
As fat naked waddling baby
All alone in the yard
Bright flowers
Silver lawnmower blades
Big dog approaching (friendly?)
Berries
What are fears or dangers?

I imagine that, were this poem subjected to a workshop, an earnest, crosseyed workshopper would ask, “What are the berries doing here? I don’t think the poem needs berries.” The crosseyed poet would have a point: what the berries are doing thematically—a safe and pretty counterpoint to the poem’s dangers—has already been done by the “bright flowers” three lines above. But, in my imagined scenario, this workshopper does not have the last word. A fierce monk walks into the classroom and whacks the crosseyed poet across the back with a stick. Numerous times. His eyes uncross, and he says with relief: “Oh yes, those berries are correct in that location. The phenomenal world contains berries. Keep the berries.” The berries are no longer inessential repetition. Seen differently, they become vital, assymetrical bumps.

Jack Kerouac made this case in different terms in his “Statement on Poetics” in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology: “Add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science.”

In Whalen and Kerouac’s case, the choice to include berries, bumps, and alluvials has to do to with the aesthetics of zen. Nichols writes: “In his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968), Thomas Merton compares the true Zen artist’s mind to a mirror, a reflective surface that does not strive for meaning or poetic beauty.” The choice to include berries, then, could be the result of an attempt to mirror the phenomenal world without intentions of beauty or meaning. Reality has berries, poem has berries.

Doom! Doom! Call the Kinks! Polaroid will soon stop manufacturing its instant film. Of course nostalgia is one of the most unpleasant poses one can strike (and I have no plans to try to make my computer look like it was designed by H.G. Wells), but this news is wearing my heart out. Why?

There are so many reasons to love a Polaroid. They are so tender. There is only ever one of them. It is not their immediacy, but their vulnerability that I find so appealing. It means something to give a Polaroid away, to relinquish that particular frame of that particular moment to another human being. Polaroids! You can become lost! You can disappear forever in a way that pixels just cannot. It seems like a Polaroid picture could be capable of restoring some of the ritual aspects that Benjamin says art has escaped in “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

…for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

And I love that frame, that elegant white space, so perfectly proportioned and inviting. It sets one’s thumbs at ease–so kind! So human! An airy waiting room to rest in while the image develops, swells from a foggy dawn into the odd darkness and definition of light. Or later, maybe, the invitation shifts, suggests the space might be receptive to being written upon: a date, a name, an unrelated message.

Oh and the sounds that pour out of that machine! The whir, the click, the hum–sometimes I want to take a picture just for the music of it. If you go here you can listen to (and watch) Andy Warhol play with his Polaroid. We can’t ask Warhol for his take on the death of the medium, but if you go here you can find Chuck Close and other photographers despondantly responding.

I am going to go hoard some film, but I’ll leave you back in the hands of the Kinks, who are directing us into the future.

Not that we haven’t seen some interesting things. The fields of flowering perversity were particularly impressive. Who knew it would all be so… vivid? (The rash has mostly healed now. Thanks for asking.) And, yes, the moment when I mistook you for my mother was amusing. But do we have to keep talking about it?

“We’re most human,” you like to say, “in our inconsistency.” Certainly my characters agree. But are you? Human? If so, then why am I following you?

Look, no pressure, but I confess I’ve been counting on the whole divinity thing. It’s the golden glow you give off in the morning. Who wouldn’t be charmed? But by the afternoon, you’re beginning to look a little frazzled, a little more – how shall I put this? — sweaty. And the robe’s starting to get a bit frayed. Didn’t I buy some sheets in that pattern last year?

Here’s the thing: writing a novel is an act of faith. It’s like jumping off a cliff with a needle, string, and a few yards of silk, counting on sewing the parachute on the way down. It would really help to know you’re who you claim to be, and not just some projection of my desire. All the other boys are out playing in the sunshine, but I sit in this little room, day after day, following you wherever you lead. Frankly, it’s a little humiliating. And have I mentioned that you snore?

I know you don’t like to hear about creative writing workshops… Wait, hold on! Honestly, you’re just being paranoid. Nobody’s saying we can do your job better than you! We just want to understand you better, that’s all. You have to admit that you can be a little confusing. It’s the rational mind that gives us trouble. (Can we leave your old boyfriends out of it? Not everyone can be Rimbaud, okay?)

But I had a teacher once who warned us about you. “If the muse gets in your way,” he said, “push her out of the boat.” Misogynistic? No question about it. We all winced. Still, you have to admit, there are times every writer finds you frustrating. He was talking about clear story structure… No, I don’t think writers only talk about structure when they have tiny… Okay, I’m sorry! Just don’t let go of the vine, please!

Yes, I find you attractive. No, you haven’t put on weight. You look… healthy. Sorry, I haven’t found any goats to sacrifice yet. (Why only goats?) Of course I have faith in you, even if you can’t read a map.

You’re the love of my life.

Now will you pull me out?

By “a place” I think what is really meant is a financial livelihood. There are obviously a limited number of grants and fellowships available which are granted strictly on the merit of a writing sample that could support some of these non-skill based poets, but since teaching is the main way that poets make a living, poets who aren’t able or are unwilling to teach may miss out on a way of having a lifestyle in which they can both have financial security and write. This can’t be a good thing for poetry.

Probably because I have spent most of my writing life in academia, I have a hard time thinking of a poet that I know personally who falls into the category of someone who is a brilliant poet but could never hack the teaching/reading/reviewing life because of mental or personal issues. I know they exist, and I love the work of many past poets who were unable to live the academic lifestyle (Dickson, Crane, Bob Kaufman, John Wieners), but I’m not sure that I know anyone like this.

As for those who are unwilling to exist in academia (like Willams, Stevens, O’Hara, etc.), I know plenty of folks who want to be professional, skill-based poets with teaching jobs but who haven’t found a way to make it happen yet and are pursuing other employment in the meantime. But I don’t know many people who are perfectly contented to have a career outside of teaching or editing while still writing poems. While I have chosen to go down many of the “proper” channels to become a skill-based poet (I have an MFA, I teach, I give readings, I have a fellowship at a University), I still read my inability to think of contemporary poet that I know who is A) a terrific poet and B) not interested in pursuing at least some of the activities of the skill-based poet as a shortcoming not only of my own, but of our poetic moment in general. Honestly, I am much more interested in those poets who are unable to be skill-based than unwilling. There is simply something to be said for a poet whose work you have spent hours on the couch with but who you would never want inside of your home. Who are those poets now?

While talking about the phenomenon of skill-based poets, Boland asks the question, “Who is losing out?” I’m very curious as to what others think about this—do you know someone who is a good poet whose work is flying under the radar because for whatever reason they can’t perform the basic steps most people take (being in workshops, sending out work, giving readings) to become a poet with a readership? And if you don’t, does it worry you? Or is it simply a fact of poetry that there are always going to be some poets who are so marginalized or insular in their lifetime that we will only discover them after the fact? Or never?

After reading this piece in the Sunday Oregonian on William Stafford, with whom Portland is obsessed, and after learning, on the same day that Gary Snyder has won the Ruth Lilly prize, I got to thinking about legendary Oregon poets, and the difficulty of living and writing in a much-written landscape.

Gary Snyder especially makes writing about nature–especially this nature–problematic, makes it hard to have coyotes, cedars, the mountains, or the rain in your poems. Here’s a poem of his from a fan’s site, the title of which, perhaps not coincidentally, is a small town in Oregon as well as a lovely, lovely plant that grows on the coast:

Manzanita

Before dawn the coyotes
weave medicine songs
dream nets -- spirit baskets --
milky way music
they cook young girls with
to be woman;
or the whirling dance of
striped boys --

At moon-set the pines are gold-purple
Just before sunrise.

The dog hastens into the undergrowth
Comes back panting
Huge, on the small dry flowers.

A woodpecker
Drums and echoes
Across the still meadow

One man draws, and releases      an arrow
Humming, flat,
Misses a gray stump, and splitting
A smooth red twisty manzanita bough.

Manzanita     the tips in fruit,
Clusters of hard green berries
The longer you look
The bigger they seem,

`little apples'

In Snyder’s landscape poems, the very Existence of the landscape is entirely the point. As Christian Wiman said, “Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” As the judges who gave him the Ruth Lilly said, “…he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility.” In fact, it seems to me that he doesn’t use the natural world at all. It is just there, and the poems ask that we, beatifically, regard it.

I grant that this work, this movement, this attitude probably seemed revolutionary in its time, and I can enjoy some of the poems. But I argue that it could only be done once, and living in the geographic and generational wake of this poetry’s popularity means you, as a writer, have to invoke nature very carefully to make it effective, fresh, and powerful. It is not enough just to render the moment by naming, in sacred tones, what occupies the landscape, no matter how awe-inspiring the landscape actually is.

Makes it tempting to stop writing about nature entirely. No more trees in my poems, no more rivers, no more fields.

But then I remember James Galvin. He’s not a Northwesterner, but (the Western) land and landscape figure prominently in his poems. (According to the Academy of American poets, “he has worked as a rancher for part of each year all his life.”) The difference is that in Galvin’s poems the landscape works with metaphor and thought. What makes this poems poems is that he does use nature. Here’s one from Lethal Frequencies (1995):

Small Countries

In defense of whatever happens next, the navy of flat-bottomed popcorn clouds steams over like they are floating down a river we’re under. To the west, red cliffs, more pasture, the blue Medicine Bow with stretchmarked snowfields, quartzite faces like sunny bone. I’m worried about Lyle getting back from town with his oxygen, but then I see him through binoculars turn the Studebaker, antlike, off the country road and up the four-mile grade, so small down there that I want to imagine his hands on the wheel, still strong, his creased blue jeans and high-top shoes I know he wears to town. He turns off the road on a small knoll about halfway up and stops the truck, facing the mountains. He still looks small against so much space, but I can see his left arm and shoulder and the brim of his hat lowered as he lights a smoke and looks off toward the mountains, the small countries of light and dark rush across the prairie towards him and over him.

From that first clause, the poem calls up human frailties and vulnerabilities–vulnerability to the land and its weather, but also to our own bad habits. Also these things are beautiful. The landscape is the material with which Galvin tells this story.

Now, a purely speculative thought. The famous nature poetry of the Northwest comes from a time when the mainstream societal and governmental relationship to the land was one of extraction. The land was to be tamed to further the harvest of natural resources. Our regional economy was based on logging, mining, fishing, and ranching. Notice, in Gary Snyder, both lookout cabins and logging trucks. The counter-cultural attitude toward the land was one of reverence, but this was just the flip side of the mainline attitude. Now that the land has become quaint in most lives, something to be recreated upon and conserved, now that our collective prosperity is driven by technological innovation (at least in the case of Seattle; Portland’s collective prosperity seems driven by inbound wealth), now that technological innovation (in the form of renewable energy) is our great hope, maybe formal innovation will become the Northwest poet’s trademark. Bring on the wind farms.