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Paul Nelson

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Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo,
2nd Count of Revillagigedo

 

……y who is de San Juan after whom
……………….de islas de San Juan are named?
…………………………..& how did Spaniards

….get here and who, why, how
………………………………….did the blood stop
…………at one pig, how
…………………………..were the war pigs (for once)
…………………………………………………………………..denied
………………………………………………………………….(denuded
divested of covering
made bare?)

……………………………… Coulda been war, glorious
………………………………………………..here in Isla y Archiepelago de San Juan.

……………………………….Cannon balls and musket blasts
……………..to scatter the last of the Canis lupis
………………………….the Columbia Black-Tailed Deer, the
…………………………rare Northern Sea Otter (for whom

………..or whose pelt Quimper would trade copper
………..years before Filthy Jerry cd get his
………………………..filthy fingers on it.)
 
 
 
But there’s something in the Cascadia water wd
……………………………………bring out the noble in men
…………………..like Admiral Baynes who’d soon
………………………………………………………be knighted
…………………..who’d refuse Governor Douglass’
…………………………………….August 2, 1859 troop landing order.

………………Something that’d attract
……………………………………………..Spaniards like the Mexican Viceroy:

Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo

(Not the San Juan who’d be put in a cell not much bigger than himself. Not the one who’d see the union of jiwa and Divine in the metaphor of Holy Marriage. Not the one who’d write about how the bride hides herself and abandoned him in his lonely groaning. Not the one who’d feel the need to purge every last imperfection every last psychic typo every last lust urge every last of the dominator fixation not mitigated but transcended by The Fire to which Blaser wd allude. Not the he of a thousand graces diffusing, graces unnumbered, those that protect from the thousand cuts that come from conceptions of
the Beloved. Not the one whose metaphor’d bride’d leave his heart there in that lashed meat cage maintained by a bit of bread and salted fish. Not the one with the silvered surface who’d one day mirror forth. Not the one on the wing whose Beloved’d one day see the strange islands with the roaring torrents (Cascade Falls?) & whose gales would whisper amour, a love-awakening south wind not spewed by Spetsx who’d be the rain wind from the Southwest a two day canoe journey south of the present scene. Not the one whose Beloved bride from a mother corrupted would make a bed out of flowers,
protected by lions hung with purple and crowned with a thousand shields of gold. Not the one whose bride’d attract young ones & who’d commence the flow of divine balsam & get him pitchdrunk on fire and scent and spiced wine. Not he of all consuming painless fire drunk on pomegranate wine whose only job was amour. Not that San Juan.)

This Juan was a Cubano,
………………….born in La Habana.
……………………………………..The third Criollo Viceroy
……………………………………………………………….of Hispaña Nueva.

This Juan wd see
…………………the Capital (then Veracruz)
………………………………………………..as a slum, peasants
…………………………………..in thin robes, straw hats, trash
…………………………………..in the streets and the first flash
…………………of all those Rez dogs to come.

…………………………………………………………………………..This Juan
(el Vengador de la Justicia)
……………………………………he’d find & hang
……………………………………the outlaw gangs
……………………………………………………..of murderers

& clean the Viceroy’s palace.
………………………………………Light the streets of Ciudad de Mexíco
……………………….pave highways to Veracruz,
………………………………………………Acapulco,
………………………………………………Guadalajara,
………………………………………………San Blas y
………………………………………………Toluca

…………………………find the Aztec Calendar Stone & set
……………………………….the heavens on fire but found
……………………………………………..Cascadia

……………………………………………………………not worth the troops
………………………..it’d cost to own her,
…………………………………………………..settled
……………………………………………………………for leading the flock
………………………………..of 4.5 million future Mexicans
…………………………………………………………………he’d count and a few islands
…………………………to this day
………………………………………in one way or another
…………………………………………………………………..bear his name:

………………………..San Juan
……………………………………….Orcas
………………………………………………….Guemes.

………………………………Dots in a green landscape
………………………………………..as seen from Constitution
………………………………………………………….where the divine balsam flows
……………………………………………………by the kayaks
……………………………………………………………………….and the wind whispers

………………………………………………………………...Mary.

………………………………………………………………………………..8:49A – 2.24.13

“Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo” is from the Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia.

 

 

SPLAB founder Paul E Nelson wrote Organic Poetry (VDM Verlag, Germany, 2008) & a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, 2010) shortlisted for a Genius Award in Literature by The Stranger. In 26 years of radio he interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles, Wanda Coleman, George Bowering, Joanne Kyger, Jerome Rothenberg & others, including many Northwest poets. He lives in Seattle and writes at least one American Sentence every day.

Jane Alynn

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Hummingbird

 

She remembers how he entered the flower,
keen on the honeysuckle
that fluttered itself,
enamored of red—
his brazen body, hovering,
darting in and out,
interrupted, now and then,
by the humming
of a nectar-seeking rival,
equally as beautiful.
Then with the flush of spring
he turns a coppery back to her
ascends, slowly, to great heights
and dives on whistling wings
in a giddy twist toward her, tail on fire.
She’d like to get used to this.
But such displays are short-lived.
Given to being alone,
never alighting—or not for long,
ever a flitterer, he buzzes off
to the next flower
as she knew he would,
leaving her the nest
and a hunger
greater than her tiny body lets on.

 

“Hummingbird” is reprinted from Necessity of Flight (Cherry Grove Collections, 2011).

 

Jane Alynn is a poet, writer, and fine art photographer. She is the author of Necessity of Flight (Cherry Grove, 2011) and a chapbook, Threads & Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2005). In addition to winning Second Place in New South’s 2012 Poetry Contest, she received a William Stafford Award from Washington Poets Association in 2004. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals as well as in many anthologies. Recently, her poems, written in collaboration with visual artists, have been exhibited in galleries, a synergy she also explores in her photographic artwork.

 

Lenora Rain-Lee Good

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Little Boys and War

 

I was six; brother was five.
Papa was gone to war.
Planes roared overhead
Racing for the city,
Our farmhouse shook;
Dishes crashed on the floor.

Mama screamed and
Called us to her.
In the roar, we wouldn’t hear,
And rushed outside
To watch the show.

Could we really see the bombs
As they flew toward the city?
“There! There!” we’d yell
As planes swooshed low
And dirt blossomed upward
And lives and property
Were destroyed for our enjoyment.

And mama screamed
And called us to her bosom.
This time, we answered her tears with,
“Mama, it’s so exciting!”

 

 

“Little Boys and War” is reprinted from Cradle Songs, An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood edited by Sharmagne Leland–St. John and Rachelle Yousuf.

 

 

Lenora Rain-Lee Good lives and writes in Kennewick, Washington. She shares her abode with her cat, Tashiko Akuma Pestini and a small Chihuahua she calls her Pit Bullet. She has sold and published three Young Adult novels, numerous short stories, and poems.

 

Alicia Hokanson

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Teaching Homer to Eighth Graders

What appeals to them most is that Odysseus
was one horny guy
moving from goddess to nymph;
not that he kept his vision
of Ithaca like a flame in his gut.

And Telemachus – that wimp –
turned out to be okay,
he could have strung the bow
if his dad had let him.

Argos, on the dungheap, rolls
his eyes and dies,
joy in his doggy heart
when he hears his master’s voice.

And Eurylochus-–a fool to eat those cattle–
got what he deserved.

Nausicaa? An idiot
to let a naked man
from the bushes by the river
nearly hug her about the knees.

With what glee they read
the bloody battle in the hall.
How cool that Antinous
got it in the throat
and that Melanthius
was strung up on a brutal wall.

How far we’ve come when they begin
to feel the complications of return
to greening Ithaca, and kneel in the orchard
with Laertes weeping. The old guy
fooled by a son just beginning
the ship-wrecked journey home.

 

Reprinted from Yalapaloosa Review.

 

Alicia Hokanson’s poetry collections are Insistent in the Skin (Brooding Heron Press, 1993), Mapping the Distance (King County Arts Commission Publication Prize, 1989), and Phosphorus (Brooding Heron Press, 1984).  She lives in Seattle and teaches at Lakeside School where she holds the Bleakney Chair in English.

 

Library Club

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by Craig Seasholes, Librarian at Sanislo Elementary in West Seattle

 

Cynta-Liyah has the touch.

Last year, early in second grade, Cynta-Liyah started stoppin’ by the library as others headed to the playground. She’d ask if this was a time she could stay inside to write a poem.

15 minutes later, as other kids were streaming in from recess, she’d quietly hand me a short piece she’d written.  Just picked. Fresh. Ready to be added to our poetry anthology. She’d smile, then slip ’round the corner and back to class for the final hour of the day.

Remarkable. And that was before she started bringing in the boys.

Boys whose names were heard as teachers raised their voices “Cut-that out-and-stoppit-NOW” levels. Boys who tied teachers in knots of frustration and sent them over the line and down the hall to the principal’s office. Boys who would look up from the chair outside the principal’s office while classmates went out to lunch recess and their teachers headed to the lounge to flush their frustrations with “I can’t believe he did it again” conversations over lunch.

But later at the start of our  short afternoon recess,  I’d see these boys with Cynta-Liyah. Coming into the library for recess, asking for permission to write another poem.  “Please?”  She’d plead, “He’s my cousin,” or “He wants to try.”  “OK?”

That’s how our Poetry Club began.
Cynta-Liyah taking boys under her wing.
Working together on a little poem.
Finding something good inside; going and growing from there.

This year other second graders saw what was happening and asked to stay in, too. Our poetry club was formally announced. Girls writing friendship poems to one another. Others began writing love notes, birthday wishes, Valentines and “things I love”  lists that capture perfectly their precious aspirations and emotions, preserved on paper against the amnesia of adolescence yet to come.

April arrived bringing National Poetry Month and Elliott Bay Books offered an opportunity for our poetry club to recite a few “Poems to Learn By Heart” for Caroline Kennedy’s public appearance in Seattle.  I spotted Janet Wong’s “Liberty” as a perfect group recitation, following the cadence and updating the sentiments of The Pledge of Allegience we recite at the start of each school day.

I pledge acceptence of the views
So different that make us America.
To listen, to look
To think and to learn.

One people, sharing the earth
Responsible
For liberty and justice for all.

Our poetry club kids took to it immediately, their faces and names reflecting beautifully the sentiments of the poem: Wang, Vu, Nguyen, Martinez.

I also spotted this as an opportunity for special students to shine before a large public audience. It was easy to choose two by Langston Hughes, including “The Dreamkeeper” for Quinton:

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

and “Dream Variations” for Cynta-Liyah:

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

A week before the event, I was informed that Ms Kennedy would like to visit our school, to bring media attention to the role of school libraries and to meet our student poets. Ms. Tsuboi’s first grade class came into the library with their classroom poetry notebooks in hand, and read several poems.

Then the poetry club kids came in, with “Liberty” followed by Quinton and Cynta-Liyah sparkling with irrepressible joy.

And when Caroline Kennedy asked, “Why do you like the library?” it was Quinton who busted out with the quotable quote, “I like the library because there is never someone mad here. Books make people happy!”

Photo Credit:  David Rosen, West Seattle Herald

Larry Laurence

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INCLUSIVE OF HELLO AND GOODBYE
for J.W.

 

Three angels manifest themselves at a bar. They make it known
to the mind of the bartender, This day is our birthday.

No. Three baleen whales, a gray, a blue, & a humpback,
swim into a bar. They sing in high-pitched vocalizations & clicks,
This day is our birthday.

No. Three rocks, an igneous, a metamorphic, & a sedimentary,
roll into a bar. In Morse code they knock against themselves
to the bartender, Today is our birthday.

No. Three weeds, a sheep sorrel, a redstem filaree, & a Canada
goldenrod, seed themselves at a bar. Utilizing the slight air
currents available they rustle to the bartender, Today’s. . .

No. Three trees, a Jenny sycamore, a paw paw, & a blossoming pear. . .

An anaconda, a coachwhip, & a Texas blind snake. . .

OK, a swift, a chicken hawk, & a blue jay. . .

OK, OK. Three subnuclear particles appear & do not appear
simultaneously in various unknowable interstices of realities themselves
barely conceivable at the bar & outside the bar. They harmonize

in vibrations at once audible & inaudible to the bartender
in such a way to at last, at long last, prove senseless the dichotomy
of the observer & the observed, Today’s our birthday!

No matter, says the bartender. We, all of us,
gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

 

 

“INCLUSIVE OF HELLO AND GOODBYE” originally appeared in POOL, A Journal of
Poetry.

 

Larry Laurence lives in Seattle and works as a rehabilitation counselor. Books are Life  of The Bones To Come, Black Heron Press, (a National Poetry Month selection by NACS, National Association Of College Stores) and Scenes Beginning With The Footbridge At The Lake, Brooding Heron Press. Poems appear in the anthologies How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, Roundhouse Press, Jack Straw Writers, Jack Straw Productions. Awards include grants from Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture and Artist Trust plus a residency at Squaw Valley Community Of Writers. He studied poetry (and growing up) under Philip Levine.

Terry Martin

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EVENING ON SCHULLER GRADE

 

Orange light quiets the sky.
Color stains trees
into lengthening shade.

Lean back in your chair,
feet bare in tickling grass,
while the sun sinks behind the hill.

Sparrows flit
from limb to limb
in the orchard.

The smell of apples
becoming themselves
can ripen you, too.

Feel the air begin
to cool your shoulders,
kissing your face, blessing it.

Catch the earth’s pulse
through the soles of your feet.
Listen to the dark arrive.

Fill your empty place
with this horizon.
Hold it all lightly,

like that. Just like that.
Sit here, home,
the taste of evening in your mouth.

 

Terry Martin is the author of The Secret Language of Women (Blue Begonia Press, 2006) and Wishboats, published by Blue Begonia Press in 2000, winner of the Judges’ Choice Award at Bumbershoot Book Fair. Over 200 of Martin’s poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous publications. Hiker, river-watcher, and lover of the arts, Terry lives with her family in Yakima, and teaches in the English Department at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. She is the recipient of CWU’s Distinguished Professor Teaching Award, and in 2003 was honored as Washington Professor of the Year by the CASE/Carnegie Foundation–a national teaching award given to recognize extraordinary commitment and contribution to undergraduate education.

 


An Invitation to Submit

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If you are a poet currently living in Washington State, and you have not yet been included in The Far Field online, I want to invite you to submit work. This invitation includes students (though I will publish poets under age 18 without a last name).

Send three to five poems in a single attachment, along with a short bio that includes your city, to poet@humanities.org. Previously published poems are preferred, but not required.  In fact, a growing list of poets count The Far Field as their first publication.  I’m very proud of that.  I can’t guarantee publication, but I would like to read your work.

Teachers, if you encounter a particularly excellent student poem, please encourage your student to submit it to The Far Field. I’ve received some wonderful poems that way.

My goal is to represent our state’s poetry communities in a very broad sense–so I am especially interested in voices that are un- or under-represented here.  I look forward to  showcasing unconventional poetry, spoken-word videos, poetry that verges on other genres (including visual art). And I’m hoping to hear from all corners of the state, and the big middle.

I am also interested in brief essays that relate to poetry in Washington State. For example, see Rebecca Frevert’s piece on her poetry kiosk in Everett, Jim Freeman’s shout out for Whidbey Island’s Poetry Slams, and Jim Deatherage’s description of an inspired collaboration between the Creative Writing and Photography classes at Richland High School.  Write to me first to inquire.

Thank you to all who have trusted me with your work already. I am privileged to read and publish poems that represent this thriving community of writers. I look forward to more poems and no repeats.  When my appointment concludes in February 2014, this site will remain as a resource, and let’s face it, a kind of brag. Look what our state’s got.

 

 

J. Glenn Evans

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AN OLD MAN’S WINTER

After Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

 

To take, to take?
I feel that mist.
As though my boiler was busted
I think my bones forgot.
Like half-gone love I hug my memories.
O for a vision of what’s to come,
Heavenly music across the bay,
Echo of the Lord’s message,
Full jolly, a string
Melodious and,
On the straightaway
Lost among the firs and wood songs
Wind flashes by
To hold conference with me
Where mountains converse,
And leap over shoulders,
Of an old man
Racing like a fool.
If only I could go back
To gather memories holding sway,
Coming back this way,
The passions of my day,
Floating on a sea of memories
In a house of beautiful memories
Now that time is gone:
I’m old and life is done

 
 

Founder of PoetsWest and Activists for a Better World, J. Glenn Evans hosts PoetsWest at KSER 90.7FM, a nationally syndicated weekly radio show, and is author of four books of poetry: Deadly Mistress, Window in the Sky, Seattle Poems and Buffalo Tracks, author of three novels, Broker Jim, Zeke’s Revenge and Wayfarers, several community histories and numerous political essays, co-produced a movie, “Christmas Mountain,” with Mark Miller, co-staring Slim Pickens, and is a former stockbroker-investment banker.  Part Cherokee, native of Oklahoma.  Evans has lived in Seattle since 1960.  Listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.

 

 

Map of my Travels

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I just added another page to The Far Field: visit “Map” (on the menu above) to see a few highlights of my Poet Laureate travels.  Not nearly all–you can take a look at the “Archives” to see where I’ve traveled over the past year and a half.  But this map (which is a work in progress) is a good way to keep track of the geographical range of my events. It includes photos and links to poets and poetry. I plan to push a pin into all 39 counties before I turn in my Poet Laureate badge in February 2014.  KF