An online discussion of poetry set for January 7th, facilitated by Sandra Kleven, poet, MFA student in the low residency program at University of Alaska, Anchorage.   See link on this site for Kleven's current project, "Where is Ted Roethke?" a short film -- being shot in Seattle January 1 - 16, 2009.  Kleven's most recent published work can be found in the first issue of CIRQUE JOURNAL, "Jaden is Calling."  http://www.cirquejournal.com/

Anne Caston  Click photo to go to Anne Caston's web site. Click book to purchase Click book to purchase Anne Caston is a former nurse, a writer and an educator whose work has been published in literary and medical journals here and abroad. She received a grant from St. Mary's Arts Council in 1994 and has been a featured writer twice on WPFW's "The Poet and the Poem" and was interviewed by Michael Collier for The Writer's Life video series, broadcast over a tri-state television area (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia). Her work has recently been anthologized in collections such as The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, Where Books Fall Open, Sustenance & Desire, and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets. A selection from Anne's poems was awarded Prairie Schooner's 2002 Readers' Choice Award and her poem, "Purgatory," received a 2003 International Merit Award in Poetry from Atlanta Review.  Caston's poems, below, will be published in her her next collection The Empress of Longing.  "Deer Season" has been previously published in a literary magazine (Sundog: The Southeast Review). Anne Caston's webpage Click this link for more information about Anne Caston Click for Library of Congress webcast with Anne Caston - "The Poet and the Poem"

The Charge The poacher's late years, to hear it, were riddled with regret, though not for the hundreds or more hysterical chimpanzees who'd launched themselves at him, the stinging nettles of their yellow teeth needling  a thumb or finger when he'd gotten close. Not for the hundreds of them and not for the terrified infants, caged and crated, shipped off to zoos in the West or restaurants in the Far East. Business is business, he was fond of saying, and business is good these days. A man has to eat, after all. Just for one was that hard man undone, by one who'd been most ferocious in her love, refusing to surrender to him her child until the machete had cleaved her near in two, she who had staggered backwards under the blow and – seeing for herself the hard and unrelenting fact of the matter – had circled the man's scarred thumb with her fingers and pulled him close, placing her trembling infant in his arms, then lay down on her side on the mossy forest floor and died. ~ December 21 2009

Deer Season In Shoney's this morning, at a center table, five men in flannel and bright orange vests, speaking loudly of hunting and guns, of the buck they hope to bring down, the knife, the gutting, the rack of antlers. When a boy in the next booth drops  his jacket, his mother fusses, Jacob, don't  throw your coat on the floor. The men chuckle.  One winks and leans over to say  to her, A typical boy, Ma'am. She jerks back, as if slapped, then stammers, Not quite. Something stricken in her voice shakes the boy who turns face-forward toward the man who can see now the puckered socket where an eye and cheekbone used to be. The boy is watching his mother's flushed face. She is watching the man's. If it isn't cruelty – how she lets him go on sitting there, ash-faced, staring after the boy who has turned back already to his green toy soldiers and the war he is making with them – well,  it isn't kindness either. Across the room, sounds lift: a cough, clacking spoons, the clatter of cups, a glass shattering. She retrieves the dropped coat. The men turn back to their plates, to what's left of their coffee and eggs, to the frosty morning beyond the window. Anything but that face. One by one, each man shoves a dollar bill under the rim of a plate. One by one, each gets up, takes a coat, goes out. They gather again on the sidewalk beyond the ice-pocked window. They shake their heads and shove their fists deep into pockets. They leave for the cold fields. They don't look back. The boy, with his one blue eye, watches them go.

49 Writers Derick Burleson Click on photo to go to Marick Press site Click book to purchase Click book for Amazon page UAA - CWLA Faculty page with Derick Burlson bio Derick Burleson's first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and lives with his partner and daughter in Two Rivers, Alaska."Never Night" is a hymn to life, a meditation on day and night, on the seasons, on nature and on love. Alaska may be real chilly in the winter but these beautiful poems are more than warm. Apparently poetry can change climate... Adam Zagajewski The poems below are from Burleson's collection, NEVER NIGHT.

Never Night You’d like it here where it’s never night, where the sun circles, rather, until it ends up where it started from, east or west, rises, sinks but doesn’t ever set, where in the summer you never need to sleep and all day and all night the sky is a series of blues you’ve seen only once before, blues van Gogh painted at the end. Where all the traffic is fox and moose and bear, where aspen and birch bud and leaf all in one day, and your sleep, when sleep finally comes, is innocent, spring wind through a window left open now that spring is passing fast and summer won’t stay here long before the snow sweeps any green away again and then it’s always night. You’d like that too, when endless night falls and the moon comes up, reads your book over your shoulder, learns which dead poet moves you tonight, when any heat at all rises,  and becomes a visible thing. Prophet When snow falls thick among bare aspens, I will wade down into this vale and begin to make my soul. When midnight dawns frozen with no moon to silver the night, I will begin with words made visible, frozen words rising on no wind among the black blind eyes of bare aspen, rising into midnight sky with none to hear except sleeping ravens, and the world will grow rife with strange green fire.

49 Writers Michael Burwell  Burwell is the editor of CIRQUE JOURNAL - click here Click book to purchase Click for CIRQUE JOURNAL Mike Burwell has published two chapbooks of poetry; his full-length poetry collection Cartography of Water was published by North Shore Press in 2007. He manages to keep out of trouble by writing environmental impact statements for the Department of Interior, teaching poetry part time at the University of Alaska Anchorage, researching Alaska maritime history, maintaining a database on Alaska shipwrecks, and pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology. He is also editor of the new literary journal Cirque. Granite Creek When I cross the bridge over Granite Creek just past Sutton on the way to our cabin  up near Fish Lake three years ago,  I am still long married, dying from the load of it. The creek’s my divide  between town and the wild, where wild  takes over: raw, spacious, quiet.  Granite Creek’s whitewater scrapes the air  clean as it courses past the highway bridge.    Castle Mountain’s towers and spines  soar above cottonwoods and clouds. King Mountain ascends in scree and slice.  A spectacle stirs between them  that I think full enough to embrace and carry us.  But in our cabin on the wild side of the creek’s bright churning,  a darker flood scours the trees and peaks, our home, where I live nameless  and submerged, rapt in a land  I let you draw on your brittle map. From 50 Poems for Alaska, Ten Poets Press, 2008. Wolf at Beaver Creek, Wrangell Mountains, Alaska                     --for Allison Hedge-Coke This gray shape before me  not any known thing. From twenty feet, my eyes slide  into other eyes, full of wild streaks of darkening sky. The creek rushes in its small calling.  He moves first, turns from the trail,  trots off, turns, stares,  trots, stops, stares  three more times before the willows  swallow him. I am rooted under clouds ripping in winds too high to hear,  that other eye heaving in the heart. Originally published in a slightly different form in Cartography of Water, NorthShore Press, 2007 49 Writers Click on photo to go to Bradfield's website. Click picture to go to Broadsided web page 49 Writers Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008), which won the 2009 Audre Lorde Prize and was a finlaist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry Magazine, Orion, and in numerous anthologies.  Founder and editor of the grassroots-distributed and guerilla-art-inspired Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org), a former Stegner Fellow, she works as a naturalist. www.ebradfield.com Polar Explorer Capt. John Cleves Symmes (1820) Outside his Cincinnati windows, a street game in full swing. Some kid shouts Safe! Another jeers Symmes’ hole! A fight breaks out. Inside, Symmes keeps pressing his human face against the frozen wall of what is known, not seeing through but melting into it his own features, his own strange form. He wanted explanations for the plenty at the poles: caribou twice the size of white-tailed deer, white bears dwarfing black, schools of herring that return each year fat and flashing, more fish than ever could fit into an ice-choked ocean. Shouldn’t the north be barren? Wouldn’t the cold… Hope effervesced in him, bubbled toward utopia. Americus, he’d say to his son, there is more to discover and we’ll be patron to it. It could almost pass for science—the icy ring and sloping verge that he proposed, a concavity, a hole four thousand miles across at the globe’s north end, and, for symmetry, six thousand at the south, another earth within our earth, more perfect, richer, the borealis streaming from it like a neon sign.              Eskimo whizzamajig —label circa 1940 for an ivory spear tip in the MacMillan Collection, Provincetown          Optimism, in a strange, American way, this zippy          caption for what was foreign beyond language.          Thingamabob. Doohickey distant as the need          for a haasux (spear-thrower in Aleut)          or unaaq (Inupiaq pole to check ice thickness).          This tool (perhaps a sakku) clever and useless to the secretary          (was it Miriam?) who typed the label that has yellowed.           Widget. Whatzit….                     but some words drift.          Take vaxa gididzagh, Athabaskan for that with which things are spread          and so now butter knife.          Or lastax—fermented fur seal flipper— now the three-petaled gizmo          that spins beneath a boat.          And consider the kayak, translated through fiberglass          and rotomold, neoprene and rubber.          Bright alchemy that’s made it whizzamajig          to its own source.

49 Writers

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