Executive Overview
In contemporary American poetry, the landscape is rarely just a physical terrain; it is an atmospheric condition, an archive of memory, and an intellectual negotiation. Such is the premise of "Cannon Beach," a striking new poem by author, critic, and educator Lucy Biederman, which has been officially selected as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week. Written after Wallace Stevens and born from an intricate web of literary influences, geographic dislocation, and auditory musings, "Cannon Beach" captures a haunting afternoon on the Pacific Northwest coast where the boundaries between reality, recollection, and ecological vulnerability blur into a thick August mist.
Biederman, whose previous accolades include winning the Vine Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award for The Walmart Book of the Dead (2017), brings her distinct prose sensibilities and lyric precision to this new work. Her poems and prose have regularly surfaced in prominent literary journals such as Bat City Review, Sixth Finch, Poetry, Ploughshares, Rejection Letters, and wigleaf. Based in Chicago—where she divides her time between college access work and teaching first-year writing at the College of DuPage—Biederman writes from the perspective of a Midwesterner grappling with the alien, cliff-ridden, tide-pool-laden majesty of the Pacific coast.
This article provides an in-depth examination of "Cannon Beach," exploring its genesis through the author’s personal creative chronicle, analyzing its thematic and stylistic homages to Wallace Stevens and Zach Savich, and placing Biederman’s work within the broader ecosystem of contemporary American verse. By examining the poem’s textual architecture, authorial notes, and critical reception, we uncover how a fleeting memory of yellow raincoats, protected anemones, and a muffled shoreline transformed into one of the season’s most celebrated poetic achievements.
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Detailed Chronology: The Genesis of a Poem
To fully appreciate the layered construction of "Cannon Beach," one must trace the timeline of inspirations, aesthetic collisions, and pedagogical moments that brought the piece into existence. The biography of a poem is rarely linear, and Biederman’s creative process serves as a fascinating case study in how contemporary literature absorbs and transmutes cultural data over extended periods.
Phase One: The Physical Encounter (Pre-2024)
The emotional foundation of the poem was laid years prior when Biederman—fundamentally shaped by the freshwater horizons of the Great Lakes—found herself standing on the actual Cannon Beach in Oregon. For a person accustomed to the familiar liminal spaces of the Midwest, the Pacific coast presented an alien shock. Characterized by dramatic sea stacks, sheer cliffs, and fragile marine ecosystems, the environment was simultaneously horrifying, confusing, and intensely compelling. However, at this stage, the experience remained unwritten, stored away as sensory data: the cold August mist, the protective park officials guarding tide pools, and the overwhelming vastness of the Pacific edge.
Phase Two: The Scholarly Catalyst (2025)
The intellectual seed of the poem was planted during an Annulet Linkages Lecture, where writer Zach Savich read from and discussed his book A Field of Telephones (53rd State Press, 2025). Savich’s scholarly yet elliptical work on poet Theodore Roethke deeply resonated with Biederman. She was particularly struck by how Savich’s book resisted rigid academic orthodoxy, opening up gaps in its own knowledge and transforming into poetry to explore alternative ways of understanding the world. Crucially, the conclusion of Savich’s work converges on a symbolic and physical Cannon Beach—a conceptual bridge that reawoke Biederman’s own dormant memories of the Oregon coast.
Phase Three: Incubation and Musical Intersections (Late 2025)
For over a year, Biederman carried the ideas sparked by Savich’s lecture. The creative tipping point arrived via an unexpected cultural artifact: a new album by country-folk artist Zach Bryan. Listening to one of Bryan’s tracks—which featured a lyrical nod to Cannon Beach and the poignant line, "They covered all the songs that were best left alone"—while commuting to teach her classes, Biederman experienced a sudden convergence of influences.
Phase Four: The Classroom Composition and the Shadow of Stevens
Upon arriving at her college campus, Biederman engaged in a routine writing session alongside her students. It was here that the first lines of "Cannon Beach" materialized on the page. Recognizing early in the draft that words like sky, sea, and afternoon were summoning the grand philosophical ghosts of Wallace Stevens, Biederman began carrying a copy of Stevens’ Collected Poems in her backpack.
As the semester progressed, the poem evolved through rigorous peer workshops. Biederman has frequently credited her circle of fellow writers—specifically acknowledging the brilliant feedback of Kathy Goodkin, Karen Kilcup, Jess Cory, Ruth Hoberman, and Jennifer Whitaker—with helping her refine the draft into its final, published form.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Biederman’s Literary Ecosystem
To contextualize the achievement of "Cannon Beach," it is essential to examine Lucy Biederman’s broader portfolio and the critical reception of her work within the contemporary literary landscape.
Literary Output and Cross-Genre Mastery
Biederman occupies a unique space in modern letters by maintaining a fluid boundary between poetry and prose. Her prose works, published in venues like Ploughshares, Rejection Letters, and wigleaf, often employ flash fiction and vignettes, demonstrating a keen eye for micro-narratives. This sensibility directly informs her poetry, which frequently reads as a narrative snapshot or an impressionistic landscape study.
Her major breakthrough came with the publication of The Walmart Book of the Dead (Vine Leaves Press, 2017), a book that won the Vine Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award. The collection showcased her ability to find profound, uncanny, and deeply human moments within mundane, hyper-capitalist American environments—a thematic precursor to how she navigates public spaces, park officials, and shared tourism at Cannon Beach.
The Geography of Identity: Great Lakes vs. Pacific
A vital metric in analyzing Biederman’s poetry is her relationship with geography. As a resident of Chicago working in college access and teaching first-year writing at the College of DuPage, her daily life is anchored in the urban-suburban Midwest. When she encounters the Pacific Northwest, her outsider status becomes a poetic lens. The mist that "muzzled sound" and existed "between every one thing / and every other" is viewed through the eyes of someone accustomed to different aquatic borders. This geographical displacement heightens the poem’s central theme: the feeling of being at the edge of the world, where reality feels provisional and constructed.
Official Statements and Authorial Insights
In her official Author’s Note accompanying the Missouri Review publication, Biederman provided a rare, transparent look into the mechanics of her inspiration. Rather than presenting the poem as a bolt of divine lightning, she contextualizes it as a collaborative, multi-layered artifact born of reading, listening, and teaching.
"The seed of this poem was planted in me when I listened to Zach Savich read from and speak about his wonderful book… [which] pokes ellipses in what it knows, turning itself into poems again and again to show other ways of knowing."
Biederman’s acknowledgment of her creative lineage underscores a vital aspect of contemporary poetry: that poems often beget poems. By weaving together the scholarship of Zach Savich, the musical melancholy of Zach Bryan, the high-modernist philosophical scaffolding of Wallace Stevens, and the real-time energy of a college writing classroom, Biederman positions "Cannon Beach" not as an isolated utterance, but as a node in an ongoing artistic conversation.
Furthermore, her tribute to her poetry workshop highlights the communal nature of literary production. In an era that often mythologizes the solitary genius writing in an ivory tower, Biederman’s transparency regarding the semester-long revision process and her gratitude toward peers—Kathy Goodkin, Karen Kilcup, Jess Cory, Ruth Hoberman, and Jennifer Whitaker—offers an authoritative model of collaborative artistic practice.
Textual Analysis of "Cannon Beach"
Everyone was wearing a yellow raincoat
in the cold August mist
at the edge of the world, the worldthat lives as you live,
speaks as you speak.
The mist muzzled sound.
The poem opens with a cinematic precision, establishing both a uniform visual aesthetic (the ubiquitous yellow raincoats of coastal tourists) and a meteorological condition (the cold August mist). The invocation of Wallace Stevens is immediately felt in the phrasing the world / that lives as you live, / speaks as you speak, echoing Stevens’ fascination with the interaction between human consciousness and physical reality.
As the poem progresses, the narrative introduces figures of authority—the park officials tasked with protecting the delicate marine life:
They wanted nobody
to stand on an anemone.
To go out into the mist like this,
here in the home of nobody I know,
was like starting and starting
again and again
many times,
many times over,
but with dying.
Here, the mundane act of telling tourists to step off tide-pool life transforms into an existential meditation. The presence of the officials shouting "Hey, that’s an anemone" and telling kids "whoa, that’s alive!" grounds the poem in hyper-realistic, slightly comical tourism, which Biederman brilliantly juxtaposes against the heavy, philosophical dread of mortality and repetition.
The climax of the poem merges auditory memory with the physical retreat of the tide:
The world as word
played all afternoon on the gramophone,
but no one uses those anymore.The waves pulled back from the shore,
back into the sea’s sky’s mist,
where nothing exists,in nobody I know’s home.
Stop. Said the officials, muzzled by mist,
stop standing on that rock you’re standing on.
The gramophone image operates as a brilliant metaphor for obsolescence and mediation. Just as a gramophone plays recorded sound from a bygone era, the speaker’s memory plays back the afternoon in yellow raincoats. The final command—"Stop… stop standing on that rock you’re standing on"—functions simultaneously as an ecological warning, a pedagogical reprimand, and a metaphysical halt called by the universe itself against human overreach.
Future Outlook
The publication of "Cannon Beach" as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week marks another significant milestone in Lucy Biederman’s ascending literary career. As she continues her work in Chicago—shaping the minds of first-year writing students at the College of DuPage and supporting college access initiatives—her dual life as an active scholar-poet ensures that her voice remains fresh, rigorous, and deeply engaged with the intersections of everyday life and high art.
For readers and critics, the arrival of this poem signals a poet at the height of her powers—one who can seamlessly integrate the legacies of Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke with the contemporary cadence of singer-songwriters and the visceral shock of cross-country travel. As Biederman continues to build upon the foundation of The Walmart Book of the Dead and her extensive journal publications, "Cannon Beach" stands as a luminous reminder of poetry’s unique capacity to freeze time, honor community, and map the mist-ridden edges of the human imagination.
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