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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Ex Nihilo, or For Openers

Crisis in Criticism: Textual Literalism Versus the Art of Criticism

Moby-Dick's Ishmael, Burke, and Schopenhauer

Nineteen Eighty-four and Philosophical Realism

Urban Black American Music in the Late 1980s: The 'Word' As Cultural Signifier

Comprehending Mass Murder: The Buchenwald Trial of 1947

FARM POEMS

Letter from Illinois

The Farmer

The Farmer II

Farm Wife

Unless It Rained

Wheat Chaff Settled

The Farmer

New Bread

In His Hands

Pick-Up

Silent Survivor

Sugaring

Conversation with an Arkansas Farmer

Four P.M.

Killing The Pig

Farming in Poweshiek County

1964

Making Lard

Empyrean, Nebraska

Orbits

The Sandhill Crane

Evening Walk With Dog and Cat

Drought

Green Corn Moon

The Sixth Day

REVIEWS

Bruce Cutler; Dark Fire, a narrative poem

Linda Hasselstrom; Going Over East: Reflections of a Winter Rancher

Linda Hasselstrom; Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains

John Clellon Holmes; Representative Men: The Biographical Essays of John Clellon Holmes

Elliott Shore; Talkin' Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912

Abstract

in this issue. . .

Out of nothing, something. ROBERT WEXELBLATT examines the meaning of the creative act and scrutinizes the first sentences of major works to illustrate the writer's power to fashion time and place and character in the choice, juxtaposition, and concatenation of words. Now Chairperson of the Division of Humanities at Boston University, Wexelblatt writes scholarly articles on literary subjects (recently on Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Camus, and Nietzsche), stories, and poetry, as well as essays, several of which have graced The Midwest Quarterly.

Literary critics too frequently mistake the leaves for the forest, and by failing to explore the mind and art of the writer and by overlooking the meaning of the text to catalog the words, asserts KENNETH L. GOLDEN, they reveal little and obscure much. Assistant Professor of English at Memphis State University, Golden has published several articles and has a book in preparation dealing with the application of the insights of Jungian psychology and comparative mythology to modern literature.

In Ishmael, Herman Melville developed a character to investigate the meaning of will, its triumph and surrender, and in so doing, argues CHRISTOPHER S. DURER, Melville was on common ground with Edmund Burke and Arthur Schopenhauer. Author of articles on American and comparative literature and modern drama and Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, Durer is at work on a book-length study of Melville and Romanticism.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's warning of the triumph of totalitarianism, also advanced the slim hope, WILLIAM CASEMENT holds, that truth and human nature could bring an end to Big Brother's regime. Philosopher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Casement has written extensively on philosophical topics ranging from Aristotle to William Morris and Michael Polanyi and on educational theory.

Racial identity, social criticism, and rage--these and a measure of perspective on the past, present, and future of poor blacks in urban America form the theme of "rap music” in the 80s, observes WHEELER WINSTON DIXON. Now Assistant Professor of English and Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Dixon has published several books and many articles on cinema, and his films have been screened in Europe and across the United States.

JAMES J. WEINGARTNER discusses the nature of justice as evidenced in the trials of thirty-one defendants held for crimes evil and inhuman at the Buchenwald concentration camp, and he finds the verdicts and the subsequent reconsideration of many of them troubling and worth pondering. Author of books on Hitler's Guard and the Malmedy massacre and trial, Weingartner is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

HUGH C. ABERNETHY, JR., lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and works for Zephyr Press and the Harvard Coop. His poems have appeared in more than thirty magazines, including Mid-American Review, Xavier Review, and Chariton Review.

MICHAEL A. CAREY no-till farms four hundred acres near Farragut, Iowa. His first book of poems, The Noise the Earth Makes (Pterodactyl), was published in 1987. His poems have appeared in more than forty magazines, including Time, Voices International, and The Laurel Review. His work has also appeared previously in MQ.

MARK CHRISTHILF has published poems in Kansas Quarterly and The Yale Literary Magazine, and also in MQ. He lives in Charleston, Illinois.

CHRISTOPHER COKINOS lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and has had work previously in Whiskey Island, Witness, and also in MQ.

TWYLA HANSEN has published poems in Prairie Schooner, Small Pond Magazine, Spoon River Quarterly, and other literary magazines. She was raised on a Nebraska farm and now lives in Lincoln. She is currently working as a horticulturist at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

KATHLEEN JOHNSON lives in Lawrence, Kansas. She has published poems in Blue Unicorn and Touchstone, and her work also appeared in the Cottonwood Review anthology, Kansas Women Writers.

JO McDOUGALL has published three poetry chapbooks and her book, The Woman in the Next Booth (BkMk), appeared in 1987. Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, and Louisiana Literature. Her work has also been selected to appear in Editor's Choice 11 and in Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, by Miller Williams. She has published work previously in MQ. She currently lives in Pittsburg, Kansas, but she grew up on a farm in Arkansas, and until 1979 she and her husband operated a farm in the delta near Stuttgart, Arkansas. Her father still runs the farm she grew up on, and her son has recently taken up farming also.

JAMES D. MILEY teaches in the Sociology department at Kansas State and edits an alternative social science journal called Transformations. His poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Minnesota Review, and Cottonwood Magazine.

DUNCAN MORAN lives on a farm near Lake Leelanau, Michigan.

MICHAEL J. O'BRIEN grew up on a farm near Liberal, Kansas, and currently lives in Cerritos, California.

AL ORTOLANI, a Pittsburg, Kansas, native, published his first book of poems, The Last Hippie of Camp Fifty (Woodley) in 1988.

AMIL QUAYLE lost his Nebraska cattle ranch to the "farm crisis" and is currently teaching English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For him, poetry "provides one avenue for trying to understand some of what is happening in rural America."

TOM SAYA is a graduate student of American literature at Indiana University, Bloomington,

MARION SCHOEBERLEIN lives in Elmhurst, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Atlantic Monthly, and in various anthologies, including Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Press, 1986).

PHIL STEPHENS is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Green Corn Moon” is his first published work.

ELMER SUDERMAN, professor emeritus of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, grew up on the 160 acre farm his father homesteaded on the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma. He has published two books of poems, What Can We Do Here (Daguerreotype Press, 1974) and We Must Try Words (Daguerreotype Press, 1980). Recent poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Wind Magazine, and others.

SIDNEY R. THOMPSON is a senior creative writing major at Memphis State University. One of his poems was published in Metrosphere, and his short story "Windows" won second place m the 1988 Southern Literary Festival.

RICHARD TUCKER lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

PAMELA YENSER was guest poetry editor of the October 1988 issue of MQ. Her work has appeared previously in Poetry Northwest, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Woman, and other magazines. She recently moved from Pittsburg, Kansas, to LaGrande, Oregon.

ANGELA COOPER teaches freshman composition at both Pittsburg State University and Missouri Southern State College in Joplin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Missouri Southern and a Master's from Pittsburg State University.

V. J. EMMETT, JR., former editor-in-chief of The Midwest Quarterly, now chairs the Pittsburg State University Department of English, serves as Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies, and is a generous and reliable contributor to this journal.

CHARLES CAGLE, who teaches fiction writing here, has written on such Beat Generation figures as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. Author of a text, Writing Fiction, Cagle has also done an upcoming biography of the regionalist painter, Charles Banks Wilson.

GENE DeGRUSON, curator of special collections in Leonard H. Axe Library here, is the authority on the history of Girard, Kansas, the home of The Appeal to Reason, Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, and a host of unusual men and women. Crowning his career is the recent publication of a new and complete version of Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel, The Jungle, which Gene edited for St. Luke's Press and Peachtree Publishers, Memphis and Atlanta. At last report, the Book-of-the-Month-Club had added it to its list of selections.

The Poetry Editor is interested in receiving poems on Native American subjects by writers of any racial or ethnic origin for a special poetry section of the Midwest Quarterly.

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