Reading Local Seattle

[ Floating Bridge Review: Numbers 1 & 2 | Floating Bridge Press | $10] If you’re a poet who lives and writes in Washington State there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Floating Bridge Press. Each year this press holds a poetry chapbook contest and—along with the winning manuscript—publishes Pontoon, an anthology of poems selected from the submitted manuscripts. At least that’s what used to happen. In 2008, the editors decided to mix things up a bit; now, in addition to the winning chapbook, they publish an annual literary journal, Floating Bridge Review. Half of the journal will still be dedicated to the Pontoon anthology, but the other half will be “re-imagined with each issue”. The new section will allow the editors to “experiment and expand” what they’re publishing. They intend to explore new genres and new writers (who won’t necessarily be required to live within our state’s borders).

The review’s inaugural issue feels very much like a bridge (no pun intended) between the old format and the new. The re-imagined half of Issue 1 presents six Washington State poets with newly released or forthcoming books. It’s an in-depth presentation, with anywhere from 5-8 poems by each. I always appreciate a comprehensive selection of work by one poet in a literary journal; one or two poems usually cannot give a satisfying picture of what the poet is attempting to achieve. The selected poems cover a healthy range of format and voice, from Allen Braden’s emotional consideration of the natural:

“resin that weeps and doesn’t congeal” (11) and “heartwood” on the lathe (12)

to Nance Van Winckel’s take on family dynamics:

my mother in front won’t
turn, won’t look at
her mother—the pleas, the please—
the got-to, the go-back… (42)

to Cody Walker’s sardonic, modern-world-weary politics:

Dear Dick Cheney,
Today I could barely leave the house. I flipped through
magazines; I ate crackers; I checked my email (a lot). (48)

Reading Issue 1 was akin to reading a fully-fleshed out issue of the original-format Pontoon. It feels familiar: the names of the poets, the tone of the poems, the predominantly Pacific Northwestern topics and perspectives. Derek Sheffield’s poem in the second half of the issue is entitled “Postcard to Braden from a Cabin in the Hardwoods”, which calls to Allen Braden’s poems in the first half, which are themselves full of trees, of wood and its grain. As a local reader, who also happens to know both Derek and Allen, I was delighted by this slightly cheeky instance of meta-connection. Although I do wonder if a reader outside of Washington’s borders would find it a little insider-y, or perhaps miss the moment entirely.

Issue 2 transcends the original Pontoon, unequivocally striking out for new territory. The first half of the issue—Textremeties—presents work chosen by guest editor John Olson. Olson deliberately selected work by poets who are involved with Seattle’s Subtext reading series, an ongoing program that presents experimental writers from around the country with Pacific Northwest writers. These risky, self-aware, spiky poems mark a decidedly different direction for this publication. I was pleased to see some of my favorite local writers who, due to their radically different aesthetics, would probably never have appeared in the original Pontoon. These are poems very much concerned with language, writing, and the (de-)construction of poems themselves. For example, from Nico Vassilakis:

Writing gives voice: a secondary, a simulated real-time. Draw-
ing an image (seen) becomes language (said.) It wants to
attract the air-borne (thought) to land (absorbed) on tarmac

The poems in this section display a dizzying range of style. There are complex, sound-and-vocabulary heavy streams-of-consciousness from Bryant Mason:

So much for the dazzling façade of margins and want… for as
the athletes sleep ceaselessly recedes beyond the grasp of these
cunning specialists, the resulting dissonance reinforces the
logic of postures and abandonment necessary in the produc-
tion of subtle variations on astonishment.

as well as Ezra Mark’s ekphrastic consideration of Sa-Kwa, a film by Kang Yi-kwan:

A sequence near the end of the film, a succession of scenes,
emptied of people, appearing in chronological order, separat-
ed by fades and sections of black leader. The Aria from Bach’s
Goldberg Variations plays.

I’ll admit that I do not often seek out experimental writing, especially at the extreme end of the scale. Reading this section of Issue 2 was tiring and, at times, frustrating, but it ultimately resulted in that good kind of exhaustion, as if I’d successfully run two miles farther than I’d ever run before. Floating Bridge Review’s second issue does what any poetry journal worth its salt should do: it challenges, provokes, and triggers an active response from the reader. The journal does maintain a core sense of identification with the Pacific Northwest (there are plenty of pleasantly familiar names and voices in the Pontoon half), but I am very much looking forward to the new poetries and poets that future issues of the Floating Bridge Review should bring.

Author: Amy Schrader

Amy Schrader has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington. Her poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in The Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Filter, and RHINO. She lives in Seattle with her husband Chris and giant goldfish, Vlad the Impal

Amy Schrader has written 4 articles for us.