Review of The River Where You Forgot My Name by Corrie Williamson

Southern Illinois University Press/Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Paperback, 80 pages. $15.95. By Melissa Kwasny “A poem can be said to have two subjects,” Richard Hugo states in his collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town, “the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the […]

Unexpected Effects: Learning from Clay Artist Paul Soldner

By Heather Swan In a corner of a darkened courtyard, I knelt next to a brick wall which separated me from an inferno on the other side. Bright orange flame shot out between the bricks, making a lattice of dangerous light. The bare skin of my arms felt as though it might singe as I […]

Lessons of Time, Velocity, and Hard Music: Remembering Walt Pavlich

By Thomas Aslin This morning I searched through my file cabinet before latching onto a file of letters and postcards from the late poet Walter Pavlich. One card, mailed from New Orleans, and covered with Walt’s odd, inky scrawl—half in cursive, half in crabbed-print-style lettering—refers with some heat to the scantily dressed blonde on the […]

“This Is a Junior”: On Meeting Roethke

by William Pitt Root In spring term 1963 at UW, I attended Theodore Roethke’s class in an overcrowded room in Parrington Hall. I’d heard that on his way to his classes he greatly resembled a wounded elephant. To me he seemed more like a large, beardless, out of work Santa Claus (pink cheeks, white hair, […]

Return to a Meadow: Remembering Robert Duncan

By Carlos Reyes I first met Robert Duncan in the fall of 1968, at Seattle’s Union Station. He had come to Washington as poet-in-residence for a symposium at Central Washington University, where my good friend Phil Garrison was teaching. Phil knew how much I admired this well-known poet of the Black Mountain School, this lion of […]

In the Dark: Meeting Larry Levis

by Christopher Buckley In Memoriam: Larry Levis Waking in the dark, Daylight Savings gone, I’m remembering the Biltmore hotel in L.A., killing the afternoon at the MLA in 1981, the hopeful with their haircuts upstairs being grilled like fish. I knew better then than to hope. I’m remembering that dark empty bar there Larry and […]