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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

Revisiting Literary Blacks and Jews 

Black and White: American Genealogy, Race, and Popular Response 

Becoming Disney: Perception and Being at the Happiest Place on Earth 

Pacific Poetics: Melville’s South Seas Laugh 

What Socrates Said to Phaedrus: Reflections on Technology and Education 

Egypt: Shaping Gnosis for Christianity 

POEMS 

Life of a House 

Revision 

Remission 

A Rural Scene 

Several Cylinders In The Forest 

Arnoi 

Thaw 

The Naturalist 

Advent 

Crows at Dawn in Montana 

Nest 

No One Has To Tell Me 

Pancakes  

Crimes Against Fringed Gentians  

The Pattern Recurs on My Windowsill 

REVIEWS 

John Rodden; Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995  

James Merrill; Collected Poems 

David Baker; Changeable Thunder 

Daniel Halpern; Something Shining 

Abstract

ANDREW FURMAN maintains that Jewish-Americans and African-Americans have long been bound up in one another’s imaginations and that the intersection of their lives and histories is too important to disregard or to become sundered by anger and accusation. Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and the author of Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination (SUNY Press, 1997) and Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (Syracuse University Press, 2000), Furman has published numerous articles on Jewish-American and other multicultural writers.

ERIC GARDNER examines how recent popular discussions integrating genealogy with frank consideration of the issues of race and slavery are altering the perception of the family tree. Gardner teaches American literature and culture, writing, and multimedia studies at Saginaw Valley State University. His recent work on nineteenth-century African-Americans has appeared in a variety of scholarly venues.

HADARA BAR-NADAV, Lincoln, Nebraska, has recent publications in Paragraph, California Quarterly, and Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review. She works on the editorial staff of Prairie Schooner and is a doctoral student in English at the University of Nebraska.

KAY BARNES has published poetry in America, Baybury Review, Kansas Quarterly, Dallas Review, The MacGuffin, Wind, and in three anthologies. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

ANDREA HOLLANDER BUDY, Mountain View, Arkansas, has published two books of poetry, House Without a Dreamer (Story Line, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, The Other Life (Story Line, 2001), and three prize winning chapbooks. Her other awards include the 2002 Ellipsis Poetry Award, the WORDS Award in Poetry, the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, the Panhandler Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, and from the Wesleyan and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. Recent poems and essays ahve appeared in Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, DoubleTake, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Creative Nonfiction. Budy is Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

SHARON DOYLE published poems in numerous journals two decades ago, but then put aside her writing to raise a family and to teach. In the past year she has returned to writing and has had poems published in Baltimore Review, Brooklyn Review, Confluence, Monserrat Review, and other journals. Her work has also appeared in the anthology The Cancer Poetry Project. She lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado.

CAROL FRITH, Sacramento, California, has published two chapbooks, Moving Like a Blue Flame, winner of the 2001 Medicinal Purposes competition, and In and Out of Life. Her poems have appeared in Cutbank, Chariton Review, Blue Unicom, Poetry New York, Cold Mountain Review, and many others. Her poems have also won recognition in competitions sponsored by several journals, including The Formalist, Blue Unicom, Negative Capability, and Atlanta Review.

JAMES GRINWIS has published poems recently in Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Skidrow Penthouse, California Quarterly, and other journals. He lives in Belchertown, Massachusetts.

CHRIS HEDGPETH, Seattle, Washington, has published poetry in Faultline.

TIM KAHL, Sacramento, California, has published poems in Gulf Stream Magazine, International Poetry Review, Apalachee Review, English Journal, Nimrod, and numerous other journals. He teaches at Sacramento City College and co-edits the online journal Mongryl.

ANGELA KOZOL has published poems in Small Pond Magazine, Black Dirt, Bitter Oleander, Laurel Review, and other journals. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

WALT MCDONALD, a native Texan, was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy and Texas Tech University, and served as Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. His recent books include All Occasions (Notre Dame, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave, and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State), and others from Harper & Row, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh. Four of his books have received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. He and his wife Carol live in Lubbock They have three children and seven grandchildren.

AMY MITCHELL recently completed her M. F. A. at Western Michigan University. She lives in Chicago.

LOUIS PHILLIPS, New York, New York, teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts. His recent books of poems include The Krazy Kat Rag (Light Reprint), Bulkington (Hollow Spring), The Time, the Hour, the Solitariness of the Place (Swallow's Tale), Celebrations & Bewilderments (Fragments), and In the Field of Broken Hearts and Into the Well of Knowingness (Prologue). His poems have also appeared in Northwest Review, Kansas Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The Literary Review, and many other journals.

MARK SANDERS has new poems in Borderlands and Northeast, a story in an anthology of Plains writers, and his collection, Greatest Hits, is forthcoming from puddinghouse. He lives in Pearland, Texas. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

PETER STILLMAN has published poems recently in California Quarterly, Blue Line, Alea, Mississippi Review, College English, and in several anthologies. He was the featured poet in a recent issue of Zone 3. Two of his books, Gilead (New York State Council on the Arts) and Planting by the Moon (Heinemann) combine poems and nonfiction. He is a longtime book publisher and lives in Charlotteville, New York.

JUDITH STRASSER has published a chapbook, Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles (Parallel, 2002). Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry, Nimrod, Witness, 5AM, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a free-lance writer in Madison, Wisconsin, and interviews for OUT LOUD, the audio feature of the Poets & Writers website.

H. PETER STEEVES explores the Disneyland experience, what we feel and why in this controlled "free" environment. Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, Steeves has published articles on a variety of fields within philosophy, written Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Kluwer, 1998), and serves as editor of Animal Others: On Ethics. Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY Press, 1999). His interests include phenomenology, applied ethics (especially animal, environmental, and bioethics), and social-political theory. Currently working on a collection of essays applying phenomenology to popular culture (including the Disney experience), Steeves hopes it will not prove "just another Mickey Mouse project."

KIM LEILANI EVANS observes that after his sojourn in the Pacific, Herman Melville "learned to laugh in a different way there--not the lunatic laughter of the outsider nor the haughty laughter of the enlightened, but the low chuckle of the skeptic who likes the jokers that meaning makes of us. She wrote this article while on a Fulbright Fellowship in New Zealand studying what she calls the “grammar of the Pacific.” This is her first "official" publication.

JOHN CHURCHILL suggests the disquiet he feels about the impact of computer technology in education comes not from distaste for things and ways new but from having the teacher’s ability to teach and the student’s opportunity to learn seriously compromised, that we are approaching a time when colleges will be providing semblance of education without its reality. Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, Churchill is also Professor of Philosophy. Among his recent articles are “Consciousness, Behavior, and the Clinical Impact of the Definition of Pain,” “Discovery-Based Learning Across the Science Curriculum,” “Rat and Mole’s Epiphany of Pan,” and “Is Postmodern Community Possible?” His publications also include a previous article on liberal education for The Midwest Quarterly.

MIKE WILSON explains the contributions Egyptians made to the construction of modern Christianity, both the acquisition of a spiritual monopoly to root out gnosticism and paganism and turning spiritual questing in the direction of monasticism, thus gaining some measure of control over its result. A practicing laqyer for twenty years with an equally long interest in religion and spirituality, Wilson has published an article on Tibetan Buddhism, has taught classes on law and on comparative religion at Sullivan University in Lexington, Kentucky, and is presently completing a biography of Father Roy Bourgois, a Catholic priest repeatedly jailed for protesting the School of the Americas, the U. S. Army facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, that trained Manuel Noriega and other Latin American military dictators.

RANDALL BYTWERK is Chair of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has a scholarly interest in propaganda and rhetoric and has authored Julius Streicher: The Man Who Persuaded a Nation to Jate Jews (1983, reissued in 2001).

RICHARD HOLINGER, with a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaches English at Marmion Academy in Aurora, Illinois. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. He resides in Gevena, Illinois.

JO McDOUGALL is the author of four books of poetry. The latest, DIRT, was published by Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is Associate Professor Emeritus in English, Pittsburg State University, and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

RONALD CHARLES EPSTEIN, a Canadian freelance writer, reviewed The Best American Poetry 1997 in Rattle. Ever interested in the arts, he visited the Indigo Manulife bookstore in downtown Toronto to see a public interview of Elmore Leonard for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in early 2002.

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