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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

No Talent for Happiness? James Wright in Retrospective  

Dave Etter' s Rural Modernism 

Discontinuity in Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express  

Hero Bloom: The Development of Character in the Calypso Chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses  

Robert Frost: The Language of Politics 

The Last Analogy: Arthur Miller’s Witches and America's Domestic Communists  

POEMS 

Salt 

Hobbies  

after reading a certain poet  

everywhere, everywhere  

Summit  

Resurrections 

Second Shift 

Crossing the Colorado 

New Hampshire  

Basil 

Dead Cow Farm 

Frijole Beach 

Purisima Creek 

From Cumbria 

The Vigil 

Hurricane Ridge 

A Morning Drive Home  

REVIEWS 

David Hackett Fischer; Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America  

Casey Nelson Blake; Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford  

Abstract

"Where is this guy coming from?" What do we bring to reading a poet such as James Wright, wonders RON McFARLAND, and how and why do individuals respond to the music and phrase and sense of what they encounter? Author of The Villanelle: The Evolution of a Poetic Form (1987), editor of two critical anthologies on James Welch and Norman Maclean (1986, 1988), and a full-length collection of his own poems, Composting at Forty (1984), McFarland teaches 17th-century and modern poetry at the University of Idaho.

In Dave Etter's poems familiar words and settings achieve their humor and insight through surreal imagery, improvisational spirit, colloquial diction, and a damned good eye and ear, as JAY PAUL shows. Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Christopher Newport College in Virginia, Paul has published critical articles on William Goyen and James Fenimore Cooper, as well as a number of contemporary poets, most recently Lucien Stryk and Michael Heffernan.

Juxtaposition, jangling, jarring images set sequentially, these are the tools with which Richard Brautigan constructs The Tokyo-Montana Express, and these discontinuities form the subject of JEFF CROUCH's essay. Crouch is a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University. This is his first published article.

KIM BRIDGFORD has published poetry in The Georgia Review, The Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, and numerous other journals. She was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in English for two years, and recently was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She teaches at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI lives in San Pedro, California. His latest book is The Last Night of the Earth Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1992).

JARED CARTER received a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant in 1991. His most recent chapbook is The Shriving (Duende Press). His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

CAROL HAMILTON teaches gifted elementary school children and is. an adjunct professor of English at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma. Two recent books include a chapbook of poetry Once the Dust (Bronco Press), and Legends of Poland. Her children's novel, The Dawn Seekers, received a Southwest Book Award.

PETER KROK has published poetry in Plains Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, Poet Lore, and other journals. Several of his poems have been selected for publication in anthologies in Canada and the United States. Presently he is the poetry director of the Manayunk Art Center in Philadelphia.

ERNEST KROLL, a former newspaperman and U.S. Government official, has published six books. Two lines from one of his poems have been cut into the granite floor of the new Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. He is the editor of three forthcoming books, including Marianne Moore at The Dial Commissions an Article on the Movies (Colorado College Press). His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

LYN LIFSHIN was recently featured in a documentary film, Not Made of Glass. Her new books include The Doctor Poem and Lips Unsealed. She is currently working on a new edition of Tangled Vines (Harcourt Brace). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares New York Quarterly, Farmers Market, and numerous other journals' She lives in Niskayuna, New York.

MATTHEW MURREY works as a bus driver for a mental health center in Chicago. His poetry has appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Zone 3, Poetry East, and other journals.

SILVIA SCHEIBLI recently published Silk Angels (Cypress Review Press, 1988) and is working on a new collection she is calling "Caffeine Kisses.” Besides writing poetry, she is also a photographer, a buyer of printing and media, and a birder. She lives in Burlingame California.

MARGO A. SCHMIDT of Lexington, Massachusetts, is an intuitive counselor who works with the creative process and its role in personal and spiritual transformation. She derives much of her inspiration from nature as teacher and healer.

IOANNA-VERONIKA WARWICK came to the United States from Poland when she was seventeen. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including New Letters, South Florida Review, and Negative Capability. Her translations of Polish poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review and other magazines. She lives in Chula Vista, California.

ERNEST A. WIGHT, JR., of Randolph, Massachusetts, is a jazz enthusiast and has recently published poems in NER/BLQ and Pudding Magazine. In 1991 he won the $500 second prize in the National Poetry Contest.

Not the epic hero of dashing deeds, but an inward warrior of the imagination, James Joyce's Leopold Bloom transcends the roles society has given him, and, as ANDREW P. WILLIAMS explains, does so brilliantly in the "Calypso Chapter" of Ulysses. Now finishing work on his doctorate in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he has previously published articles on writing theory and on Maria Cummins and The Lamplighter.

The ambiguity of poet Robert Frost's politics, his sense of himself as a "strainer" more than a conservative or liberal, and his unique definitions of justice and mercy and change, are the subjects of NICHOLAS D. ROMBES, Jr.'s article. Doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University in English, Rombes has published poems in a variety of journals and magazines, including New Voices, Bitterroot, Ariel, Gambit, and The Big Two-Hearted, and has presented a paper on The Satanic Verses at a popular culture/ American culture conference.

The obvious analogy between Arthur Miller's The Crucible and the then-rampant McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunt was one Miller, and his critics, qualified. Yet Miller's yes-no-partly hedging was false to his play and false to himself, and GARY P. HENDRICKSON shows how and why the parallel with Salem's witchcraft episode, now exactly three hundred years in our past, is appropriate and also why we should not forget it. Currently at work on an article dealing with Huckleberry Finn's ending, he has taught English in such exotic climes as North Yemen, Poland, Syria, Wisconsin, Taiwan, and now Minnesota.

DAVID SLOAN teaches courses in the colonial and revolutionary periods of American history at the University of Arkansas. He is currently completing an historiographical analysis of the Hernando de Soto expedition.

WALTER SHEAR of the Pittsburg State Department of English teaches courses in American literature and is a regular reviewer for this journal.

* * *

DECONSTRUCTION: Invitation to Interested Readers

The Midwest Quarterly recently invited Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien to amplify an article critical of certain trends in academia, "Devaluing the University," which he contributed to The Times of London on March 5. Dr. Cruise O'Brien would like to do as we asked, but he feels he needs more information from people--whether for or against deconstruction--who are at present working in American or other universities and research institutes. He would be interested in hearing from any readers who might be willing to describe for him the state of affairs in relation to deconstruction (and allied tendencies) at the writer's university. Any replies would be treated as entirely confidential, in that neither the writer's name nor academic affiliation would be cited. The answers would be used as the bases for a general comment on the overall situation as regards the influence of deconstruction in academia. Extracts would be quoted for pertinent illustration, but care would be taken to see that no quotation could lead to the identification of the respondent or his or her university.

While Dr. Cruise O'Brien would certainly not wish to restrict the area within which any respondent might choose to frame his or her comments on deconstruction, the following is a non-exhaustive list of topics he would like to know about. In the institution at which you work: estimate the proportion of deconstructionists and allies in relevant departments, including English and comparative literature; estimate the relative influence of deconstructionists, anti-deconstructionists, and neutrals in academic policy, including appointments, tenure, and promotions. In the main the information that is requested would concern the particular institution in which the respondent works, but general observations about the perceived strength of these tendencies in, for example, The Modern Language Association and whether such tendencies are growing stronger or weaker would be appreciated.

Send responses to Dr. Cruise O'Brien to The Midwest Quarterly, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas 66762, in care of the Editor, and he will forward them unopened to Ireland in a timely manner.

* * *

ANNOUNCING THE ANNUAL VICTOR J. EMMETT, JR., MEMORIAL PRIZE AND LECTURE

The editors of The Midwest Quarterly invite submission of articles on any aspect of Victorian and Modem British literature to be considered for the annual Victor J. Emmett, Jr., Memorial Prize. The winning article will be published in The Midwest Quarterly, and the author will receive an honorarium and will be invited to Pittsburg State University to deliver the annual Victor J. Emmett, Jr., Memorial Lecture. The late Victor J. Emmett, Jr., was for many years Professor of English at Pittsburg State University and this journal's Editor-in-Chief.

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