[ Hill Poems: A Collection of Capitol Hill Poetry | Jacob Brooke Press ]
{ Hill }
All of the collected poems in this slender anthology are by local poets and take as their topic the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill. Or as Poets West put it in a Metblog entry from last April, this collection is “about Capitol Hill’s degradation into a yuppie hell and the conversion of apartments to condos and the effect on the community”. Even as a fairly late transplant to the Seattle area I can sympathize with this sentiment. My own neighborhood of Ballard, while admittedly historically more staid than Capitol Hill, has suffered a similar fate over the last eight years. Single-family homes have been sold, torn down, and replaced by cookie-cutter town homes and condos. I hardly recognize my own street anymore.
I like the physical feel of this collection. It contains black and white photos of the Capitol Hill area (Dick’s Drive-In, Broadway Rite Aid, night-lit streets slick with rain) alongside the poetry. The overall effect is to bring to mind a half-mad guerrilla poet xeroxing pages of poems to hand out on the street at 2 a.m., and this has always secretly been my (perhaps overly-romanticized) impression of Capitol Hill.
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{ But I trusted you. I did. }
[ But I Trusted You And Other True Cases: Ann Rule's Crime Files Vol. 14 | Ann Rule | Pocket | $7.99 ]
Is the blood beginning to run thin in Seattle author Ann Rule’s “Crime Files” series?
Or is “But I Trusted You”, the fourteenth and latest volume in the Queen Of True Crime’s bargain-priced paperback line, merely an unfortunate departure from Rule’s normally reliable reporting and storytelling? The title story, with its skimpy chronology of events, its limited insights into the couple whose marriage ended in murder, and its careless errors of fact and supposition, raises both questions.
As a Rule fan and follower I sincerely hope the latter is true—that “But I Trusted You” is a pothole on a road with many miles still left on it. Because, even though she’s now in her seventies and has written for four decades, it’s hard to imagine that this mighty and self-made force of Northwest nonfiction might be slowing down.
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{ food is everywhere }
[ Fat of the Land | Langdon Cook | Skipstone | $26.95 ] Puget Sound once had one of the fattest natural environments on the planet. It was so well stocked and the local tribes had so much access to food that they had sedentary diseases and enough free time on their hands to create a culture as sophisticated as the elaborate bureaucracies of agricultural cultures. Unlike the culture of hunter-gatherers, the tending of crops required complex social solutions to manage the changes in season and weather from year to year, the moving of water and the storing of crop and seed. When the first settlers of European descent arrived in Puget Sound, during the salmon runs in the autumn, pioneers joked you could walk across the rivers on the back of the fish.
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{ Slaughter }
[ A Time Before Slaughter | Paul Nelson | Apprentice House | $12.95 ] Ten thousand years ago the area that is now Auburn, Washington, was still dripping with the final melting of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. As drainage from the deglaciated alpine valleys in the Cascade range flowed southward along jagged ice margins and coalesced into meltwater streams that bounced and burbled over a broad moraine of basal till in the lowlands, a deposition of parent material developed into a topsoil of amazing fertility. Forests of western hemlock, Douglas-fir, western red cedar, western white pine and lodgepole pine appeared, shading a rich understory of swordfern, devilsclub, vine maple, western yew, oceanspray, salal and skunk cabbage. Marshy habitats supported a diverse population of raccoon, mink, river otter, muskrat and beaver. Deer, elk, black bear, coyote, mountain lion and bobcat leaped, slept, prowled and hunted the valleys and slopes. Into this teeming array of post-glacial life the first human inhabitants arrived, having descended southward from the Bering Sea land bridge connecting North America to Siberia. They would form a culture in equilibrium with this environment that would last for thousands of years, knit together by a language called Lushootseed, or Whulshootseed, otherwise known as the Salish language system. This is the time before Slaughter, the subject embedded in the title of Paul Nelson’s collection of poetry. Slaughter comes later.
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{ It's all different now. }
[Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer | Jeff VanderMeer | Tachyon Publications | $14.95 ] There’s a ridiculous amount of writing reference books in existence. Hit any local bookstore or library and be dazzled by the number of books promising the secrets to end writer’s block, create dimensional characters, dynamic dialogue; to sell screenplays and memoirs, break into romance, or craft crisp query letters and irresistible book proposals. There seem to be as many books on attracting an agent as there are on finding true love. Shelves are, quite literally, groaning under the weight of these things, so it hardly seems that another could possibly be necessary. Except that for the plethora of books on how to write, there’s a remarkable few on how to be a writer, especially as relationships shift between authors, publishers, and readers; there’s now a wide sea of new media to navigate.
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Smiling in the cold rain.
[Pacific Agony | Bruce Benderson | Semiotext(e) | $14.95 ] Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson features a degenerate East Coast “street” intellectual of the type found in Brandon Stosuy’s Up is Up and Down is Up (an anthology of writing from the Lower East Side). Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Benderson himself are some of the more famous denizens of this lit scene. As a regional literary scene it has been well-documented both in Stosuy’s excellent, if mammoth, anthology but also in literary magazines such as Between C & B, The KBG Bar Reader, the occasional output of The Unbearables.
Insofar as this work is governed by an aesthetic, it tends to feature memoir-ish fiction and fictional memoir of a confessional type. This is the same style used by William Burroughs in his first two books in the 1950s (also products of Times Square), Queer (not published until 1984) and Junky, and is the style-of-choice for jailed bank robbers and death row inmates. These are often hard-boiled, mostly naturalistic tales of urban life, often juxtaposing shocking material with mundane slice-of-life. The style seems deliberately flat and easily executed in order not to detract from the edginess of the lives being documented. Frequently these stories deal with poverty, vice, or transgressive relationships.
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