Poetry Northwest was founded in June 1959 by Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, and Nelson Bentley, among others. Though it has passed through several iterations since its late ’50s debut, the core mission has remained steadfast: to provide a prominent platform for regional, national, and international writers to intersect with an audience of rough, ready, and discerning readers.
We aim to represent our vital corner of the continent to a broader audience, to serve as the go-to gateway for emerging writers to connect with readers beyond their local guilds and neighborhoods, and to attract and sustain readers with the promise of discovery. We straddle two worlds, really—older readers deeply connected to the history of Northwest letters, and newer audiences looking for some perspective in all the gush and flux.
People sometimes think we publish only Northwest writers or themes, what Hugo called (in an epistolary poem to Kizer) “the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon.” This is patently untrue, and has been since the beginning. Geography is less an orienting aesthetic, more a state of mind: edge writing, out here in the hinterlands of consciousness.
Kizer was connected to the visual arts scene in midcentury Seattle and managed to convince Mark Tobey to paint an original image for the first cover (a detail of which remains our logo today). Morris Graves designed covers for early ’60s issues too. Edward Gorey was another prominent contributor of illustrations. Kizer served as editor for seven years, giving the magazine a distinct voice—her voice, simultaneously warm, generous, and austere, classically restrained yet palpably excited to be breaking new ground—before leaving in 1966 to take up a position as the very first director of literary programs at the newly established National Endowment for the Arts.
Beginning in the winter of 1963, Poetry Northwest, which started out independently, was adopted by the University of Washington. Kizer later handed the magazine off to David Wagoner, who served as editor for thirty-six years. Wagoner preserved the poetry-only format and quarterly publication schedule through five different decades, from 1966 to 2002—a remarkable feat—but eventually, changing times and financial difficulties closed in around the magazine, and the University of Washington withdrew its support in 2002.
In August 2005, the University of Washington appointed David Biespiel the new editor of Poetry Northwest, with an agreement that the editorial offices of the magazine would relocate to the Attic Writers’ Workshop (now the Attic Institute) in Portland, Oregon. The new series resumed publication in March 2006, in a larger, trade-magazine format, appearing biannually as a print edition, with new monthly features published online. Circulation quickly rebounded. I think of the time the magazine spent in Portland as a kind of benign Babylonian exile—a necessary step in the magazine’s evolution—modernizing its perspective, broadening the roots of community support. It’s one more thing that Seattle and Portland now share in common. I was appointed editor in January 2010, returning the editorial offices to the greater Seattle area.
Those published first or early in their careers include James Wright, Beth Bentley, Joan Swift, Maxine Kumin, Robert Wrigley, Bob Hicok, May Swenson, and so many more. Some of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” first appeared in the winter 1962–63 issue. Hayden Carruth, William Stafford, Patricia Goedicke … the tables of contents of Poetry Northwest form a who’s who of American letters.
When the magazine first published former editor Richard Hugo in winter 1961, Kizer wrote, for his contributor bio,
Richard F. Hugo is an ex-editor of this magazine, an association which was a source of satisfaction to us all. His brand-new book, A Run of Jacks [Hugo’s first], has been published, also with tender loving care, by the University of Minnesota Press, and is dedicated to Kenneth Hanson. We apologize for being so lyrical about poets, publishers, and each other, in these notes, and will try not to let it happen again. It’s just that there have been all of these splendid books.
You can hear in these lines, characteristic of Kizer, that warmth and generosity I mentioned earlier—the sense of community endeavor, of sharing in each other’s successes, which I think has always been typical of literary life in Seattle, out here on the fast frontier.
I’ll stick to my guns here and suggest The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, because it contains the seeds of all that’s distinctive in the poetry that has emanated from this city for the last sixty-plus years. Without Roethke, Seattle’s midcentury vibrancy as a literary town would have been far more dissolute, if it existed at all, both in poetry and all that poetry underwrites in a literary ecology. His classes were the focus of that first and second generation of writers we still celebrate today: Hugo, Kizer, Wright, Wagoner, etc. He put the Blue Moon (that seminal literary dive in the U District) on the map. This is well-known. Less visible, perhaps, is his lingering influence on subsequent generations. He brings that quirky sincerity, that nursery rhythm edging into darkness, the firsthand struggle on the frontier of self-reckoning, the deep love of etymology, rhythm, and rhyme that many of our contemporary poets—from Richard Kenney and Heather McHugh to Rebecca Hoogs and Kary Wayson—still use so inventively. His Collected Poems is as much a primer on the territory as any field guide to flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest.
Phinney Books, on Greenwood and Seventy-Fourth. I live in Greenwood, and we’ve had some good bookstores, mostly used books—such as the thriving Couth Buzzard Bookstore—but many of them have closed in recent years. So it’s doubly special that Phinney Books is here, and doing well. It took over the space and niche that Santoro’s Books occupied: a thoughtfully curated list of fiction and nonfiction, with ample sections devoted to kids’ books, YA fiction, and, yes, even poetry. It’s owned and managed by Tom Nissley, the most literate of our local Jeopardy! champs. He can size you up with a few questions and recommend a book you didn’t know you needed to read. Last book I bought there was for my daughter: Wonder by R. J. Palacio. That, and an amazing cookbook by Becky Selengut called Shroom. If not exactly like mushrooms, it’s good to see independent bookstores flourishing again to a certain degree. The landscape would be much less savory without them.