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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Family in the Fiction of William Burroughs

"The Full and Elaborate Vocabulary of Evasion": The Language of Cowardice in Edith Wharton's Old New York

The Cherokee Night of R. Lynn Riggs

Twain's Early Writing and Theories of Realism

Do You Know Your Emporia ABCs? Tom-and-Lorna Jokes from Emporia, Kansas

The Church Militant

POEMS

A Winter Burial

Dorset, August 27, 1985

Bluejay

Where You Live Do Buildings

What Makes Us Human

She Feels Out Of Place In Burl's Auto Service

Her Town

Courtly Love

A Woman Of Substance

As Time Goes By

Mean And Stupid

September In A Line Shack Outside Girard, Kansas

To My Brother, Terrified Of Wasps

Pioneer Women

Spring Sunset in the Suburbs

Skipping Stones at Clinton

Invitation to the Mountains

Around Noon

A Thing Like A Baby

Between Dog 'N Suds And Tommy's Tavern

Atlantis

Sneaky

The Cat's Meow

Mother Bear, Father Bear

REVIEWS

William Kloefkorn; Honeymoon

Mark A. Plummer; Robert G. Ingersoll

David Thelen; Paths of Resistance

Judith Weissman; Half Savage and Hardy and Free

Abstract

in this issue. . .

The fiction of William Burroughs focuses on control and the illusion of personal freedom, a situation JOHN Z. GUZLOWSKI finds reinforced in the author's treatment of the family. A teacher in the English Department of Eastern Illinois University and Editor of Karamu, a poetry and fiction magazine, Guzlowski’s work on recent American fiction has appeared in a variety of journals.

Ways of understanding can at times become ways of avoiding reality and real comprehension. Such was the case in Edith Wharton’s Old New York, as discussed by DAVID A. GODFREY. Currently a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Godfrey wrote his dissertation on Wharton at the University of Kentucky. This is his first publication.

Divided by heritage and present-day concerns, alienated within and without the Cherokees in R. Lynn Riggs's play, The Cherokee Night, are victimized, confused, and stirred by passions and racial memories from the past, PHYLLIS COLE BRAUNLICH explains. Formerly a college English teacher and now a widely published independent writer specializing in religious subjects, Braunlich will see her first book, a biography of Oklahoma playwright and poet Riggs, appear this fall from the University of Oklahoma Press.

AMY CLAMPITT, born and brought up in rural Iowa, has since lived mainly in New York. She is the author of The Kingfisher (Knopf, 1983), What the Light Was Like (Knopf, 1985), and Archaic Figure (Knopf, 1987), reviewed here last fall. She is the editor of The Essential Donne, to be released this fall by Ecco Press.

PAUL JENKINS, Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review is also an ex-Iowan. He is the author of Forget the Sky (L’Epervier, 1980) and a social history, The Conservative Rebel (Town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, 1982). His poems have appeared recently m Kenyon Review, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Northwest.

JO McDOUGALL included this selection of five poems in her reading last year at Pittsburg State University, where she is now in her second year as Writer In Residence. Her first book full-length collection of poems is The Woman in the Next Booth (BkMk, 1987). Her work has been anthologized in Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, edited by Miller Williams (Louisiana State University, 1986) and has been accepted for publication in Men and Women: Together and Alone (The Spirit That Moves Us, 1988). New poems are forthcoming in New Letters and Louisiana Literature.

CHRISTOPHER HOWELL's latest of four books of poems, Sea Change (L'Epervier, 1985), is set in the Pacific Northwest; the midwestern settings of the poems selected here are, however, from a group of poems written during his recent tenure at Pittsburg State University. He has returned to Kansas to accept an appointment this fall at Emporia State University.

JEFF WORLEY is currently Assistant Editor of Odyssey, the University of Kentucky research magazine. He has had poems and reviews accepted in 76 magazines and journals, including Poetry Northwest, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly, and The Malahat Review.

LINDA TAYLOR teaches literature and writing at Oglethorpe University and lives in Atlanta with her husband and son. She has published a book on Henry James and articles on Emily Dickinson. Her work can be read in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Kansas Quarterly and Tar River Poetry.

DENISE LOW was featured poet in The Midwest Quarterly last summer. After graduation from the M.F.A. program at Wichita State University, she joined the faculty at Haskell Indian Junior College. She will also teach poetry writing at Kansas University this fall. A new book, Starwater, has been accepted for publication by Cottonwood Press.

ELAINE MOTT has published in The Pennsylvania Review, West Branch, CutBank, Poet Lore, Crosscurrents, and Nimrod. She was a Chester H. Jones finalist in 1984, first prize winner of the Yarrow Spring 1985 Poetry Contest judged by John Engels, and Bernard De Voto Scholar in Poetry at the Summer 1986 Breadloaf Writers Conference.

ELLEN WATSON writes and translates in Conway, Massachusetts. Her latest Brazilian translations include a chapbook of Adelia Prado's poems entitled, The Headlong Hearl (Livingston University Press, 1987), and Antonio Callado' s novel, Sempreviva (Random House, 1988).

ELLEN WITTLINGER is from Illinois. Her first book was Breakers (Sheap Meadow Press, 1979). Her play, The Deserving Rich, was performed in Boston last year. She has poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review and is finishing work on "A Mother's Promise," something that promises to become a novel.

CYNTHIA CHAPMAN was an undergraduate at Pittsburg State University when her poem was accepted for this issue. She has since been accepted into the M.F.A. program at The University of Arkansas. Her work appears in recent issues of Cow Creek Review.

MICHAEL VAN WALLEGHEN, a Detroit native who taught in Wichita, is well represented here by four long poems from his third book, Blue Tango, scheduled for publication in early spring of 1989. A few lines from his first book have been reissued by Watermark Books in Wichita-ironically, in the youthful form of a T-shirt:

It's high noon

in Wichita, 1968

the long summer

of my thirtieth year,

and time is running out.

The Wichita Poems (The University of Illinois, 1975) was to become the first of three publications at the U of I where he teaches, and it included poems from a chapbook by the same title (Stonewall, 1973) published in Iowa City where he was a workshop graduate. Van Walleghen is the winner of the Pushcart Prize and the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. He won the Lamont Award in 1980 for his second book, More Trouble With the Obvious.

In Twain's imagination, the world of reality was both fixed and changeable, and, as WALTER SHEAR suggests, it is in the interplay of internal and external reality that we can understand Twain's characters and his meaning. Professor of English at Pittsburg State University, Shear is a specialist in American fiction and has recently been researching the work of William Saroyan and mid-20th century American literature. He has published articles recently on Peter Taylor and Saul Bellow.

Surveying the humor which grew up around the Bird-Anderson love-murder quadrangle in Emporia, Kansas, THOMAS D. ISERN finds many of the townsfolk dealt with the affair by denying its relevance to themselves and by reaffirming implicitly, if rejecting it explicitly, that this heartland community shared those homey virtues foreigners (coasters) accused them of having. Associate Professor of History at Emporia State University, Isern has co-authored Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains and was the sole author of Custom Combining on the Great Plains, both from the University of Oklahoma Press.

Contrasting two divergent Christian traditions, one reverencing a warrior-king and the other a suffering servant, THEODORE R. HOVET argues the controversy shapes not only our here but how soon the planet might achieve the hereafter. Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, Hovet has published many articles dealing with religious themes and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and he serves on the Editorial Board of American Studies.

AL ORTOLANI, teacher, poet, and decorator, is an English instructor in Pittsburg (Kansas) High School, a house-painter and paperhanger, and a venturesome and imaginative poet withal.

THOMAS R. WALTHER, professor of history and chair of the PSU Department, specializes in Kansas and Western economic and social history. His most recent publication (with Robert K. Ratzlaff, Sandra McCoy, and John Lawson) is 100 Years of Excellence, a History of the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Company, 1885-1985 (1985).

GEORGE G. SUGGS, Jr., professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University (Cape Girardeau), specializes in American labor, social, and economic history. His latest book is Union Busting in the Tri-State: The Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri Metal Workers' Strike of 1935 (1986).

V. J. EMMETT, Jr., professor and chair of the PSU Department of English, is a former editor-in-chief of The Midwest Quarterly, a specialist in the English novel, and a frequent contributor to this journal.

* * *

PAMELA YENSER is the guest poetry editor for this issue. She is from Wichita State University and Pittsburg State University. Her own work has appeared in several recent issues of The Midwest Quarterly. She has had poems in Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, Ascent, and Pivot. New poems will appear in Kansas Quarterly and in the 1988 anthology from The Spirit That Moves Us.

* * *

This issue welcomes a new member to the Board of Editors, GARY L. McGRATH, Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State. Born in Ottawa, Kansas, Gary took a M.A. in Theology and a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Gary's professional interests include Number Theory, Numerical Analysis, and Operations Research. His publications include a UMAP Module on Tiltup Panels and papers on topics in Linear Algebra and Numerical Analysis. Gary is especially interested in the phenomena of insight, heuristic structures, and the methodologies of the various disciplines of thought. While it is impossible to know but a fraction of all that is known, it is possible, he argues, to have a basic grasp of the structure of human knowledge, its limits, how practitioners proceed, and the horizons within which they work. A sense of humor, the lively interchange of ideas, and the privilege of providing the context for and being there when insight occurs are the educator's life blood, Gary attests. C' est la vie, at least in academia.

The Editor and other members of the Board wish to recognize the contributions of Will Self during his brief tenure with The Midwest Quarterly. He will be missed.

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