Alive at the Center is the first book in the ambitious Pacific Poetry Project of Portland State University's graduate publishing program. It includes a variety of poets from three cities--Vancouver, Seattle and Portland--chosen by nine editors (three from each city), themselves poets. As John Sibley Williams, who got the project off the ground, describes the process, "rounding up poets is like rounding up cats." Nevertheless, they did their jobs well, celebrating the vibrant poetic communities of their cities. "We have poetry stuffed in our parkas and stashed under our boot-soles," says Cody Walker, introducing the "rough water town" of Seattle; Portland's Susan Denning, adds, "It's Oregon, go ahead--mention the rain and the Doug firs and the fish and the rivers that run through it all."
The anthology is evenly balanced among the three cities, for a total of 136 poets. There are veteran poets here, like Heather McHugh, Floyd Skloot, Carlos Reyes, Paulann Petersen, Susan McCaslin and Evelyn Lau, side by side with rookies and other poets who may be relatively well known but are still at the early end of what might become long careers. And then there are the poems. So many good ones.
Richard Kenney's contribution, simply titled "Poetry," sums up the spirit of Alive at the Center, and is worth quoting in full:
Nobody at any rate reads it much. Your
lay
citizenry have other forms of fun.
Still, who would wish to live in a culture
of which future anthropologists would say:
Oddly, they had none? --Tom Lavoie, former publisher