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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Phaistos Disk Deciphered

How I Decided Sun Was a Cannibal: The Beginnings of Reconstructive Paleo-Ethnology

The Game of Words

Jefferson, Rumford, and the Problem of Poverty

An American Dream: The Family Farm in Kansas

Burke's Reflections on Criminal Punishment

POEMS

Central States: Poems

The Midnight Oracle

Another Monday

The Departure of the Eremites

The Misery

A Little Meditation on the Nature of Liberty

A Boyhood among the Cannibal

The Calling of Christ

Slugs

St. Anthony Brings St. Paul the Hermit a Cloak in Which to Bury Him

The End of October

The Mouth of the Cave

The Pilgrim

The Back Road to Arcadia

A Minor Mind in the Midlands

For the Birthday of St. Benedict

Living Room

The Missing Link

The Everlasting Mercies

The Funeral

Manchild

REVIEW

Ralph Burns; Us

Abstract

in this issue. . .

PAUL J. MUENZER presents a translation of the Minoan Phaistos Disk--a supplication for oracular wisdom from the prophet-king. Turning from a career as an electronics engineer, Muenzer became first a technical writer and for the last decade an archaeologist specializing in deciphering Linear A and Linear B texts. He lives and writes in Munich.

HUGH FOX conjures up a living, mythic, unified world of our cultural past in which Old World and New coexist and share a common reality. Author of over fifty books of poetry, criticism, fiction, plays, and Latin American scholarship, among other accomplishments, Fox is Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University.

ERNEST GALLO investigates Marshall McLuhan's use of analogy and metaphor and finds his formulations creative and questionable. Gallo teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In November 1968 Rebecca Patterson accepted a poem of MICHAEL HEFFERNAN'S for publication in The Midwest Quarterly. This constituted Michael's introduction both to the magazine and to Pittsburg State University, then Kansas State College at Pittsburg. In February 1969, he applied for a position in the English Department and was hired in March. In the spring of 1970 he became poetry editor of the Quarterly, a position he was to hold for the next fifteen years. All because of a single 10-line poem. And Auden says poetry "makes nothing happen." Michael's subsequent association with the magazine and the University corresponds_ with a long productive period in his career as a poet. He has been a Bread Loaf Scholar (1977) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1978-79). He has published two full-length collections of poems, The Cry of Oliver Hardy (1979) and To the Wreakers of Havoc (1984), both from the University of Georgia Press, along with four shorter collections, Booking Passage (BkMk Press, 1973), In Front of All These People (Blue Period Books, 1977), A Figure of Plain Force (Chowder Chapbooks, 1978), and, earlier this year, The Breaking of Day, a sequence of sonnets from the Nonce Press of Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared regularly in a large number of national poetry magazines, most recently in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry Now. Not incidentally, during the same fifteen years, he has settled down in Pittsburg where he and his wife, Kathy, are raising three sons in a big ol~ house, the former Methodist parsonage, on Euclid Street.

Prior to Michael's editorship, a dozen or so poems were scattered through each issue of the Quarterly, apparently as a counterpoint to the scholarly articles. Michael pulled the poetry together at the center of each issue and began to feature occasional special sections, such as one devoted to poetry in rhyme and several others featuring the poetry of individual writers. It therefore seems fitting in this issue mourning and celebrating the end of Michael's poetry editorship of the Quarterly that we feature in the center of this issue a collection of his poems written during the period of his editorial connection with the Quarterly, none of which has appeared before in print. Some of these poems were written only a few weeks ago, while others date from the late .1960s, but all have grown with him in his development as a poet, and he has maintained a special interest in all of them over the years, tinkering with them, revising them, learning from them. Interestingly, the poems, though written at different times under widely diverse circumstances, have fallen together in a unified collection reflecting in a uniquely intense way the development of Michael's vision over the past fifteen years. His growth has not been linear, and so the poems are not arranged chronologically, but the sense of the emergence of a wisdom chastened by the unpredictability of chance and change and lightened by his eye for the humorous and the ludicrous is evident throughout the collection.

Because of the special nature of the poetry section in this issue, it is being separately printed simultaneously as what we hope will be the first in a series of occasional chapbooks issued by The Midwest Quarterly.

CHARLES GUZZETTA parallels the views of Thomas Jefferson and Count Rumford on relief of the poor and wonders which was the greater humanitarian, the agrarian Virginian or the urbane New Englander transplanted in the Old World? Professor of Social Work at Hunter College of the City University of New York, with a special interest in professional education, Guzzetta has written and consulted widely, including publication in European and Latin American journals.

THOMAS D. ISERN urges this generation of family farmers facing extinction and loss of virtue through commercialization to adopt the wisdom of Kansas Populist Mary Elizabeth Lease that farmers should "raise less corn and more hell." Director of the Research and Grants Center, Emporia State University, Isern has written a history of Custom Combining on the Great Plains, among other works on the history of agriculture and the Great Plains.

FRANCIS EDWARD DEVINE encourages a rethinking of modern attitudes toward criminal punishment and provides the views of Edmund Burke as a beginning. Devine is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Southern Mississippi and has published several articles involving 17th- and 18th-century writers on law and politics.

LEX RUNCIMAN teaches at Oregon State University. His book of poems, Luck, was published by Owl Creek Press in 1981. He has work forthcoming in College English, Slackwater Review, and The New England Review.

STEPHEN MEATS, who took over as poetry editor of the Quarterly in October, has had poems appear in the Florida Arts Gazette, the Kansas Quarterly, the Little Balkans Review, the Midwest Quarterly, and in A White Voice Rides a Horse: An Anthology of Thing-Thing Poets (1979). His poems have won prizes in poetry contests sponsored by the Florida Arts Gazette, the Beaux Arts Gallery in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Kansas Quarterly. His poem, "Waiting in the Gritty Dark," which appeared in the Summer 1984 issue of the Midwest Quarterly, was recently selected to appear in the 1985 edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. Meats joined the faculty of Pittsburg State University as chairperson of the English Department in 1979 after teaching for seven years at the University of Tampa and four years at the Air Force Academy. He was selected the outstanding faculty member at the University of Tampa in 1974. Meats received a Summer Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 197 4, and program grants from the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities in 1975 and 1976. He is currently serving a three-year term as a member of the Kansas Committee for the Humanities. Born in LeRoy, Kansas, he grew up in Concordia, attended Kansas State University, and received his degrees, including the doctorate, in English from the University of South Carolina.

JENNINGS M. BLACKMON, who assumes the post as Literature Editor with this issue, brings to this task a long-standing professional involvement with the subject. He has a doctorate from the University of Arkansas, and has taught British and American literature at Pittsburg State University since 1966. He has special interests in fields as diverse as 17th-century British literature and literature of the South.

The Midwest Quarterly is happy to announce that it is opening its poetry section once more to submissions from all serious writers of poetry. The new poetry editor is particularly interested in well-made, though not necessarily traditional, poems that see nature and the self in bold combinations, from writers striving to find expression for the ineffable, the inexplicable, the irrational, the unknown either in themselves or in the world around them.

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In accordance with database agreements, the full text of the issue is not available for download. Pittsburg State Digital Commons has only provided the first 6 pages for author and publication information.

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