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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Cardinal Points Symbolism of Emily Dickinson

Interpretation, Criticism and the Problem of Poetic Structure

On the Limits of Fiction

The Student Bard; or, How Not to Bottle a Goose

Jack Kerouac's On the Road: A Re-evaluation

"How Much It Takes to Compound a Man": A Neglected Scene in Go Down Moses

VERSE

Poem: Talk

Seeking Pleasure I'll Not Forget

Norton, Kansas

The Kansa

Letter from Tomis

Wild Strawberries

Legal Fiction

Shoes, Egg Shells, and Carefully Labeled Heads

Faith

Building a Fence Around Horses

Said With Flowers

To the Infinite

The All Day Moustache

Babylon

Departure

The Correspondent

A War-Monument Speech for July 4

The World When My Father Was Young

Later

The Singer

The Last Day

Abstract

in this issue. . .

TAKING THE NAME MIDWEST QUARTERLY a little more literally than usual, and acknowledging further that we happen to publish our magazine in the place that Allen Ginsberg has called, with splendid empathy, "this vortex named Kansas," we have decided to indulge a typical American penchant for regionalism and give over a special section of this summer's issue exclusively to the work of fourteen Kansas poets. Our reasons are simple: we wanted to do it, and we think it is about time that we did. Furthermore, as we believe our selections will demonstrate, a number of good poets are writing in Kansas these days, as usual, and others with Kansas backgrounds, working as far away as Oregon or Sweden, have maintained in various ways a productive sense of their original ground.

OUR FIRST poet, D. CLINTON, poetry-editor of The New Newspaper of Wichita, writes that he is currently "thinking of driving to a new parallel," destination unspecified, which may mean simply that, like many of the other poets in this issue, he feels quite normally the midwestern writer's peculiar hankering for other places. Born in Winfield, near Wichita, Mr. Clinton studied at Wichita State University. His travels have taken him to Finland, Crete, and the Orient. For the last two years he has worked part-time with the Kansas Cultural Arts Commission as coordinator of the Kansas Poetry in the Schools Project, in which position he is authorized to send his fellow poets for weeklong poetry-workshops everywhere in Kansas. . . . VICTOR CONTOSKI of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, has conducted Poetry in the Schools workshops at Mission Valley, Harveyville, Garden City, and Norton. He has published two collections of his poems—Astronomers, Madonnas, and Prophecies (Juniper Press, 1972) and Broken Treaties (New Rivers, 1973). A collection of his translations from the poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz is soon to appear from Quixote. This summer he will travel to Poland, where he will work on a book of translations from the contemporary Polish poet Jerzy Harasymowicz. . . . BRUCE CUTLER' s first book, The Year of the Green Wave, appeared in 1960 as the first selection in the University of Nebraska Press First-Book Series, with an introduc tion by Karl Shapiro. Since then Nebraska has published three more of his impressive collections, A West Wind Rises, Sun City, and A Voyage to America. Presently he is coordinator of the new MFA program in creative writing at Wichita State University. . . . A. A. DEWEY, from Garden City, lives presently in Lawrence. He has published poems in numerous little magazines, including December, Hearse, Kansas Quarterly, and Hanging Loose. Speaking of which, it is worth noting that A. A. Dewey figures in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965) as the 12-year-old son of Detective Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the law-officer who, according to Capote, was largely responsible for bringing Richard Hickok and Perry Smith, murderers of the Clutter family, to justice. . . . GENE DeGRUSON, of our own Porter Library, has had recent poetry publications in Crazy Horse, Kansas Quarterly, Mediterranean Review, and other poetry journals. He is still at work on the biography of Little Blue Book Publisher, E. Haldeman-Julius, and hopes to have primary research completed by this fall. . . . HARLEY ELLIOTT, from Salina, spent a few years in New Mexico and New York and has lately returned to Salina where he is a part-time instructor in art at Marymount College. His books of poems include Dark Country (1971) and All Beautyfull and Foolish Souls (1973), both from The Crossing Press. A generous sampling of his work can be found in John Gill's anthology, New American and Canadian Poetry (Beacon Press, 1971). . . . TOM FERRELL was, until last winter, a student at Kansas State College of Pittsburg and is presently working as a switchman for the Union Pacific Railroad in Kansas City, after a brief stint as a clerk in a pornographic bookshop. . . . ROBERT GREEN also spent a few years as a student at this College, where he was a talented photographer for the student newspaper. He has lately been contemplating the possibility of living and working as a sponge-diver in the Greek islands. For the moment he is loading boxcars for a local feed company. . . . JONATHAN KATZ, originally from Brooklyn, is an editor of The Ark River Review in Wichita. He taught English at Purdue before coming to Wichita State University in 1970. He has conducted a number of Poetry in the Schools projects in Kansas and has recently published poems in The New York Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, and The North American Review. He is now community development coordinator for the Kansas Cultural Arts Commission. . . . MICHAEL PAUL Nov AK is chairman of the English Department at Saint Mary College, Leavenworth. He has published poems in over forty literary magazines (beginning with THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY in 1964) and has recently produced a long-overdue first book The Leavenworth Poems, from BkMk Press (Shawnee Mission). . . . WILLIAM STAFFORD's first book of poems, West of Your City, appeared in 1960. His second, Traveling Through the Dark, won the National Book Award in 1963. Among his other awards and distinctions are a Shelley Memorial Award (1967), a Guggenheim Award (1969), and the consultantship in poetry at the Library of Congress in 1970-71. His fifth book of poems, Someday, Maybe, has just been published by Harper & Row. He teaches at Louis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. . . . JAMES TATE graduated from this College in 1965. This year he has a leave of absence from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is living in Stockholm, Sweden, the home of his new bride, Liselotte. He writes: "My poems now grow out of weeks and weeks of silence and pacing around and walking the harbor here and not speaking to anyone but my wife, who demands little." His numerous books include The Lost Pilot (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1967), The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), Hints to Pilgrims (1971), and Absences (1972). His poem in this issue, written in Stockholm, mentions a small former mining-town three miles southwest of Pittsburg. . . . ARTHUR VOGELSANC'S poems have appeared recently in The Iowa Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Little Magazine, and The New York Quarterly. He will have stories in Fiction (New York) and Robert Coover's anthology, The Stonewall Book of Fiction. He is an editor of The Ark River Review. . . . For some reason we have very little information on SYLVIA WHEELER, who last published a poem with the QUARTERLY in October, 1967. We do know for certain that she is an associate editor of the BkMk Press in Shawnee Mission.

FIRST AMONG OUR contributors of prose, REBECCA PATTERSON, has been enjoying for the last several weeks a brief leave-of-absence as editor-in-chief of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. Her work in this issue is the first half of a two-part article to be concluded in our October number. The whole piece is a chapter from a just-completed manuscript analyzing the imagery and symbolism of Emily Dickinson's work in poems and letters. An earlier two-part article, "Emily Dickinson's Palette," appeared in our July and October issues in 1964 and was later reprinted in Young and Fine's American Literature: A Critical Survey (American Book Company, 1968). Her book, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), was enthusiastically, if belatedly, reviewed by Jill Johnston of The Village Voice in January 1972. . . . ROBERT BRAY, a graduate of Kansas State College, is in his third year as an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington. His academic specialties are literary criticism and late nineteenth-century American literature. He holds the Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. . . . DAVID C. STINEBACK, with a Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale (1969), teaches in the English depa1tment at Union College, Schenectady. Though his present writing on the limits of fiction is quite contemporary in focus, his other work includes new editions of such old books as Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (College & University Press, 1973) and William Joseph Snelling' s 1830 Tales of the Northwest (forthcoming). . . . Self-proclaimed "ex-bard" MICHAEL J. KELLY, associate professor of English at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania, has given us a wonderfully rancorous piece of eclectic scholarship that turns out to be, in spite of its apparent main thrust, a hearty defense of poetry. Professor Kelly (Ph. D., University of Massachusetts, 1968) has published articles on Coleridge in Costerus and Massachusetts Studies in English and on Charles Lamb and Herman Melville in Studies in Short Fiction. An essay called "The Candy Conspiracy," exposing the shocking and insidious influence of candy on our society, was published in the January, 1973, issue of Let's Live. . . . CAROLE GOTTLIEB VOPAT, assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, contributes a critical reevaluation of the late Jack Kerouac. . . . ALBERT J. DEVLIN teaches a variety of courses in English and American literature at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Kansas in 1969. With his special interests in the fiction of the South, he has published articles in the Mississippi Quarterly and Twentieth Century Literature. He is at work on a book-length study of Eudora Welty.

THE BRIEF REVIEWS in this issue are by Gene DeGruson and acting editor-in-chief Michael Heffernan.

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