The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
ARTICLES
Detente and the Future of Europe
The Political Money Machine
Democracy and the Radical Challenge
Interaction Performances: The Curb Numbers Game
Existentialisms as Interstices
Emerson Revisted
VERSE
Chromo Print with Anvil Music
Water Water Light Light
Digging Out at Tintern Abbey
October Cranberry Picking, Great East Lake
To Celebrate the Wedding
Teachings of a Shadow to His Spirit
The Armadillo
Who you are
Professor Gedley
Cold Bed
Looking for the Landlord
Abstract
in this issue. . .
THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY begins this twelfth year with its longest, weightiest, and, we believe, strongest issue. In range we move from detente in Europe to violence on the home front, from the financing of political campaigns to the manipulations of door-to-door selling, from the waning of "existentialism" to the relevance of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In order of appearance our authors are ROBERT R. SULLIVAN, Queens College, New York; DAVID LINDSAY, Central Missouri State College, Warrensburg; LYNNE B. IGLITZIN, University of Washington, Seattle; BILLY G. GUNTER, University of South Florida, Tampa; FOREST K. DAVIS, Wilberforce University, Wilberforce, Ohio; and JAMES BINNEY, West Chester State College, West Chester, Pennsylvania.
EVEN the politically unsophisticated have been made aware of an effort, glacially slow as yet, to relax international tensions. Reaction to the SALT talks has varied from a paranoid conviction that our side will inevitably be tricked and done in, to an apocalyptic warning that this is humanity's last chance to escape annihilation. A voiding both extremes, Robert R. Sullivan presents a cool, thoughtful analysis of the possible effects of detente not upon the two great antagonists but upon that nation as yet unborn, the nation-fragments of western Europe. Professor Sullivan has a B. A. degree from Boston College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He has spent three years in Europe either as a foot-loose hitchhiker or as a student at the University of Munich and Bonn, and for two years he worked in Ceylon as a field representative for CARE. He has been a lecturer at Queens College and, about a month before this issue appears, will have become an assistant professor at John Jay College, C. U. N. Y. He has published or will soon publish articles dealing with the politics of altruism, the architecture of western security, and similar topics in such journals as Orbis, Australian Journal of Politics and History, A Journal for Church and State, Studies for a New Central Europe, Western Political Quarterly, and Polity.
FALL elections will be upon us almost as soon as our subscribing voters receive this October issue with its analysis of the money power behind the scenes. The evil has been with us a long while, however, and is not likely to be halted any time soon by this or a series of like articles. Still it is esential to raise the alarm and to keep raising it. Our author, David Lindsay, came originally from Ohio, has the B. A. in political science from Northwestern University, and the M. S. and Ph.D. in government from Florida State University. He has taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and is presently teaching at our neighboring institution, Central Missouri State College in Warrensburg. He is a member of Pi Sigma Alpha, Pi Gamma Mu, and Phi Delta Kappa honor societies.
"RADICALISM AND VIOLENCE," says Lynne B. Iglitzin, "far from being aberrations, are becoming increasingly relevant and more important as instruments for social protest and change." Having thus thrown down the gauntlet to all stand-patters and viewers with alarm, Professor Iglitzin proceeds to probe the nature of the radical challenge, both Right and Left, the rhetoric of the opposing groups, and the implications for a democratic society. Professsor Iglitzin has the B. A. from Barnard College, the M.A. from the University of Minnesota, and the Ph. D. from Bryn Mawr College, has taught at Beaver College, Abington, Pennsylvania, and is presently an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a research consultant for the President's Commission on Causes and Prevention of Violence. Among present or future publications are a recent article in Journal of Social Issues and two forthcoming books, Violence in American Society, Chandler Publishing Company, 1971, and The Violence Reader: Readings in Theory and Practice of Violence in America, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971.
EDITORIAL reaction to Billy G. Gunter's amusing yet horrifying account of the manipulators sedulously at work conning the householder out of his dollars was an impulsive resolve to get out and paint our own curb numbers before they got to us. On second thought, a dollar is only a dollar, and what about the paint and the equipment and the stooping in the hot sun? Still there lingers a feeling somewhere between outrage and shame at being so easily and brazenly manipulated in the small things no less than in the great; we were, so to speak, resigned to being conned in the larger matters. Professor Gunter has the B. A. degree from William Jewell College and the Ph. D. from the University of Tennessee. He has taught at our own Kansas State College of Pittsburg and the University of Alabama (Huntsville) and is now an assistant professor in the Sociology Department of the University of South Florida at Tampa. Most of his writing, he tells us, has been of a highly technical nature, including two monographs on population growth and movement, but he found the present article so much fun that he plans to do more of this kind of analysis; that is, applying social-psychological concepts to everyday activities.
PHILOSOPHY is not our easiest subject, and the time that we spent some years ago trying to arrive at a satisfactory definition of Existentialism was, we fear, largely thrown away. The best we could arrive at was an attitude of grim earnestness, a radical do-it-yourself stance, which, so far from conferring freedom, seemed to entail a perpetual slavery, in that everything, literally everything, and in every moment of our life, had to be built anew. Our subsequent resolve to wax philosophical in the popular sense may not have much to do with Forest K. Davis' view of existentialisms as interstices in the long history of philosophical thought, but may explain our delight in his article. Professor Davis has the A. B. and S. T. B. degrees from Harvard, was for seventeen years on the faculty of Goddard College in Vermont, and since 1967 has been on the staff of Wilberforce University in Ohio, and for the last year as Dean of Faculty. He continues to teach philosophy and/ or religion on the side. Many of his early papers were published in Educational Theory and the former Crane Review. Recent articles have appeared in College & University, Philosophy Today, and the Journal of General Education.
OUR ACQUAINTANCE with James Binney originated on the poetry side of our journal, and we think it altogether appropriate that a poet should reconsider the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and philosopher, who, as philosopher at least, has not been in critical favor since the neo-conservatives got down on him some decades ago. It is time to see Emerson reappraised and the mistakes and limitations of his recent critics pointed out. Professor Binney has a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and for some years has been teaching English at West Chester State College. He continues to publish occasional poems and stories and has written several essays on Shakespeare and general critical pieces. His poem "City Landscape" appeared in the January 1969 issue of the QUARTERLY.
AMONG THE POETS in this October issue are four old contributors and seven who are new to our pages. In recent months we published a poem by How ARD McKINLEY CORNING, Portland, Oregon, and had the pleasure of reviewing a collection of his fine poetry. When last heard from, he was having a marvelous time reading his poems and talking to English classes at Wabash College and the University of Northern Iowa. . . WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS, of Central Connecticut State College, New Britain, reports a number of recent publications in such journals as The Malahat Review, Shenandoah, Wormwood Review, Florida Quarterly, The University Review, and many others . . . Our old acquaintance STUART FRIEBERT still teaches German at Oberlin College, Ohio, has published two recent collections of poetry, Dreaming of Floods (Vanderbilt University Press, 1969) and Kein Trinkwasser (Atelier Press, Andernach, Germany, 1969), and has a third book coming out shortly, Calming Down (Triskelion Press, Oberlin, 1970) . . . We have published so much work by LEONARD GILLEY, articles as well as poems, that we think of starting a new folder on him in our files. He is still at Farmington State College of the University of Maine, and he tells us that he is writing much and publishing "a very little!" A disciple of Horace, we presume.
FIRST on our list of newcomers, RICHARD AMOROSI is presently working on an M. F. A. degree at the University of Massachusetts and publishing his poems in Red Cedar Review, Minnesota Review, West Coast Review, Quixote, and Ann Arbor Review. He has poems in an anthology called All Our Games to be published by Random House and a section of nine poems forthcoming in The Drunken Boat. He has also been working with Quixote on an anthology of East Coast poets to be published this year . . . CARL CARY, Bellingham, Washington, with degrees in music education and in creative writing, seems well equipped for the arts. His work as a teacher is varied by summers in the forest service, where he has had numerous warm experiences fighting fires. His poetry has appeared in New Mexico Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, Sage, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, and Northwest Review. A collection of fourteen poems, Salish Songs and Rituals, was published in late 1969 by the Goliards. Another group of "primitives" will appear in the Buffalo University anthology A Summoning of the Tribes . . . The editor acknowledges with amusement a tribute to Rebecca of Ivanhoe and welcomes newcomer DONALD JUNKINS to the roll of our contributors. A professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in English, and Director of the Northern New England Poetry Circuit, he has found time to write three books of poetry, The Sunfish and the Partridge, The Graves of Scotland Parish, and Walden, 100 Years after Thoreau, and has a fourth book, And Sandpipers She Said, coming from the Massachusetts Press this November. He is the winner of the 1961 National Endowment of the Arts Award, the 1968 Jenny Tane Award for Poetry, a former Breadloaf Poetry scholar, and the present poetry editor of Massachusetts Review. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, Poetry (Chicago), Beloit Poetry Journal, Antioch Review, and at least eighteen other journals, some with exotic names like The Galley Sail Review and Visvabharati Quarterly . . . "i come here like a recording angel and i write down what i see." This is the answer, between joke and earnest, that ROBERT LAX has given his Greek neighbors when they wonder why this middleaged American should settle down to a life of writing and poverty on their barren, beautiful Kalymnos-main industry, sponge-fishing. (In wry parentheses: "Some record, some angel.") Educated at Columbia University, where his closest friend was Thomas Merton (who would speak of him in The Seven Storey Mountain), Lax tried a year of editorial writing for The New Yorker, entered the graduate program of the University of North Carolina and worked briefly toward a doctorate, tried a year as movie critic for Time, spent two years in Hollywood as a script writer, edited Jubilee magazine for a number of years, published poems in such journals as New World Writing, Commonweal, American Scholar, Lugano Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and New York Quarterly (Voyages, 1968, devoted a special double issue to his work), brought out such books as The Circus of the Sun (1960), based on his experience as a clown with Christiani Brothers Circus, New Poems (1962), 3 or 4 Poems About the Sea (1966), and a four-page book entitled How Does the Flower Seek the Sun (1966), meanwhile hunting for the place where he would be at home. Since he has been on Kalymnos almost continuously since 1964, he has apparently found it. Although Lax has been called a "concrete poet," he began writing toward his style in the early forties, long before the term came into use. In fact, his poems are far less "concrete" than those of the so-called "concrete" school, relying more on standard poetic repetitions than on visual gimmicks. His manner appears to derive almost purely from his own resources, perhaps reflecting his extremely simple life on an Aegean island . . . Following several years of newspaper reporting and two years of community development work with the Peace Corps in Colombia, TOM O'LEARY now writes, teaches, and works on an M. F. A. degree in English at the University of Massachusetts. Although he has been chary of listing his publication credits, we can not suppose that his delightful "Teachings of a Shadow to His Spirit" is his first and only . . . An anthropologist by training (Ph.D., Harvard, 1953), WILLIAM SAYRES is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia, and is presently working in Afghanistan, under the aegis of the Department of State, as a member of the T. C. C. U. advisory team in education. Last year he headed the T. C. C. U. team in Peru, working in the Ministry of Education. In all he has spent over six years working in Latin America and has enjoyed it but is delighted to have the chance to learn something about Asia. We are glad he also finds time to write. He has had two novels published, Sonotaw (Simon & Schuster) and Do Good (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) . . . JEDDIE SMITH is currently serving an active duty tour with the U.S. Air Force and simultaneously teaching poetry at the Christopher Newport College of William and Mary College and fostering a poetry magazine called The Back Door, which he says helps preserve his sanity amid the rigors of military life. His poems have appeared in Minnesota Review, Chesapeake Review, William and Mary Review, The Smith, and South Dakota Review.
PROFESSOR TOM HEMMENS of the English Department, Kansas State College of Pittsburg, is the author of our brief review.
Recommended Citation
Sullivan, Robert R.; Lindsay, David S.; Iglitzin, Lynne B.; Gunter, Billy G.; Davis, Forest K.; Binney, James; Corning, Howard McKinley; Lax, Robert; Gilley, Leonard; Junkins, Donald; Cary, Carl; O'Leary, Tom; Davis, William Virgil; Friebert, Stuart; Sayres, William; Smith, Jeddie; Amorosi, Richard; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1970)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 12 No. 1,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 12:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol12/iss1/1