The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 27 No. 3

Authors

• Mark Christhilf
• Thomas R. Vale
• Geraldine R. Vale
• Edward L. Galligan
• James Barbour
• William C. Dowling
• Charles M. Redenius
• Matthew Melko
• Lola Haskins
• Regan Good
• Ruth Good
• Thom Tammaro
• Midwest Quarterly Editors

Contents

ARTICLES

Expressionist Imagery in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin

Reflections on Landscape Change

Red Smith, Essayist

The Death of the Game in Contemporary Baseball Literature

Lindisfarne: William Irwin Thompson's New Planetary Community

Hostility Between Civilizations 381

POEMS

Momotaro-A Folk Tale

The Hidden Flower

At the Pittsburgh Airport

Northern Light, Northern Dark

Flower Picking with Vincent van Gogh

The Perpetual Tea I

Bulletin 1

Lyrids

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.

The poetry editor is particularly interested right now in poems dealing with Halley's comet or other astronomical phenomena.

Abstract

in this issue. . .

Wishing to help us see what his words suggest, the poet struggles to give expression to images. W. S. Merwin, explains MARK CHRISTHILF, makes use of the work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, among other painters, in bringing to his readers an understanding of what Merwin's generous eye beheld. Poet and critic, Christhilf teaches English at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. He has poetry in Karamu, and is writing a book entitled, W. S. Merwin the Mythmaker.

LOLA HASKINS lives on a ranch north of Gainesville Florida and teaches computer science classes at the University of Florida. She has published two books of poetry, Planting the Children (Florida, 1983) and Castings (Countryman, 1984).

REGAN GOOD is a senior at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut. Next year she plans to attend Colby College. These are her first published poems.

RUTH GOOD, who lives in Westport, Connecticut, has had poems recently in Carleton Miscellany, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, the Literary Review, and Cottonwood Review, among others. Ruth and Regan Good are mother and daughter.

THOM TAMMARO, of Moorhead, Minnesota, has had recent work in Crosscurrents, South Dakota Review, and Spoon River Quarterly. In 1985 he was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in poetry. Thom's contribution to this issue, "Lyrids," is our first comet or star poem, with more to come, we hope, in the summer issue.

Why is returning, especially to the place we call home experienced with a sense of loss? THOMAS R. VALE and GERALDINE R. VALE investigate this phenomenon in connection with revisiting the landscapes of their youth and consider the meaning of this for contemporary concerns about urban and rural change. Both authors are professors of Geography at the U nivers1ty of Wisconsin in Madison, and they recently published a book on this subject, U. S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America.

The rites of Spring in post-pagen America include baseball's annual ritual of batting practice, pop flies, and grounders, harbingers of a season which now sprawls monetarily to the end of October. To celebrate this event, EDWARD L. GALLIGAN has written a thoughtful, engaging account of Red Smith, the sports columnist. Professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Galligan started reading Red Smith's columns when he was sports editor of the school paper of Rittenhouse Junior High School in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 1939. Among his publications are The Comic Vision in Literature, published in 1984, and an essay on W. C. Fields in a recent issue of the Midwest Quarterly.

JAMES BARBOUR and WILLIAM C. DOWLING also take baseball as their subject. As the most recent World Series seemed to be a battle between innocence, the boys of Kansas City, victorious naturally, and the angry men of Saint Louis, a closer look at some of the forces of goodness and virtue revealed a drug scandal implicating several members of the Championship team. It is this loss of national magic on the part of the "national pastime" that the authors explore here. Both teach .at the University of New Mexico. They collaborated previously on "Ball Four with Epilogue" in The American Self- Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, published in 1981.

Rejecting the customary role of the utopianist as gadfly, William Irwin Thompson has attempted to begin the transformation of society to meet his version of the ideal, the Lindisfarne Community. That project is examined here by CHARLES M. REDENIUS, Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. Author of The American Ideal of Equality: From Jefferson's Declaration to the Burger Court, which was published in 1981, Redenius has written numerous articles on American political thought, political economy, public law, and the economic policies of the Reagan administration and the Thatcher government in Great Britain.

The present century congratulates itself on its enlightenment while spending more in anguish and treasure than even a Croesus could imagine. MATTHEW MELKO considers the extent to which conflict among civilizations represents a necessary—inevitable—result and the ways in which denouement is reached. Melko is Professor of Sociology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Permissions to Use

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.

Recommended Citation

Christhilf, Mark; Vale, Thomas R.; Vale, Geraldine R.; Galligan, Edward L.; Barbour, James; Dowling, William C.; Redenius, Charles M.; Melko, Matthew; Haskins, Lola; Good, Regan; Good, Ruth; Tammaro, Thom; and Midwest Quarterly Editors (1986) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 27 No. 3," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 27: Iss. 3, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol27/iss3/1