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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

ABM, MIRV, SALT, and the Balance of Power

The Making of Europe

Economic Philosophy and Distribution of Income

Toward a Lexicon of Slogans

Unglued English

Environmental Decision Making: Retrospect and Prospect

VERSE

A Children's Disease

Tiger Lilies/Country Churchyard

Sightseer

From The Deadwood Dick Poems

At the Time of the Tone

The First Stone

The Peonies

Snakes in an Aquarium

Our latest calf

Abstract

WE BEGIN this thirteenth year of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY with an October number devoted to the most current of topics, among them such challenging and perhaps determining issues as the outcome of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks between the U.S. S. R. and the United States and the related struggle of Western Europe to achieve strength by unification. Turning our attention to more specifically national interests, we discuss changing attitudes toward the economics of the Welfare State, the mindless sloganeering of Right and Left, and the problems of decision-making with respect to our environment. On a lighter note, but depressing enough to those who are concerned with the teaching of English, we have a brief, pungent review of that special dialect, Academese.

WHATEVER one's assessment of the novel and even startling proposals with which ROBERT R. SULLIVAN concludes his study of the nuclear balance, there must be lively gratitude for so scrupulous a definition of terms and so lucid an analysis of the growth of power. In a very real sense this examination of ABM, MIRV, and SALT continues a discussion Professor Sullivan initiated a year ago in our pages with his "Detente and the Future of Europe," in which, incidentally, he made prophetic mention of the American search for an apertura a China. For new readers we repeat that our author is an assistant professor in the Division of Government, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, and has a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University. He has published articles in a number of journals dealing with history and politics.

A LITTLE MORE than seven years ago, in the April 1964 issue, we published a first article by EDMOND P. ODESCALCHI, followed by a second article in January 1966, both centering on that concern with the unification of Europe which informs his third and present article. A native of Hungary and a refugee from Communism since 1945, he became interested in the history of supranational organizations while studying political science in post-war Germany. He holds the master of arts degree from the most ancient of Scottish universities, St. Andrew's, and has been for a number of years an editor with International Business Machines Corporation in Poughkeepsie, New York, and has published numerous articles mostly scientific, in journals in the United States and abroad. Among his more recent publications, an article on the origins of behavior patterns appeared in the April 1967 Science Education and another on aggression in the Fall 1967 Modern Age.

OBSERVING that the United States is "now in the process of reforming its welfare programs for the poor," VERGIL L. WILLIAMS and MARY FISH begin by analyzing the assumptions of the classical economists, show how these attitudes have changed and are changing, then proceed to a careful examination of the current situation and choices. Co-author Vergil L. Williams holds a B. S. in economics from West Texas State University, has done graduate work in economics at Southern Illinois University, and was a part-time instructor in the Finance Department of the School of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Alabama while completing a Ph. D. in business administration. He presently is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Alabama. He is also assistant Coordinator of the Institute for Probation and Parole Supervisors in the School of Social Work at the University of Alabama. Co-author Mary Fish holds a B. B. A. from the University of Minnesota, an M. B. A. from Texas Technological College and a Ph. D. in economics from the University of Oklahoma. She is a professor of economics in the School of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Alabama. The present article represents the authors' first study of poverty. Previously their major interest has been the application of economics to criminology and penology and they have presented papers at international and regional criminology and economics meetings. They have published articles in Crime and Delinquency, Behavioral Science World Order, The Mississippi Valley Journal of Business and Economics, and in still other journals on a variety of subjects.

IF THE DEBASEMENT of language is followed by the enslavement of men, then there would seem to be scant room for optimism in the language generated by our current crisis. Analyzing the slogans employed by Right and Left, FRANK D. McCONNELL discovers an “air of deep fictiveness'" "unreality, " "delusiveness, " an anarchy of language that seems to portend a political anarchy. Author McConnell holds the B. A. degree from Notre Dame and the M. A. and Ph. D. from Yale. He has published articles on Byron in ELH, on Virginia Woolf in The Bucknell Review, on William Burroughs in The Massachusetts Review, on Flaubert in Novel, and on monster movies in The Kenyon Review. He has completed a book entitled The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth's Prelude and is now collecting a series of his essays on American culture and politics in the '60's. For the past four years an assistant professor of English at Cornell University, he has been since September an associate professor in the English department of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

THE FACT that author MAX S. MARSHALL is a professor of microbiology, emeritus, of the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, seems almost an irrelevance or at least an initially misleading datum, so fresh and wide-ranging are his interests. His present bibliography, which shows a ratio of 120 articles on general topics to 170 in his special field of microbiology, is evidence of this breadth of interest, as is the title of the most recent of his three books, Teaching Without Grades (Oregon State University Press, 1968). A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Professor Marshall transferred to the University of Michigan for his M. A. and Ph. D. in microbiology, began his teaching career as an instructor at the University of California's medical school, served as chairman for fourteen years, and found time along the way to produce a surprising number of books and articles before his retirement as professor emeritus freed him to write still more books and articles.

OUR FINAL ARTICLE, a retrospective and prospective analysis of the making of environmental decisions, was originally presented as a paper to the Conference of College Science and Mathematics Teachers meeting at Kansas State College of Pittsburg on last February 27. Our author, FRANKLIN S. ADAMS, holds the B. S. in Ed. degree from Johnson State College, Johnson, Vermont, the M. S. from the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ph. D. from the University of New Hampshire. He has also done graduate work at Boston University and at Dartmouth College. At present he is an assistant professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University. He has given a number of lectures on pollution and the environmental crisis, and alone or in collaboration has written several scientific articles, most of them now in process of publication.

OF THE NINE POETS in this October issue only three are newcomers, and one of these proves to be an old acquaintance in other ways. The name DON MILLIKEN struck us as hauntingly familiar, and to our query he readily admitted that he had once been a member of the editor's class in Humanities and to this day could not "remember the name of the man who fell off Circe's roof and broke his neck." To be entirely candid, neither at this moment can the editor recall the name of that unfortunate youth, although we did considerably better with the name Don Milliken. The latter youth, not the Greek one, has a B. S. in Ed. from Kansas State College of Pittsburg, an M. A. from Iowa, and an M. F. A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has taught part-time in the University of Massachusetts and is now a non-teaching member of their art department staff. His wife, of whom we also have a lively and pleasant memory, is an administrative secretary in the University's art department; but their son Kevin, according to his father, "and our six cats do nary a thing." This is his second poem to appear in print, an earlier one having been published in Cloud Marauder. . . . The five Deadwood Dick poems in this issue are the work of a distinguished young black poet, HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN, poet in residence at Aquinas College during 1967-1970 and now an assistant professor of English at the University of Dayton. He has the B. A. degree from the University of Toledo and the M. A. from the State University of New York in Buffalo and has had scholarships and fellowships at Antioch, the University of Colorado and at Middlebury's Bread Loaf writers project. He has also studied voice in Ohio and New York and has won esteem for his acting performances and for his distinguished group of readings at a number of universities. His poems have appeared in such periodicals as The Activist, Trace, Mainstream, Epoch, Chelsea, and others, and he is the author of New York the Nine Million and Other Poems. . . . The third of our new poets, ERIK MULLER, writes that he had his schooling at Williams College and the Universities of Oregon and Colorado and now teaches English at Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review and Southern Poetry Review.

THIS MARKS the third appearance of JACK FLAVIN in our pages, earlier poems of his having appeared in our recent January and April issues. He is still working at the Springfield (Mass.) Public Library, where, he says, he noticed lately a grateful letter of ours posted on the library bulletin board, proving that we get around in all sorts of ways. . . . LOUIS GINSBERG is with us for a second time, has "no particularly fresh data" about himself, but adds at he teaches evenings at the local branch of Rutgers University and as a spin-off from his poetry or love of words conducts a daily pun column in the Newark, N. J., Star-Ledger. . . . It has been some years since we published a study of poet Theodore Roethke (Winter, 1966) by poet RICHARD GUSTAFSON of the English department of Iowa State University at Ames. Professor Gustafson has published widely, both poems and critical articles, some recent poems having appeared in Epos, Descant, Colorado Quarterly, and Perspective. He is still editing Poet & Critic, and has been working on some fiction. The poem published in this issue is his first with us. . . . An earlier poem by WILLIAM KLOEFLORN appeared in our January 1971 issue. The one in this issue is from a book-length series of poems recently finished, but not yet published, entitled A Single Seed: Alvin Turner as Farmer. He is still teaching in the English department of Nebraska Wesleyan at Lincoln, “still writing and enjoying poetry, still wondering what sort of manure it is that can cling so tenaciously to a fellow's boots.” . . . Since his first appearance with us in January, 1967, TED KOOSER of Lincoln, Nebraska, has continued to publish in the magazines and has a pamphlet of poems and drawings soon to be released by the Windflower Press in Lincoln. No new books, he says, since his collection of poems, Official Entry Blank, which we had the pleasure of reviewing in our October 1969 issue. . . . It was some time before we satisfied ourselves that the JOHN TAYLOR who now teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania is identical with the man who used to write to us from Buffalo, New York, where he was then teaching at the State University College, and whose first poem with us appeared in the July 1966 issue. But we are nothing if not persistent, and we did clear up the confusion. The present poem is therefore his second appearance in the QUARTERLY. In the past five years he has had a number of magazine acceptances and last year received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, enabling him to finish a play he had been working on for several years.

OUR BRIEF REVIEW is by Poetry Editor Michael Heffernan.

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