A journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? |
WHERE ARE THE DEAD? (for Donald Hall) by James Snydal Where are the dead? Where will we be? To ask questions begins so many longings. The beloved are quiet and gone, sometimes our wives, our companions. What happens to them? It is said that Jesus said, "You will be with me in Paradise." There are quiet, rest and peace for you after you're dead, even if your days and nights were more and more hard, as well as for those left behind, although theirs is, perhaps, a lonely distress. Our endings are only beginnings of the rest of time. Some of us, very soon dead, have somehow spoken of beauty. Is the reaper our friend? Becoming dead, each of us may learn, for so many of our questions, answers. copyright2001 James Snydal originally published in Do Not Surrender, John Matthews, ed., Dry Bones Press, 2001 |
A journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? |
JAMES SNYDAL was born on Randall Jarrell's 35th birthday in a North Dakota hospital along the Lewis and Clark Trail as Dr. William Carlos Williams took a train through town, headed to Seattle to give a reading. One of Snydal's grandpas was a worker with hides & fur, while the other managed a Great Northern railroad depot (HIS dad had edited a Minnesota newspaper). Raised on the Olympic Peninsula in NW Washington, Snydal now lives on a green hillside of the Puget Sound island where Theodore Roethke spent his last afternoon. A postcard of Snydal's, from Richard Wilbur, recalls taking a case of bubbly, with Ted & Beatrice Roethke, out to Morris Grave's home on Bainbridge Island. Among Snydal's publications, Do Not Surrender a 254- sonnet sequence on the faith & life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (San Francisco: Dry Bones Press, San Francisco, 2001), Kneel and Pray, a chapbook from the Bonhoeffer sonnets, (Ottawa: Plowman Press), Blueberry Pie; 26 five-beat quatrains on Andrew Wyeth, as Wyeth was making his "Christina's World" ( Seattle: Wood Works Press); A Flower in a Guardsman's Gun, heroic sonnets on our demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, (Kent State: Pudding House)'; Living in America (poems on Whitman, WWII, Robert Oppenheimer, Edmund Wilson & Edna St. Vincent Millay, (Tulsa, Oklahoma: New Thought Journal Press). With 189 poems now published in journals or anthologies in 32 states, Canada, England & Wales, Snydal has also reviewed many books for a variety of journals. Besides giving readings at the University of Washington, Seattle's Bumbershoot, Elliott Bay Bookstore, Port Angeles' Peninsula College, Pacific Lutheran University, Bellevue Art Museum & in Greenwich Village, Snydal has hosted a radio program on Seattle's KRAB radio. |
