On a cloudy Sunday in early June, I spent the morning with poetry bookshop proprietors Christine Deavel and John Marshall. The results of our conversation were an article on the poetry bookselling biz for Crosscut and a Q&A for Poets & Writers about Marshall's first book, a poetry collection published by Oberlin College Press called Meaning a Cloud. The middle section of his book is called "Where Else," which takes on the subject of Seattle directly, for example:
Every State Its Own QuarterOne recent aspect of
our freedom was
a contest to design a coin
The large agreeable Indian man
worked the sidewalk in
an Easy Mart's blue ice light
60s apartment buildings each side of the street
were linear and balconied like
orthodontia and a mirror
He offered a
perfectly dead and shriveled rose
banter and a loony dance
The image of a salmon and the mountain
distinguish our state's quarter
from those others
One white couple on their way out
took the rose for change with
smiles all around
The weather for the moment was
less aggressive summer than we'd been having
much to everyone's relief
Following up with Marshall later by e-mail, I asked him to think about the idea of "Where Else" as a question, as in "Where else but Seattle can you find ..." How would he complete that line? His response:
Dear Lisa,
Okay, this is going to be a longish answer. Mostly because that's the first time I've seen Where Else in that kind of questioning way. I called the section that because of the echo of That else! in the hospital poem "Three Things About Walking Again." That, and it echoes (a writerly insider thing) a section titled "Elsewhere" in James Schuyler's Hymn to Life. I'd been reading him a lot over the last three or more years. Besides writing every morning (nearly), I keep a large book of someone's work by the typewriter and read some from it after I stop typing. I read Schuyler's Collected that way, then tried some other people on and found I was so enamored with his voice that I started the Collected again. I can't say that he's much of an influence in the book except for the poem "July 14, 2006," which is way more relaxed and alive to the moment than I traditionally am. I feel like I'm embracing a conflict. I want to write that alive-to-the-moment poem as captivatingly as Schuyler did, but I also love the work of Eastern Europeans like Popa and Holub, that tight dark sort of fable-like thing locked in a small poem. I want both. All. So instead some poems lean more one way and others lean more the other.
Now, for your actual question, the alive-to-the-moment answer to your question, the first thought, best thought:
Where else but Seattle can you find a neon and lightbulb rotating large-as-life Elephant Car Wash elephant sign that is always so buoyant even on the fairly darned forlorn corner it's bolted to? And those guys, and some gals, in its shadow and beyond, hovering around the cars after they exit the sprays and the brushes, uniformed and with towels in hand. They are barely buoyant. You have to figure it's a minimum wage or slightly better job.
There you go. Pretty thoroughly overwritten. Please feel free to edit the heck out of any of this. And thanks again for this attention. I really appreciate it.
My best,
John
