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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

So Much Nonsense Must Make Sense: The Black Vision of Chester Himes  

Left-Hand Horses, Winged Souls 

Initiation, Individuation, In Country  

There's a Whole Lot O' Color in the 'White Man's" Blues: Country Music's Selective Memory and the Challenge of Identity 

The Silent Threat: A (Re)Viewing of The "Sexual Other" in The Phantom of The Opera and Nosferatu 

Paul Robeson Remembered  

POEMS 

October, and I don't know 

The Spiritual 

Where They Slept 

The Serious Minded in Pursuit of Happiness  

Eclipse 

Raining Through a Gray Light  

Every Field  

She Said the Geese 

The Egg Illuminates 

After Being Grown-up Awhile On Goodwater Hill  

Food chain  

The Cold After Drought  

The Equine Sky  

Mimesis (Allegory with Heliotropes)  

REVIEW 

Glen Jeansonne; Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' 

Movement and World War II  

Abstract

DAVID COCHRAN explores the world Chester Himes has created in his hard-boiled cop series set in Harlem as a reflection of reality and Himes's own experiences. A doctoral candidate in American cultural history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Cochran has published two articles previously and is working on a dissertation covering popular culture in the Cold War era.

MICHAEL A. GRIFFITH contends that Plato, in Phaedrus, distinguishes between philosophy, as the superior intellectual endeavor, and poetry and rhetoric, as its inferiors, in the same way he would distinguish between love and sex, the one sublin1e and the others obstacles to wisdom, but both necessary in life. Assistant Editor of The Southern Review, he has essays forthcoming in The Southern Literary Journal, Aethlon, and Southern Quarterly.

SARAH BROWNING, Montague, Massachusetts, directs the Amherst Writers & Artists Institute, which provides creative writing workshops for low-income women and their children. Her poems have appeared recently in The Seattle Review, Sycamore Review, Onionhead, Blue Unicorn, and other journals. One recent poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

ROBERT COLES teaches African American literature at Hampshire College. His poems have appeared recently in Black Buzzard Review, Maryland Review, Bottomfish, and other journals. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

PAT DANEMAN, Lenexa, Kansas, works as an editorial manager. She has published fiction in MSS and The Indiana Review, and poetry in Poetpourri.

JOSEPH M. DITTA teaches creative writing and American literature at Dakota Wesleyan University. He has published poems in The Centennial Review, Voices in Italian Americana, and The Illinois Review. He lives in Mitchell, South Dakota.

CAROL HAMILTON, Midwest City, Oklahoma, is writer, storyteller, and teaches English at Rose State College. She has published poems recently in The New York Quarterly, Blue Unicom, Amelia, Maryland Poetry Review, and numerous other journals. Her poetry chapbook, Once the Dust (Bronco Press, 1992), won the Oklahoma Book Award. She also writes fiction for children and adults which has won numerous awards . Her poetry has also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

GRAY JACOBIK, Pomfret Center, Connecticut, has published poems recently in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and other journals. He also recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in Creative Writing.

CHRISTIAN KNOELLER teaches literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Connecticut Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Cutbank. He has also published a poetry chapbook, Song in Brown Bear Country (Devil's Club Press).

LYN LIFSHIN, Vienna, Virginia, has published two recent collections of poems, Blue Tattoo, Poems of the Holocaust (Event Horizon Press, 1995) and Marilyn Monroe, Poems (Quiet Lion Press, 1995). Her poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

HILLARY LYON has published poetry in Poetry Northwest, Poem, The Literary Review, and Sulphur River Review. Her poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. She lives with her family in Lake Worth, Florida.

JANE McCLELLAN, Ocala, Florida, recently retired from teaching. Her poems have appeared recently in The Centennial Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, Eureka Literary Magazine, and other journals. Her poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

SALLY ALLEN McNALL, Paradise, California, has published poems in New Letters, Cottonwood, Kansas Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other journals. Her poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

DIXIE PARTRIDGE has published two books of poetry, Watermark (Saturday Press, 1991) and Deer in the Haystacks (Ahsahta Press, 1984). Her poems have also appeared in many journals, including Commonweal, Hollins Critic, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Poetry Review. Her poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. She lives in Richland, Washington.

LAUREN SMITH, Champaign, Illinois, recently edited a collection of essays, Swaying: Essays on Intercultural Love (University of Iowa Press,1995).

STEVE WILSON, San Marcos, Texas, teaches creative writing at Southwest Texas State University. His recent poems have appeared in Asylum Annual 1995 and New American Writing. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing in Romania in 1994-1995. His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

DREWEY WAYNE GUNN argues that Bobby Ann Mason's In Country presents two intertwined journeys of self-actualization, a particularly female version of the quest undertaken by heroine Sam Hughes and the more traditional male quest of her uncle Emmett Smith. Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Texas A & M University-Kingsville, Gunn has written American and British Writers in Mexico and Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography, as well as articles on Mark Twain, John M. Synge, John Steinbeck, Preston Jones, and Carlos Fuentes, among others.

REBECCA THOMAS traces the double denial that marks today's country music: denial that its roots lie in African American experience and music and denial of black artists of a significant presence in the major venues and collective memory of country music professionals. Currently researching a dissertation on the early interactions between African American musicians and white country music stars in the program of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Thomas is here publishing her first scholarly work. In 1995 she wrote a "My Turn" essay printed in Newsweek.

ANDREW P. WILLIAMS examines both the threat the Phantom of The Opera and the Vampire pose to western patriarchal sexual authority and their otherness. Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at North Carolina Central University, Williams has published articles on a variety of subjects including James Joyce's Ulysses, Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets, and writing theory. He is currently working on a book-length study of the Restoration fop.

H. WENDELL HOWARD discusses the impact of singer-activist Paul Robeson on his own life, Robeson's reaction to the suffering of his people whether in the United States or elsewhere in the world, and Robeson's confrontation with the anti-Communist movement. Howard is Professor of English, Director of the Honors Program, and conductor of the Glee Club at St. John Fisher College. Author of over one hundred scholarly articles, creative non-fiction essays, satires, pieces of humor, and poems on a wide variety of topics, he has published in Midwest Quarterly three times previously.

HARRY L. HUMPHRIES, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Pittsburg State University, teaches a course in political sociology. During the 1994-95 academic year, he was a Fulbright Fellow at Kazan State University in Tatarstan, Russia, and recently presented his paper entitled "Two Political Pictures of the World: Russian and American Sociology" at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society.

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