http://www.crosscut.com/mudville/4163/The+new+boss+at+the+Port+of+Seattle+is+wasting+no+time/#comments

i have a slightly different take
Report a violationPosted by: mikerolm on Jun 16, 2007 7:36 PM

maybe mr. corr ought to have checked with some folks in what passes as "the city" hereabouts to check what kind of good old boy Tay Yoshitani really is. a list of prior jobs does not really do the trick as probing reporting goes.

as to mr. dinsmore. i interviewed him at great length around the time of the last election for commissioner, and i have interviewed nobel prize winners, and usually they like to open up to me, as did mr. dinsmore [but knute berger, then of the seattle weekly did not even have the courtesy of exercising the first refusal rights i offered him] and found Mic the Great to be a character worthy of an American novel, but evidently not a tragedy. unusually seigneural. especially considering his origins in the butt of the american industrial wasteland. a lunch whose tab cost the port a mere $ 40, for three. it appears that toward the end of his tenure he was rather hand's off as a manager, but played the making of deals in Asia close to his vest, as i would, too, I must say, not only with a board of overseers such as the by and large fine bunch like the current crop [my favorite is alec fisken, and i think john creighton and lloyd hara are fine, too; bob edwards i have not to come as well as i ought to have; the foxy lady appears to be a bag lady for what joel connelly calls croney capitalism, but who knows, perhaps crony capitalism nepotism is best for seattle??? which exerts its efforts through p.a.c.s; pacs for port commissioner races, good grief!!] but faced with the slug processor just imagine having that shibboleth "transparency" vet a big contract for a shipping line to make the port of Seattle its American home port. ah me gawd, it would be like the building of a fourth runway.

http://www.crosscut.com/mossback/4159/Theodore+Roethke+lives+through+David+Wagoner/

Roethke is a fine German nature poet in American,
Report a violationPosted by: mikerolm on Jun 17, 2007 3:44 PM

and he certainly fits the No' West. However, he only spent the last years of a fairly short life in these parts. His appropriation by the locals is yet another instance - August Wilson is a more recent example - of their dressing themselves with laurels developed elsewhere, since they allow so few of their own to flourish.

Nowhere does Mr. Berger - while citing prizes, posts held, accolades showered, influences exerted - even attempt to define even a single quality of Roethke's, or manifest a kind of personal response to his work. I am afraid I find this to be typical not just of Mr. Berger's work in such matters in these parts.

Mr. Berger's Mossback columns in The Weekly were one of the few things I at least looked forward to, that one could at least disagree with, whereas as an editor he certainly did not develop or allow any interesting writers to flourish. With few exceptions, Roger Downey being the most significant, The Weekly must have had a collection of some of the most godawful writers going anywhere. Who do I miss, well Claire Dederer is now at the NY Times. Suspicion is in order when an editor chiefly features himself, as is the case once again in Crosscut [Neither cross nor cuts nor much of a section says this once lumberman who however took down his last tree with a double bit about 20 years ago.]

I recently re-read quite a bit of Roethke, on-line, on the occasion of The Stranger's Brendan Kiley's take on Roethke,

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=166026

where Kiley's quoting did not seem [to me, obviously] to do Roethke the best of service. Thus there are different kind of Roethke's to respond to.

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/

maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roethke

sincerely

http://www.roloff.freeservers.com