Poetry

Summer 2005

In Praise of Fertile Land

There aren’t many anthologies that juxtapose poems by the likes of Robert Frost with those of elementary school kids. In Praise of Fertile Land does, and it works.

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a treeToward heaven still,And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or threeApples I didn’t pick upon some bough.But I am done with apple-picking now,

intones Frost in “After Apple-Picking”—expressing, it may be, not just the fatigue of harvest, but adult world-weariness.

Then along comes second-grader Henry Phillips, offering “A Recipe for a Garden”:

Add roses and a huge stretch for tulips.Pinch in a … » More …

Winter 2003

“Talk happiness,” wrote the prolific poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox about 125 years ago. “The world is sad enough / Without your woe.” The former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has largely gone in that direction, and so has Scott Poole (’92 B.S. Psych.; ’95 B.A. English), who lives in Spokane and reads his poems Monday mornings on public radio station KPBX (91.1 FM).

In short, if one has a sense of humor—preferably of the absurd as well—it’s hard not to like most of the 43 poems that comprise Poole’s second book. “I’m sleeping on the coffee table tonight. / I think someone stole my bed.” … » More …

Winter 2007

Famous

When it comes to fame and poetry, the locus classicus surely must be this passage from Milton’s “Lycidas”: “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days.” We of the 21st century have not so far shown ourselves much disposed to scorn any delights at all, most likely because we are not inclined to accept Phoebus Apollo’s sermon to the effect that “Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.”

But the fame we encounter in the 51 generally short poems of Famous, by Kathleen Flenniken ’83, is … » More …

Fall 2005

The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars

While undertaking a 15-minute workout on the elliptical machine at the fitness center, I read a dozen poems from Chris Forhan’s 2003 Morse Prize-winning book, The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars. Some poetry lovers might regard this as a shallow gesture, perhaps even a kind of sacrilege. Of course I intend no such disrespect to the high art of poesy, or as Dylan Thomas so memorably wrote, the “craft or sullen art.” The word “sullen” here means “silent,” and the North Idaho Athletic Club is no such site. No, I was reading and enjoying such poems as “Piet,” “Dumbwaiter to Heaven,” and “Some Words for … » More …