The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
ARTICLES
Out Mute, Inglorious Mothers
Margaret Drabble: "There Must Be a Lot of People Like Me"
The Third Eve: Caddy Compson
Enchantment and the Demonic in Iris Murdoch: The Flight from the Enchanter
"Time Is a Waiting Woman": New Poetic Icons
From Reverence to Attention: the Poetry of Denise Levertov
POETRY
Going Under to Beltzhoover
Teresa Birdsell
After Illness Discovering the World
Homage to Jan Vermeer
Monday
My Daughter in a Sudden Moment
Weeds
Love Poem to End Love Poems
A Form of Reply
On Sunday Morning
Three Poems from Winesburg by the Sea
December Midnights
Abstract
THIS APRIL 1975 issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY is the second we have been able to devote largely to work by or about women, the first having appeared in October 1973. Both issues involved us in some perplexities, but the lead article of this April number goes far toward answering an unspoken question of ours: why do so few women, proportionately speaking, send us good poems and articles? The conditions described in "Our Mute, Inglorious Mothers" may already be changing. Certainly there is a hint of spring in the air after a long, long winter's silence, noticeably in the fact that an increasing number of women are producing literature worthy of the serious critical attention given in this April number. Author JANICE H. HARRIS leads so busy a life herself as to make us wonder how she finds time to comment on women's lack of time. With a bachelor's degree from Stanford and a doctorate from Brown, she is now "teaching on and off at the University of Wyoming, raising children, writing." An article of hers defending D. H. Lawrence against Kate Millett appears this spring in The Massachusetts Review, and she has been finishing a book on Lawrence's tales.
OUR second contributor, NANCY POLAND, who gives us a pleasant and lively interview with a newly important English author, Margaret Drabble, graduated from Randolph-Macon Women's College and did graduate work at the University of London and through the Smith College Continuing Education Program. She has been a feature writer and general reporter on three newspapers and as a government employee had the duty of covering the President's White House press conferences. She now freelances for various Eastern newspapers, out of Washington, New York, and London. Her interviews include an exclusive with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and others with playwright John Osborne, C. P. Snow, David Garnett, and with the members of an entire literary family—biographers Lady Elizabeth Longford, her husband Lord Longford, their daughter Antonia Fraser, and another (novelist) daughter, Rachel Billington. As of last October she was finishing her own biography of Thomas Hardy.
WE have read many different approaches to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but this study of Caddy Compson from a feminist angle has, we think, the promise of a fresh new approach. Author GLADYS W. MILLINER received her B. A. cum laude with the English Faculty Award from Louisiana State University in New Orlean and her doctorate from Tulane University in New Orleans on a college faculty grant from the A. A. U. W. She is presently an associate professor of English at Southern University in New Orleans. Active in the women's movement, she is chairperson of the South Central Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages and writes and speaks in the field of feminist criticism, her most recent article being "The Tragic Imperative: The Awakening and The Bell Jar" in the Wollstonecraft Newsletter.
IF we were not immune to surprise, we might well be surprised at the meeting of cultures implied in a subtle and meticulous analysis of so very English a writer as Iris Murdoch by (precisely) ZOHREH TAWAKULI SULLIVAN. Our author was born in Tehran, Iran, and had received all her education in India and Pakistan before coming to the United States in 1961. A year later she received her B. A. degree from Western College, Oxford, Ohio, and subsequently her M. A. and Ph. D. from the University of Illinois, where she was a graduate assistant from 1963 to 1968. During the next two years she taught at Webster College, Missouri, and in Demawand College, Tehran, before returning to the University of Illinois as an assistant professor. She has written articles on T. S. Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and is now working at a book on the encounter with an alien culture in the modem novel, a subject in which she should have a special competence. She read a paper for the Conrad Seminar at the 1974 MLA Convention, and her article "Civilization and its Darkness: Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ford's The Good Soldier'' is to be published by Conradiana.
RICHARD GUSTAFSON's study of the new symbolism which women poets are creating (being compelled to create in order to have a language of their own?) touches upon a throbbing interest of this editor's. Professor Gustafson has appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY on an earlier occasion and has published articles and poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Quarterly, College English, Epos, Descant, Perspective, Western Humanities Review, Twentieth Century Literature, and other places. He edits Poet and Critic at Iowa State University where he teaches modem literature and film courses.
AN article on contemporary British nature poets introduced professor JULIAN GITZEN to our journal in the July 1974 issue. His current study of poet Denise Levertov seems a fitting close to an issue largely given over to the important and serious writing being done by women in the latter half of the twentieth century. When we first became acquainted with Professor Gitzen he was teaching graduate English courses at Pahlavi University, Shiraz, Iran. So many were our frustrations with the foreign post that we were selfishly relieved to hear in a recent letter from our contributor that since February 1 he has been a member of the English department of Prahan College of Advanced Education in Victoria, Australia. So far at least our dealings with the Australian postal service have been happy ones. Professor Gitzen also informs us that his article "Gary Snyder and the Poetry of Compassion" appeared in the Winter 1973 issue of The Critical Quarterly.
A FIRST BOOK of poems by GERALD COSTANZO, In the Aviary, was the 1974 Devins Award selection from the University of Missouri Press. He also won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry last spring. . . . DAVE ETTER lives on a farm in Kane County, Illinois. As manuscript editor at Northern Illinois University Press, he helped produce Lucien Stryk's anthology, Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest, which was just published this month. Poems of his appeared in the first Heartland in 1967. . . . JACK FLAVIN still works at the public library in Springfield, Mass. Recent work of his appeared in Poetry Northwest. . . . ROBERT HOLLAND lives in Decatur, Georgia, and is a member of the Poetry at Callanwolde Committee, which sponsors readings in the Atlanta area. He published work in the last issue of X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures. . . . GREG KUZMA's Best Cellar Press issued three new chapbooks late last year. . . . TOMAS O'LEARY still lives and lets live in Cambridge, Mass. His schedule this year includes poetry workshops and readings around Boston. . . . RICK SMYTH is about to complete his studies at the University of Delaware. He lives in Wilmington. . . . HAROLD WITT's new collection of poems, Now, Swim, was published last year by the Ashland Poetry Press (Ashland, Ohio). . . . PETER D. ZIVKOVIC once made a living playing professional baseball and driving a beer truck. He now teaches creative writing at Fairmont State College in West Virginia.
THE REVIEW in this issue is by REBECCA PATTERSON.
Recommended Citation
Harris, Janice H.; Poland, Nancy; Milliner, Gladys; Sullivan, Zohreh Tawakuli; Gustafson, Richard; Gitzen, Julian; Costanzo, Gerald; Etter, Dave; Flavin, Jack; Holland, Robert; Kuzma, Greg; O'Leary, Tomas; Smyth, Rick; Witt, Harold; Zivkovic, Peter D.; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1975)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 16 No. 3,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 16:
Iss.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol16/iss3/1