Tight Cozying: PageBoy Magazine

While Seattle has a large reading population for a city of its size, it’s filled with an admirable amount of writers. Combine it with the rest of the Pacific Northwest and there’s something charming and almost curious to be taken note of, rumbling beside the quake-torn bowels of the earth. That being said, it’s quite clear that the people living in Seattle and Portland are also not afraid of enjoying their literary talents on a regular basis. Pick any day of the week, any bar or bookstore, and you can be sure to find writers around, ready to share in all manner of forms and styles.

Since moving here in September, I have investigated and penetrated numerous circles and circuits, entered and exited numerous venues of expression and have found much of the prosody and verse quite rewarding. I must admit that moving from the much larger and historically prominent Philadelphia left me with high standards on art and performance, but Seattle has proven itself. And so it’s clear that the fruitful emerald landscape still shimmers, and yet this article is about a highlight recently unleashed. The third issue of PageBoy Magazine, just released by editor Thomas Walton, puts a shining star on the efforts of the independent and underground communities.

It’s a small volume in depth and dimensions, but don’t be fooled: beneath the cardstock cover, which features the unabashed portrait called Carlos, is a dynamic variety of writing ready to capture the poetic reader’s attention. The book features nine writers and Shannon Perry, who is responsible for the cover art and several additional portraits inside, and while not all the contributors are living, they all embody the imaginative spirit and manage to create a unity of expression.

Let me start with the beginning. Recent UW MFA-recipient Sarah Erickson’s poems come first, and they are shaped like cloths or scrolls being unrolled, readied to spill out with earnest prophecy and comforting nostalgia. In “Shaped like an Aphrodisiac” she writes: “The coils of silken cord/The ancient key/The underspeak/The all of it shimmying” and this treatment is profound. Her writing is terse, and yet it is as mystical as it is backyard sprawl. She opens the book with a powerful scanning into experimentation, too, where her academic cape twirls and marvels, her eye for image dominates and lures.

Jesse Morse of Portland follows quickly. His poems are entries, micro-letters addressed to unconventional recipients: the Dolphin, the Wall, Downtown, Wheat and Page are all muses capable of the inspiring verse written for and out of them. Though the poems look like small blobs on the page, Jesse’s abstractions through prosody represent the other unknown of confessional: the confusion we create through our attempt to understand.

Editor Thomas Walton worked with Lisa Sila and Alice Calie, and perhaps others, too, for that matter, to create an engaging book. Isn’t that the goal for most publishers? Well, they succeeded. Following Morse we have an identifiable triptych of poets whose alignment seals the deal on the ultimate goal of the literary magazine. Local SPLAB-man Paul Nelson, as well as internationally-acclaimed José Kozer and the late Lorine Niedecker have their poetry presented side by side here, in rapid succession. Like three mirrors facing toward one another, each separate and yet willing with the open voice, this poetry is revelation. The outcome of placement is provocative and yet a haunting challenge between life, death and the confirmation of beauty.

Local musician and artist Shannon Perry’s watercolor portraits are about as photographic as they can be without being called photographic. With a rage of color, shadows playing through each crevice and layer of skin and poses that never fail to haunt and stun, these portraits are a welcome counterpoint to the text. Perry says: “the watercolors are difficult to predict and control, so having a visible outline lets me see a skeletal structure underneath the paint.” The embodiment of the Human in this art is complimentary to the expression of voice, ego, identity and identification throughout the poems that precede it.

What journal would be complete without some comic, cynical relief? In Seattle poet Doug Nufer’s single, multi-page list-poem, the reader is presented with a long line of warnings. How many times are you warned? At what point do we stop to think that those objects that beware us to stay away are pointless? At what point do we think them hilarious or ridiculous? Nufer uses footnotes and exclamations and repetition to point us in the right direction. Brimming with puns and, ironically, a dry sense of humor, his “Slippery When Wet” is a testament to the agility of language.

As quickly as the energy rises, it falls back into a steady shallow pool again with the close-walled poems of Erika Wilder. Her status as a current MFA poet may explain her precision with sound, tense and form, and yet the still-life qualities of her visions leave endearment to be had. These pieces fall short of the boundaries that the rest of PageBoy has expanded beyond, but fortunately the magazine as a whole retains its strength as a series of links. Where each poet is their own person, they support those who come before and after as a collective of strangers bound by the spiritual confines of their region.

And yet remember what I said about boundaries: the territory of those boundaries within PageBoy breaks free into the continental, international and universal. Perhaps the writer who struck my eye the most with such innovation and lingual appeal is not from this region at all, but from Kentucky. Douglas Miller, whose prose works in this issue are freakish and lonely, distorted and trying and true, says so much with so little. And isn’t that what horror is about? As a visual artist he knows what elements can be mixed in contortion and conflict to create a new sense of beauty. “On Postman’s cobbler and Postman’s stew” reads the prose piece largely concerned about the murder of the local overweight postman. What does it mean that I take adamant pleasure in these grotesque creations?

Closing out the book is Sarah Galvin, who writes for The Stranger. Her poems are snarky and sarcastic, blunt and belittling. They are pop culture like Tao Lin and yet confrontationally off-beat like Dorothea Lasky. All in all, her poems are relative and current, and can be read without making you afraid to laugh.

PageBoy is definitely a magazine worth keeping an out for. You can check out the official blog at pageboymagazine.blogspot.com, where you can find a bunch of media and literary miscellanea, or you can just go find and buy the magazine and dive right in. It’s only ten bucks and it’s available at numerous bookstores around Seattle and where you find this latest issue, issue three, you might also find its predecessors.

Greg Bem does search engine marketing, and in his free time co-curates the Breadline performance series on Capitol Hill. He has a blog called the Stale and has a yellow bike helmet.

Comment