The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 30 No. 3

Authors

• Matthew Melko
• Jon Roper
• Arthur A. Molitierno
• Michael Ponsford
• Robert E. Fleming
• Alan Nadel
• Phyllis Janik
• Jennings M. Blackmon
• Jo McDougall
• Donald Wayne Viney
• Midwest Quarterly Editors

Contents

ARTICLES

The Present Age

Ideas of Democracy in America and Britain

Georg Simmers Cultural Narcissism: A Non-Traditional Approach

"To Wish Back Eden": The Community Theme in Charles Tomlinson's Verse

American Nightmare: Hemingway and the West

"My Mind Is Weak but My Body Is Strong": George Plimpton and the Boswellian Tradition

POEMS

Poems from FUSE

Encounter Between Two Worlds

Sliding Through The Grove of Poison Trees

Surrender

Elaboration II

Moonrise

REVIEWS [not indicated in original print]

Peter Scheckner; Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Works of D. H. Lawrence

Christopher Howell; Sea Change

Denise Low; Starwater

Terry L. Miethe, editor; Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurection Debate

Abstract

in this issue. . .

These are normal times, not crisis times, in the other-end-of-the-telescope view of MATTHEW MELKO, and we should value this age as such and use this insight to improve the lives of others and ourselves. A professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a pioneer in worldview studies, Melko's essay here summarizes thoughts which will shortly be given book-length treatment by Paragon. This is Melko's second article in The Midwest Quarterly.

JON ROPER discusses the ethical dimension of democracy as it passed from the Greeks to Americans of the Revolutionary generation and Englishmen of the early nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century. Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Wales in Swansea, he has among his publications a recent book, Democracy and Its Critics: Anglo-American Democratic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, from Unwin Hyman.

Locating in the money economy the source for the problems besetting modern, metropolitan culture, Georg Simmel, argues ARTHUR A. MOLITIERNO, produced a more insightful, less partisan view of comtemporary ills than that of Christopher Lasch. Molitierno is Assistant Professor of English at the Lake Campus of Wright State University, Celina, Ohio.

PHYLLIS JANIK teaches at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, near Chicago. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Another Chicago Magazine, New Renaissance, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. Her most recent book of poetry is No Dancing / No Acts of Dancing (1982). She has in progress two books of poetry, "Bite Marks" and "Voodoo du Jour," and one novel, "Ending Up." The poems in this issue of Midwest Quarterly are an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Fuse, which will be published by Another Chicago Press in late fall, 1989. These poems are based on a series of art works called tapices--engraved, painted animal hides used as wallhangings--created by Cuban artist Frank Leon, and on Janik's coincidental visit to the four-corners region of the southwest United States just after she had arranged an exhibit of Leon's works at Moraine Valley Community College. In her yearlong struggle (1984-1985) to make the exhibit a reality, Janik found that the grim political barriers between Cuba and the U. S. virtually held Leon and his art hostage. Here is Janik' s description of how these artistic, political and geographical elements came together as catalysts for her poems: "In the spring of 1986 I travelled to the Southwest, specifically in the 'Grand Circle' of the Four Corners Region where New Mexico-Arizona-Utah-Colorado conjoin. Once home to Native Americans whose cliff dwellings and artifacts date from roughly the first century through 1300 A. D., the area also contains their rock art (pictographs--figures painted on; and petroglyphs-- figures hammered into the rock face), as well as a spectrum of impressive rock formations, desert life, and a vivid, hard-edged light unique to the territory. In that weatherbeaten place, and with Leon's work and dilemma still on my mind, I began to see a correspondence between the Southwest landscape and his tapices: the crucial burning, gouging, and staining of those hides evoked the pictographs and petroglyphs etched into boulders and canyon walls hundreds of years earlier. Further, I saw that the Southwest terrain itself, with its extremes of hot and cold; its blunt, plundering waters and winds; its painfully slow changes, was a geographically apt metaphor for the split; the insistent--if sporadic--havoc; the erosion that prevails between the U. S. and Cuba. I completed Fuse as a tribute to the estranged families and friends victimized by Cuba-U. S. abrasion over the past thirty years. I had witnessed results of the division- an invisible but volatile line the two governments have set between them. I had seen people following it, igniting it with anger, waiting and watching: 'Will it detonate?' But I had also seen others contained enough to jettison ignorance and fear and view that line, a deep and old cut, as would a physician with a strategy: 'What can we do to help the abrasion heal?' "

Charles Tomlinson's poetry, explains MICHAEL PONSFORD, wonders what will bcome of Eden and its denizens in a world transformed by city-planners and transfixed by neon and gasoline. Now returned to Marlborough College in Wiltshire, England, from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he was Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Ponsford is at work on his own poetry and on poets of our time and others long before. His article on Hardy appeared earlier in The Midwest Quarterly.

According to ROBERT E. FLEMING, Ernest Hemingway saw the American West at times as an idyll and more frequently as the setting for nightmare. A Hemingway scholar and Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Fleming has published several articles on this topic and is currently developing a book-length manuscript on the writers in Hemingway's fiction.

Like James Boswell, George Plimpton takes himself as the subject no matter the setting or the personality he confronts. Indeed, ALAN NADEL suggests, many twentieth-century writers have successfully adopted this tactic at once disarming and disgusting. Author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon from the University of Iowa Press, scholarly essays on American literature, and poetry, Nadel is Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University.

JENNINGS M. BLACKMON, Professor of English at Pittsburg State, has played a key role in the University's recently inaugurated Honors Program. During a sabbatical leave this spring he will revisit England.

JO MCDOUGALL is Assistant Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Pittsburg State; her work has appeared in these pages, been anthologized in Patterns Of Poetry (1986) and Men and Women Together and Alone (1988), and is forthcoming in New Letters, Louisiana Literature, and Miscellaneous Z.

DONALD WAYNE VINEY, Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the PSU Department of Social Science, is particularly interested in philosophies of religion--hence his illuminating review in this issue.

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.

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 front matter for author and publication information.

Recommended Citation

Melko, Matthew; Roper, Jon; Molitierno, Arthur A.; Ponsford, Michael; Fleming, Robert E.; Nadel, Alan; Janik, Phyllis; Blackmon, Jennings M.; McDougall, Jo; Viney, Donald Wayne; and Midwest Quarterly Editors (1989) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 30 No. 3," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 30: Iss. 3, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol30/iss3/1