Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature

Dedicated to the appreciation of poetry, fiction, painting,
 literary criticism, drawing, sculpture, music, movies, video,
 but not exclusively that produced in the Pacific Northwest

Spring 2002

Volume One, Number Two,

 Copyright 2002 Kingfisher Press
 

3M:The Long Poem Today: Merwin, McHugh, Muldoon

Filled up to the ears with haiku and other Oriental forms of terse poetic expression, it was wonderful to come across some poets who haven’t permanently given up on the long poem—a form made famous by Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and many others. Not that we Americans didn’t have practitioners of the long poem, for we did, but it has fallen in disrepute for decades, and now a handful of poets have breathed life back into the form--with widely varying results and degrees of success.

It takes a poet sure of him- or herself to make the attempt. I mean, if you fail at haiku, what have you lost? A little more than two handfuls of syllables (17), and that’s all. It’s not enough of a pretzel to choke on. But Paul Muldoon,  a poet born in

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Morris Graves, shortly before his death in May, 2001
Photo courtesy Art News.
For pictures by Morris Graves, click here

Poems by Tim McNulty, from his book, In Blue Mountain Dusk, Broken Moon Press, Seattle. Distributed by Pleasure Boat Studio, http://www.pbstudio.com. 
Also available through Amazon.com and the MONA Store.  

Little River Love Poem

 The early summer light
steps birdlike
down the east slope of Green Mountain
and stirs low mists along the river
into flight.

Back inside, you lie
still asleep in your summer skin.
A blue sheet thrown back like a dress,
your dark hair
spilled rain over your shoulders.

Having so much and nothing at all to say,
I slip cold arms around you.
You turn, sleepily,
and a deep green river
drifts away in your waking eyes.

From a wooden skiff
tied to a salmonberry bush,
you step ashore,
holding in your arms
everything I ever slip away.  

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SITTING IT OUT WITH DICK SYLBERT

Robert C. Arnold, Editor

[The following is adapted from my book, Steelhead and The Floating Line (1995). It is not entirely a fishing book. I found that I had to rewrite this chapter extensively. It seems appropriate to run it again now, for reasons that will soon be apparent.]

One person I enjoy running into on the Wenatchee River each fall is Dick Sylbert.  Once he took a thirteen-pound steelhead on a floating fly; so have I.  We have this and other things in common.

Dick makes movies.  He has been production designer for many of Warren Beatty's fine films, including Reds, at which time he lived in Europe and got to meet a number of writers whom I admire. I love to get Dick talking about writers and their idiosyncrasies.  I also enjoy talking about the movies he  has made, which I remember vividly. I have a vast collection of videotapes of movies, many whose production was designed by Dick. In fact, I accumulate them.

I don't know anything about production  design, except that he has a twin brother, Paul, who does much the same thing. Dick has his own company. I gather that they are  responsible for the sets, the location, the order in which the scenes are shot (for maximum efficiency and economy), and the general ambience of the movie.  Dick did Chinatown, with Roman Polanski, in which the golden-brown atmosphere of long-ago, rural Los Angeles was carried to art form status. He also did Dick Tracy.  Both pictures won Academy Awards.

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Delores Tarzan Ament, with photographs by Mary Randlett, Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art, University of Washington Press, March 2002. 388 pages, color and black and white plates, index, bibliography, $40.  

by Robert. C. Arnold, Editor

What if there were no such thing as The School of Northwest Art, only a loose association of artists, friends, and sycophants, at its peak at mid-century, and you had to create such a school? (A school, after all, is but a pedagogical device for organizing, teaching, and writing intelligently about a subject.) So, how do you go about creating one? And whom do you include in your school? 

Actually, such a school was created by Life Magazine in 1953, when it published its seminal article, “Mystic Painters of The Northwest,” which included Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, and Kenneth Callahan, and elevated them immediately to mythic status. It matters not if some of them were no longer speaking to each other at the time; they sure knew who the others were, and soon everybody else did, too.

Thus the school concept was born. It has been hard to get rid of ever since. However, who else belongs in the so-called school will ever be a controversial matter, since reputations, careers, money, and friendships (such as they are, tenuous things each) depend on inclusion.   

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