Alaska Quarterly Review
Spring and summer 2015 issue, edited by Ronald Spatz
There's much to recommend in the upcoming spring/summer issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, including a haunting and provocative photo essay by Eman Mohammed, who calls herself "the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip." But it's April, which is National Poetry Month, and in the poetry section of the 300-plus-page issue, you'll find diverse new work by Alaskan (or formerly Alaskan) poets in conversation with writers from all over the world about the things that matter -- like survival.
If each poem is partly an answer to the question "What the hell is poetry, anyway?" here are six wildly unique takes. All of which means that in Alaska poetry today, and in this issue of AQR, something truly vital is going on.
Gary Holthaus, former executive director of the Alaska Humanities Forum and author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, is a poet in the contemplative tradition. In "What is the Source?" he addresses the elemental, unstoppable force of regeneration within the earth (and within us). What's most beautiful about this poem is how his answers to the title's question get more specific as the poem unfolds:
"Where does/this commitment/to soil,/to nurturance/arise? Does it come/from the whuffing/noses of animals/nudging our palms ...?
Then the poem opens out again to the widest of questions: "Who knows/how we come/to know ourselves in-/separable from all the rest ...?"
Not only does the poem converse with a reader, but also with other poets like Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder — and even with the photographs of Gaza that open the issue. How do we hold it all? Survive it all? How do we connect to everything else? What is the source?
Keeping reader off balance
Widely published poet Jill Osier, in her tight poem "Vespers," focuses her lens very close to find an answer, both on what's outside and inside the self. How often have we watched a scene play out between strangers from our lonely, private perch and felt an unexpected fellowship? In the 12 lines of "Vespers," both a lot and a little transpires.
The poem's speaker watches a neighbor "burning/a fire next to his trailer." Can we ever predict how our minds will leap from present to past? "I catch glimpses of his red cap," Osier writes, and suddenly: "The people I've watched die ..."
Line by line, the poem, pondering its own questions, never fails to upend expectation and keep you off balance. Yet the feeling of the poem is so familiar. We've all been there, in that loneliness.
There are so many ways to think of poems, as windows, as doorways, as questions without answers, as arguments, even as prayers (the word "vespers," in fact, refers to evening prayers). Consider Anchorage poet Susanna Mishler's "Crank-Arm Prayer (Kennecott Copper Mine)."
Mishler, who earns her living as an electrician, published her first collection, "Termination Dust," last year.
Prayers are, at heart, expressions of desire, and the most authentic prayers are those that express the most fervent, urgent desire.
Like every good poem, this one's full of surprise, including its own definition of a poem as "a love song for the monster living under the bed." It's daring to make such a claim. And how this line leads to the yes of the next stanza, another assertion, is part of its magic and daring: "There is no sadness like that of tools/mounted on a wall, relegated to ornaments."
Survival's not enough, is it? We need to be useful. And the way this poem, too, ends in questions, not of nostalgia, but of mercy and devotion. How does she get there? You'll have to see for yourself how poems are driven by their own brand of suspense.
Poetry that makes you flinch
Even the title of former Fairbanksan Amber Flora Thomas' poem induces suspense: "Rattlesnake." You feel yourself flinch before you've imagined "Too much mouth, too much/gasping outward with teeth/of white cords stuck in warning."
A poem questions, and always disturbs. Not only with its movement of thought, but also with its imagery and its language, in this case, tight and tense as the warning rattle we never hear. Suddenly, we're right there, "too-much-ness" in our faces. The poem seems to suggest that sometimes survival requires violence — or is that what we're made to believe? There is death in this poem, as in every poem I've mentioned, and yet its last words are: "life again."
How can that possibly be? (Read it and see.) Flora Thomas, who taught poetry for many years in the graduate program at UAF, now teaches at East Carolina University. She says Alaska continues to influence her writing.
Another thing about poetry: It's supposed to be true, right? In spite of the fact that, in literary circles, you refer to a poem's "speaker," and don't assume the person "talking" in the poem is the poet. Still, the poems that matter to us express something truthful about being alive. We don't trust a poem whose emotion feels put on, no matter how technically brilliant.
And here enters Anchorage-based Olena Kalytiak Davis, whose latest poetry collection was named one of "Nine Great Books of Poetry" for 2014 by The New Yorker magazine.
This is a poet who seems to be talking directly to us (her "sweet reader," as she's put it). At the same time, as in "On the Certainty of Bryan," she seems to be in dialogue with specific people in her life, and we're listening in. How does that work/happen? There's so much passion in her arguments and raw self-scrutiny, it feels like everything's at stake -- poems themselves as matters of survival. Each becomes a dangerous ride through another consciousness, and we can't predict what comes next, as in this moment halfway through "On the Certainty of Bryan": "Then, out of the blue, out of a southeast Alaskan clear blue-green pit,/actually, Dylan comes to visit, like some/traveling salesman of complexity." The poem traces the mind's trajectory, its wild flight from questions about a painting to questions about art, life and self.
If Gary Holthaus is a philosopher-poet, Liz Bradfield, whose third book is due out this year, is a naturalist-poet (she earns a part of her living as a boat naturalist in Alaska, on Cape Cod and as far afield as Antarctica). Is there any difference, though?
"We loved our loneliness then," she writes in a poem that's ostensibly "about a bear." Bradfield's two poems tell stories, but in the way only poetry can, by music, by leaping to unexpected ties among passengers on a tourist boat in Peru ("Cultural Exchange"), between residents of Cape Cod and a displaced wild animal ("Truro Bear").
"Truro Bear," you will see, speaks back to Osier's "Vespers." One poem includes variations of the word "loneliness," and the other is itself a variation of that state.
As bear season arrives for us here in Alaska, Bradfield asks us to contemplate the presence -- and absence -- of the wild in our midst. Both of Bradfield's poems are driven by desire set to music:
"Fishing bats hit/the low-lit water. Someone has music on low." Both poems are a solitary eye looking out at the world, driven by a desire to connect -- one thing to another, inner to outer, self to other.
Magic
As I've thought about these poems written in isolation, they've gradually enlarged into a conversation, expanding one another and expanding my sense of what it means to be alive for one more spring. That's magic. These six poets all have honed aspects of their imagination in Alaska, and yet, as you'll see, their poems belong to -- and connect us to -- the larger world.
That is exactly what Alaska Quarterly Review does best, every time. "Though it's produced in Anchorage, there's nothing provincial about the Alaska Quarterly Review," wrote Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books, who went on to call it "... one of our best, and most imaginative literary magazines."
Copies of the new issue can be found at bookstores, and subscriptions or selected back issues can be purchased through the university.
Author Eva Saulitis lives in Homer. Her most recent book is "Prayer in Wind," a collection of poems. She's also the author of "Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas."