Another wonderful poet, another wonderful chapbook—from Finishing Line Press! Congratulations to Benjamin Green, author of His Only Merit!!
Tag: poet
Troutwatching!
Congratulations to CLR contributor Dallas Crow on the publication of his second poetry chap book, Troutwatching, by Finishing Line Press!
Publishing Begins!
So many thanks to all the amazing poets and writers for sharing your work during this year’s submission period. Our window closed yesterday—with over 560 submissions!! WOW!!! Our reading period begins next week, and there is yet another incredible group of student editors ready to learn all about publishing by doing the hard work to publish the next volume of our beloved literary journal—and our 30th issue!
Thank you!!
How do you go from a student-run lit. mag. to a national music prize? In just five easy steps:
Step 1: A poet submits his work. In September of 2022, Steve Deutsch submitted his poem, “Looking for America,” for consideration of publication in volume XXVII of the Clackamas Literary Review (CLR). Steve is the poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet-in-residence at Bellefonte Art Museum in Pennsylvania. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times and won the Sinclair Poetry Prize for his full-length book, Brooklyn.
Step 2: Student editors select Steve’s poem for publication. Students enrolled in one of the English Department’s book publishing course offerings at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, OR, who were learning all about publishing by working as assistant editors to publish the next volume of the award-winning and internationally-read Clackamas Literary Review, read, discussed at length, and were thrilled to acquire “Looking for America” for publication.
Step 3: A composer from the San Francisco Bay Area discovers Steve’s poem in the CLR. Martin Rokeach, a professional composer who had been commissioned by conductor Bruce Koliha to write a piece for chorus, had been searching for just the right poem—scouring the internet, visiting used book stores—to set to music. He had read over 200 poems and was coming up short. And then Dennis Lum, whose poems “Milky Way” and “The Answer Is No” were published in the same issue as “Looking for America,” and who happened to be Martin’s cousin-in-law, sent a copy of the CLR to his family to read. In Martin’s words, “I at last found what I needed in Steve’s ‘Looking for America.’” Martin reached out to the CLR’s managing editor about connecting with Steve regarding the exciting opportunity. The editor connected composer with poet, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Step 4: Composer sets poem to music. Martin wrote the music, to be performed by the San Ramon Valley Chorale, renaming it “Remembering We’re Alive.” It premiered in April 2025, nearly two years after the poem was first published in the CLR.
Step 5: Choral work wins a national music prize. Sacramento State’s Festival of New American Music, which received more than 230 submissions in four categories, selected only one choral work in the choir category. You guessed it: “Remembering We’re Alive.”
See how that works?
“Remembering We’re Alive,” adapted from Steve Deutsch’s poem “Looking for America,” originally published in volume XXVII of the Clackamas Literary Review and set to music by Martin Rokeach, will be performed November 2nd, 2025 at Sacramento State’s annual music festival.
“Looking for America,” by Steve Deutsch
Let us be
best friends
one last time—
roll out the old
Ford
and take
that trip
we so often
dreamed of
when young.
Head to
the west coast
on those two lane
roads that once
were America.
Remember
when we were
America too?
Fill that old
Ford with
chips and beer—
the radio set
to the “Nothing
but Oldies” Station,
loud enough
to remind us
we are still alive.
Swap lies
with the locals
in pubs on Main Street
and sample
the biscuits and bacon
in dozens of mom
and pop diners
in what was once
the heartland—
a thousand dots
on a tattered
gas station map
long ago
bypassed
and nearly forgotten.
And when
the Ford
throws a rod
in Kansas
or Colorado,
as of course
it must,
we can unfold
the aluminum
lawn chairs
and sit on the berm
to wait for the sunset.
CLR contributor’s new poetry collection wins award!
Congratulations to Harry Newman, author of the excellent poem “Back” (CLR, 20th Anniversary Issue), on his first full-length poetry collection, Cliff Dwellers, winning the Gerald Cable Book Award! The book is scheduled for release August 15th, 2026, by Silverfish Review Press. Check it out!
Interview with Sue Fagalde Lick
Author of “Turquoise” (Volume XXVI, 2022)
“Regarding the bathroom: The description is so vivid. What bathroom was this based on?”
The bathroom in the first section is from my childhood home. The turquoise bathroom in the other sections is in the house where I live now, so I use it every day. The previous owners were very fond of color, so I have a turquoise bathroom and a pink one. The living room was green, and the kitchen was purple when I moved in. I painted the kitchen white but kept the other colors.
“What inspired you to tell a life story through the aging and evolution of a bathroom?”
We had a prompt in a workshop to talk about a room and color. I had been thinking about having the bathroom repainted, so it was on my mind. Then I remembered the sky blue bathroom back home and lines started coming to me for this poem. We spend an awful lot of time in the bathroom but rarely talk about it and certainly don’t write poems about it. There are stories there if we look.
“In the third and fourth cantos, the woman seems quite lonely. How do you envision the woman spending her Christmas Eve?”
She is lonely without her husband. I envision her going to Mass on Christmas Eve, then spending the rest of the holiday alone by the little Christmas tree she put up herself. You’d be surprised at how many widows find themselves in this situation.
Interview with Mercedes Lawry
Author of “Bears” (Volume XXVI, 2022)
“What brought you to write about bears in enclosures specifically?”
On a visit to Sitka, Alaska, I went to the Fortress of the Bears. These were bears that would never be released back into the wild. As with any captive animals, there is a sadness. As a young child I certainly never saw it that way. But that visit triggered memories of going to the zoo and seeing that particular bear and it was striking how I felt about it so many years later.
“Seeing the first couple of stanzas, are you experienced with bears in any way? If so, how?”
When my husband was battling cancer, friends sent us tiny Zuni bears that became tokens for us – we would take them to hospital visits. We began to get more bear items so now I have many bears in the house and as my husband passed away, they are a sweet reminder of him. I’ve been lucky enough to see bears in the wild twice – never in a dangerous situation.
“Why did you choose to write “Bears” as a poem and not a short story?”
Although I do write short fiction, I am primarily a poet and it was a natural inclination to approach this topic through a poem, distilling the various influences of bears while exploring their emotional resonance.
Interview with Cecil Morris
Author of “One Woman” (Volume XXVI, 2022)
“Could you tell us who inspired the character in this poem?”
My son was shooting wedding photos for a friend of his wife’s family in Cathedral Park under the St. John’s Bridge in Portland, and I had come along as an equipment carrier and back-up photographer. At least two other photographers were at the park shooting portraits (one of another wedding couple and one of a high school senior). Not a native Portlander, I had never been to Cathedral Park and was struck by the beauty of the scene and the brides. I began to imagine how the mother of a daughter or daughters might view the scene, so the “one woman” of the poem is mostly imaginary.
Being a poet of a certain age, I often think of my own receding and my own children having outgrown me and surpassed me in accomplishments. So I thought about how a woman might think of herself on that bridge suspended between (first) her life as young bride and new mother and (later but not that much later) the mother of brides.
“Why did you choose to keep your poem in one long stanza instead of breaking it up?”
I kept the poem as a single stanza because life–especially for this “one woman”–is a single short bridge from past to future. I think this might be a projection of my own experience of parenthood. It all went by so fast. Presto change-o from baby to toddler to teen to married and gone.
Interview with Harry Newman,
Author of “Back” (20th Anniversary Issue)
“Back” is a strange piece, feeling almost alien in its eccentricities. I quite enjoyed it, what was the inspiration behind it?
I have a several poems like “Back” that are associative in nature, that are guided by a more emotional logic than anything rationally thought out. There aren’t very many of them, but I like it when they come and try to follow those impulses wherever they lead. I’m interested in working more in that way because it’s unnerving for me.
“Back” is an older poem — it’s not been easy to find people who respond well to it — and I don’t remember its origin in much detail. I was homeless at the time I wrote it, after the end of my first marriage. Moving from couch to couch at various friends’ apartments around the city, in one place only a few days at a time. I guess it started as an effort to remind myself, a whispering in my own ear. A suggestion of direction and a hope for return.
What made you decide to become an author in the first place?
There was nothing conscious about it. I started writing at a young age, 9 or 10. First poems, then later plays. I spent my 20s and 30s working professionally in theater in New York, as a writer and translator and on the staff of theaters. Writing was just the thing I did naturally. And I always treated it professionally, just assuming it would be where I’d go. I started sending out poems to journals when I was in my teens. They always came back. Good practice for the future.
Do you have any other pieces you’re intending to release soon, or are working on?
I always have 30 or 40 poems circulating to journals at any given time. When one group gets rejected, I send it to another journal right away. I keep a list. I have a reading coming up in New York in June and I’m hoping to have a new poem or two for it. That’s what I’m working on right now. I’ve also started rehearsing for the reading. In part that’s because of my background in theater, but I can also get quite nervous when I read and like to practice aloud for a week or two before a reading. That helps me discover an order for the poems as well, a shape for the presentation as a whole.
Interview with Patricia Murphy
In 2005, the CLR published Patricia Colleen Murphy’s poem “Days After.” This year, she won the May Swenson Poetry Award for her poetry collection Hemming Flames. We had the chance to interview Trish about her writing process and what inspired these poems. Enjoy!
What is the background and inspiration behind this collection?
I’ve been writing about my complex family history for as long as I can remember. Poetry is helpful in articulating that history because I can use an objective correlative to show what happened, rather than trying to explain it. I think about how many times I’ve summarized the conditions of my nuclear family–how often do any of us answer the questions, “Do you have siblings?” or “What do your parents do.” I spent years and years (on an airplane or at the dentist) flat out lying. I had to lie. I couldn’t stand that look of pity when I told the truth. In this book I tell the truth about everything: madness, violence, hostility, and chaos.
What difficulties did you have writing about the mental illness and more disturbing aspects of your life? Did you have any reservations about publishing this work?
The difficulty came from having to relive so many of the painful events that render the characters and actions on the page. My mother’s mental illness made me timid and insecure throughout my lifetime. It was always going to be bigger than me. And for so long I thought her illness was my fault. This is not an uncommon occurrence for a child of a mentally ill parent. But the feeling was exacerbated when she attempted suicide when I was 15 and I saved her life. She went on to attempt suicide many times. I was never in control of anything.
I don’t have reservations about publishing this work, but I do wish I had something more uplifting to say. It’s hard to give readings from the book because it’s so intense and it’s not really fair to take an audience to the same dark place that I had to go to write it.
How do you begin a poem, generally, and how did you begin to approach this collection in particular?
I have a very disciplined writing practice. I read a lot. At least 104 books a year. And I keep an extensive writer’s notebook. When I sit down to write, first I journal, then I read a full collection of poetry, then I journal again with reactions to that. Then I review my writer’s notebook and I decide on a line or image to drive the composing process. Every once in a while I’ll have a strong emotion and I use the poem to make a sweeping gesture to address that. But usually the poems are image based or line-driven.
For this collection, I wanted to have a satisfying arch. Most of the poems were already written, but I did decide to write a series of nonce sonnets about my brother that rounded out that topic in the book. My writer’s group read and commented on them all–for many years we exchanged a poem a week for ten weeks, on and off throughout the year–and they encouraged me to be brave and detailed.
Your poem “Days After” was published in the CLR in 2005. What has changed about your writing craft—the ideas or characters you explore, how you approach them—over the last ten years?
That poem is about a different death–the death of my partner’s father in 2001. We really spent the aughts with sick parents, losing all four between 01 and 09, before I was 40 years old. I do have some love poems, and a lot of travel poems, and some conservationist poems, and some nature poems, etc. But over the course of those years we took a lot of hits! So it was asylum, cancer, death, death, hoarding, asylum, death death, etc.
What advice do you have for writers and poets working on trauma-related pieces?
First, I would say that every poem has a little trauma in it. If not, then it lacks tension, and it’s not really a poem. Second, find a group of people who love you and support you and who will read your work and tell you when you are being honest. Third, I would say read everything you can. There are so many amazing examples of poetry collections that deal with traumatic events or conditions. I’ll list some here:
Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen
After Urgency by Rusty Morrison
Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White
Temper by Beth Bachmann
Rising by Farah Field
How Beautiful the Beloved by Gregory Orr
Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright
How can readers discover more about you and your work?
At my website patriciacolleenmurphy.com.
CLACKAMAS LITERARY REVIEW 