"Walla Walla is famous for Sweet Onions and Charles Potts." --Lee Harris, from his review of Charles Potts book Nature Lovers

The recent history of serious poetry in Walla Walla probably begins in the fall of 1990 with the first Walla Walla Poetry Party when forty poets from eight states read for four days at the YWCA. Out of state luminaries at the first WWPP included Vincent Ferrini of Massachusetts and Hugh Fox of Michigan. Teri Zipf materialized at the open mic and subsequently developed into a prize winning poet. Held intermittently since then, the last WWPP was in 1997 when poets such as Sharon Doubiago, Barbara La Morticella and Judith Roche came to town.

There are three colleges in WW and two of them have reading programs. Dan Lamberton of Walla Walla College will bring dan raphael to town in the spring of 2001. Katrina Roberts of Whitman College has presented readings by Li-Young Lee and Adrienne Rich will come in 2001. Tsunami Inc. has sponsored readings by Xue Di and Edward Dorn with help from the colleges.

There are two open mics currently, one at Barnaby's on Wednesday evening and one at Club Minivan on Thursday. Any worthy poets traveling through the northwest could make a featured reading at the Minivan if sufficient advance arrangements are made. tsunami@innw.net

Linda Andrews
Jim Bodeen
Travis Catsull
Daniel Lamberton
Charles Potts
Stephen Thomas
Teri Zipf

Linda Andrews
Studies for the Hand and Arm of Adam
 
These poses are kind, the hand variously
open, reaching, or wrapped around a branch
or piece of fruit. The arm is perfectly turned
and hangs from the roundness of the shoulder
Eve's pillow. This hand is cupped just so
for caressing a woman. The creator thought of us all
when he made a man's hand to curve this way
and laced delicacy across the top of each finger.
 
Ten lifetimes ago, Dürer made Adam
all over again, drew him out of the nothing
of ink and paper, and sketched a hand and arm
so beautiful, any woman would reach
toward him--especially the first one,
so perfectly alone with him.
 
I walk into the house, empty handed
but heavy, as though I'm carrying
something, and it is desire for you,
pulling my voice down low
and I say I want you. And you are as glad
as if no man had ever heard this before.
This humble yellow house could be
just outside the gates of Eden because there are
apples on the table, and we know what we've done.
 

"Studies for the Hand and Arm of Adam" is from Escape of the Bird Women, published in 1998 by Blue Begonia Press. Linda Andrews won a Washington Governor's Award in 1999 for Escape of the Bird Women.
 
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Jim Bodeen
Lines for My Friend
 
Soft as in a morning sunrise.
May the divorce be like this,
soft as in a morning sunrise,
as you begin the marriage to yourself.
When Achilleus mourned for his friend Patroklos,
his friend came to him in a dream.
The Modern Jazz Quartet goes solo.
In the Final Concert, it's every man for himself.
This is the promise of new music,
Achilleus himself proclaiming,
We shall set our horses free.
I know this about death-
The village mourns the buried man.
The dead man shopping at Safeway goes unnoticed.
Patroklos tells Achilleus, You were not careless
of me when I lived, only in death.
Listen to the vibraphones.
Lionel Hampton sings to P. Heath.
They are becoming Moon Men.
I grimed my face and wailed
when I lost my child.
My friends said, Look,
I saw him dancing Friday night.
This destiny was given
when I was born, to bring the dreams
from two worlds together.
These are really true blues.
We grew up in the blind man's house.
You'll be a better friend to yourself.
I will miss you horribly.
It's Achilleus' dream. Patroklos tells it.
It is given to nobody to interpret.
 
When it's all over,
put our ashes in the same urn.
 

Jim Bodeen's This House: A Poem in Seven Books, from which "Lines for my Friend" was taken, was published in 1999 by Tsunami Inc. It is described by Ray González in The Bloomsbury Review as "As much a prophecy as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass," and by Harold Rhenish in the Salmon Bay Review, on line: "It is one of the most compelling books of poetry to have appeared in many years."
 
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Travis Catsull
Suddenly Humpin'

I walk inna wheat field and make biscuits.
I dip my cigarettes in Bean-O.
I wash a chicken leg samich down with orange kool-aid.

I made love to the Jehovah witness woman that stopped by.
I made her scream "Jehovah!"

I bake a square of cornbread so good,
Jesus wipe his feet twice 'fo comin' in da house.
My house got its street # on the kerb.

My wife got pregnant.
She had a puppet.
I tot the puppet to smoke.
The puppet boy ride around on a lil' ferret
Pretendin' he's Pinocchio.
One time the puppet started humpin' my wooden art man,
Bendin' it in ways I'd never imagined.
I began to draw the wooden art man
Bein' humped by my lil' puppet boy.
You know, maybe we could laugh about it once he grew up.
Him standin' on the back of his ferret for leverage.
Humpin' the wooden art man.
As I humped one of Jehovah's witnesses.
Makin' her yell "Jehovah!"
 
"Suddenly Humpin'" is from Travis Catsull's, age 24, first book, Open Spirit, published by Tsunami Inc. He is the publisher of Haggard and Halloo and the Assistant Editor at The Temple.
 
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Daniel Lamberton 
Letter from the U.S.S. Prairie
 
You can imagine why they call this ship a tender,
for tonight she is a gray nurse who moves
through wards of sleeping, turning waves. She hushes
the tired sailors who step out on her upper deck
to talk of land and light their cigarettes.
 
There is illness in this ocean. We are trailed by submarines.
Our ship goes quiet and dark, not wanting to disturb
whatever there might be that sleeps or waits in pain.
The ocean gives the faintest signs of life, and while
below the waves might pulse unfathomable sounds,
upon the water little shows except a wash of pale light
that glows up from the frantic scurrying of krill
or the deep set eyes of whales and giant squid.
 
One sailor told me how his ship, bound for the Gulf of Tonkin,
struck a blue whale, and how it stopped the ship as still
as if she'd run upon the coast of Asia--as still, you'd think,
as a night nurse who's stopped beside a bed
to find its once-pure sheets are wet with blood.
 

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Charles Potts 
Overamping in Walla Walla
 
I've been in Walla Walla going on fifteen years,
Doing field study of White Republicans.
 
To blend in, I joined the Elks Club,
The Benevolent and Protective Order of Same,
And the National Rifle Association.
I ran for city council.
I have a permit to carry a concealed weapon,
Sometimes confused with a license to carry a gun.
 
110 ten years ago Walla Walla was bigger than Seattle.
We have a steady state economy
That would have warmed the remaining cockles
Of MoDahl's (Morris Udahl's) heart,
Plus a stable population.
 
If these White Republicans can't solve their own problems,
Then the jig is up.
 
I resigned from the Elks in disagreement
With their adhoc racism.
My membership in the NRA lapsed.
I lost the election by 146 votes,
But I kept my permit.
 

"Overamping in Walla Walla" is collected in Nature Lovers, published by Pleasure Boat Studio in 2000. Of Potts' book The Dictatorship of the Environment, Doug Marx wrote in Writer's Northwest, Inc., "In spirit, he's reminiscent of the late, great, Thomas McGrath."
 
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Stephen Thomas 
At the Metropolitan
 
I wandered there into a sparse grove of marble,
where both ravished and appalled I gazed on the display:
dickless antiquities, nose- and earless, altogether headless,
limbless loped trunks out of Goya's widowed fancy.

In another room were columns topped with heads,
busts broken from their bodies by history's hammers
in our hands,
or executed by the portraitist,
guillotined in the conception,
also nose- and earless, lacking in the chin.
 
Is there yet another room where curators retreat to howl?
Where elbows, noses, earlobes, dicks, nipples,
all the protuberant detritus,
hangs arrayed in ghost postures,
like bits of fruit in aspic?
 
Time is a disdainful portraitist
and doesn't love us much.
It sculpts away the finished marble,
finding the shape within.
 
True to its grieved and solitary genius,
what it shows us is ourselves all right,
senseless and dismembered.
 

"At the Metropolitan" is reprinted with permission from Journeyman, Stephen Thomas' first major collection from Tsunami Inc.

M.L. Liebler from Wayne State University had this to say about his poetry: "Stephen Thomas' words are the poetic equivalent to Diego Rivera's powerful, populist art. They are expansive, detailed and beautifully woven with both the tender and tough images of the working class. This poet understands what it means to be human in these difficult times. His work sings to the everyday experiences of real people and their very real daily lives. Stephen Thomas represents everything that is good and eternal about American poetry, and the world is a better place because of his strong and truthful voice."
 
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Teri Zipf 
Outside the School of Theology

Outside the School of Theology, an article
from The Sun is taped to the wall.
"Adam & Eve's Skeletons Found--
in Colorado!" The photo shows two
 
skeletons lying rib by rib. Their knees bend in
the same direction, Adam's in the space
behind Eve's. His right arm--humerus, radius,
and ulna--stretches beneath Eve's head,
 
her pillow for the night, for forever.
I'm glad to see Adam didn't hold a grudge
about the apple. Of course, a lot has happened
since then. Cast out of the Garden, they
 
wandered for a while, took up farming.
Maybe when Cain was grown
they bought a Winnebago and criss-crossed
America, sent postcards to the grandkids.
 
"Overheated in a godforsaken desert,"
Adam would say. "Think I'll call it
Death Valley." He was still in charge
of naming. Finally one day,
 
they got tired. Or maybe they thought
they had wandered back to Eden.
I've felt that way, in Colorado.
So many years had passed, they had
 
forgotten about the snake. Eve's
days of childbirth were long
gone and Adam was done scraping
his living from the thin soil of Goshen.
 
They lay down. They looked
at the stars. They were so old
they no longer thought they could
distinguish good from evil.
 
They said their nightly prayer
for Abel. Eve said, "Adam, it's time
to go home." And Adam said,
"All right, dear. Good night."
 

Teri Zipf's Outside the School of Theology was the winner of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association 1998, William Stafford Memorial Award  
"We found this poetry to be magical, pragmatic and sublime; sensuous, visceral, knowing and joyous. This gathering of voice is a special offering to those who celebrate a rare and precious gift from a fine, uncompromising intelligence." 1998 PNBA Book Award Committee
 
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