Volume 43, Issue 4
FRONT COVER: William Tucker
MESSENGER, 2001
BRONZE EDITION OF 4
126 (H) X 125 X 84 INCHES
AT THE MILLENNIUM it seemed for a moment as if Imperialism were dead, replaced by something subtler, something verbal: Hegemony, or cultural dominance achieved with at least the partial consent of the dominated. This notion, spawned by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramschi and globalized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their millennial book Empire, seemed to imagine Hollywood as the Pentagon of the future (hence Bill Clinton’s cozy ties with the entertainment industry), and summoned new energies of popular resistance.
Where has this gone now, with American military command centers opening for business in the Persian Gulf, and US troops patrolling the Afghan moonscapes once lit only by the flares of the Northern Alliance? Is it back to crude force without persuasion, weaponry without words?
No. All domination from Athens to Foggy Bottom has come with a second desert storm of language, ideological cluster-bombs strewn among burning lives and settlements. In this issue Jon Thompson and Pamela Smiley reconsider two of the great verbal resistances to the idea-war in Vietnam: Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. And Barbara Baer and Marianne Boruch remap the cultural geographies of the Cold War, another interminable mix of bullets and bulletins.
Boruch in particular reminds us that these vistas are not purely horrible, that in the motion of thought comes not only the push and pull of Hegemony, but also art, as it refuses to play by the rules of unfreedom. In the rest of our space are exemplars of this: the American Poet Laureate, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Nobel prize winner, a MacArthur Fellow, a Juniper Prize winner, and lots of unanointed winners unfazed by the mind-denying firestorms that seem imminent in the dark of this darkest winter.
—David Lenson, for the editors
Table of Contents
Poets in Cars, Non-Fiction by Marianne Boruch
A Television Show that Takes Places in California, Poetry by Ed Allen
After; Flock , Poetry by Billy Collins Clot, Poetry by Karen Donovan
Beth Our Dead Man, Poetry by Garrett Doherty
Immortal, Fiction by Christine Sneed
Dream Corps, Poetry by Roald Hoffman
The Retreating World, Poetry by Naomi Wallace
Ferocious Alphabets: Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Non-Fiction by Jon Thompson
The Role of the Ideal (Female) Reader in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: Why Should Real Women Play?, Non-Fiction by Pamela Smiley
Liminality, Poetry by Virgil Suárez
Attitude of the Spectator; Listening to Jimi Hendrix Near Lafayette Park, Poetry by Monifa Love
Things of that Nature, Fiction by Timothy Scott
Mr. Mann Visits the Free Medical Clinic, Pays Good Money for a Skinny Au Lait, Poetry by John Mann
Preparations, Poetry by Victoria Chang
Dangerous Crossing to a Safe Place, Non-Fiction by Barbara Baer
The Only Snapshot I Have of My Father’s Parents. . ., Poetry by Jane Southwell Munro
Genius Loci, Poetry by John Witte
Useful Fictions, Fiction by Susan Schiff
Naked Man on a Bed, Poetry by Judith Berke
Vaginolatry, Poetry by Peter Viereck
Where It Is That Things Go, Fiction by John Keyes
The Shepherd Reproached: The Shepherd Answers, Poetry by Guy Goffette Translated by Marilyn Hacker
Contributors
Ed Allen is the author of Mustang Sally (W.W. Norton); his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ and elsewhere. Poems of his have been been in Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, and in other literary journals. He was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland in 1994-1995.
Barbara Baer is the publisher and editor of Floreant Press. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, Redbook, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is The Horse Orchard. She has spent many years abroad, teaching in India, the U.S.S.R.,Vienna, and London.
Judith Berke‘s poems have been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of an NEA grant, and her first book, White Morning, was published in 1989.
Marianne Boruch is the author of several books of poetry, including A Stick That Breaks and Breaks, and Moss Burning (both with Oberlin College Press). She has also written Poetry’s Old Air (Poets on Poetry), (University of Michigan Press).
Victoria Chang is currently editing the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, due out from the University of Illinois Press in 2003. She is the recipient of the Hopwood Award and her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including the New England Review, Cream City Review, and Hawaii Review.
Billy Collins‘ latest collection is Nine Horses (Random House, 2002). He teaches at Lehman College (CUNY) and is the United States Poet Laureate.
Garrett Doherty‘s poems have been published in Poetry, Quarterly West, Verse, and The New Republic. He has also written reviews for Verse.
Karen Donovan‘s Juniper Prize-winning book, Fugitive Red, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press (1999).
Guy Goffette is the author of six books of poems; the most recent, Un manteau de fortune (Gallimard, 2001) received the Grand Prix de Poésie de l’Académie Française. He lives in Paris, where he is an editor at Gallimard. He received the Grand Prix de Poésie de la Société des Gens de Lettres in 1999 for the totality of his work.
Marilyn Hacker, Guy Goffette’s translator, is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Squares and Courtyards (W.W. Norton, 2000). Two other books of her translations have also been published recently: Claire Malroux’s A Long Gone Sun, and Here There Was Once a Country, by Vénus Khoury-Ghata.
Roald Hoffman was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U.S. to study chemistry and has taught that subject at Cornell University since 1965. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui in 1981. Dr. Hoffman has written books of essays, poems and plays. His most recent poetry collection is Memory Effects (Calhoun Press of Columbia College, 1999).
John Keyes is a professor emeritus at Ryerson University in Toronto. His stories have been published in Queen’s Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Fiddlehead, Descant, Fiction Magazine, and in other literary journals. At the University of Michigan, where he received his Master’s Degree, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and won the Major Hopwood Award for Fiction.
Monifa Love teaches at Hampshire College. She is the author of Provisions (1989) and Freedom in the Dismal (1998). She co-authored Soundings (1986) and “… my magic pours secret libations” (1996). Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. John Mann grew up in Acron, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Borderlands, Salt Hill, Many Mountains Moving, and The Christian Century.
Jane Southwell Munro is a Canadian poet who lives in the woods of Vancouver Island. Her collections of poetry include Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books, 1995), and The Trees Just Moved Into a Season of Other Shapes (Quarry Press, 1986).
Susan Schiff‘s short fiction has been published in several literary journals, including Potpourri, Bellowing Ark, Green Mountains Review, and Chelsea. She holds a commercial pilot’s license.
Timothy Scott lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kriteen. His fiction has also appeared in The New Orleans Review.
Pamela Smiley has taught literature in New Zealand and Australia for the University of Maryland European Division and currently teaches at a small college in Wisconsin. She is at work on a story cycle about lives of Asian and American women.
Christine Sneed works in student affairs at The School of the Art Institute. Her stories have appeared in River Styx, Greensboro Review, Laurel Review, Third Coast, and the Northwest Review. She has also had her poems published in several literary journals. Virgil Suárez was born in Cuba and emigrated to the US. when he was twelve. His sixth collection of poetry, Guide to the Blue Tongue, will be published by the University of Illinois Press this year. He divides his time between Key Biscayne and Tallahassee, where he lives with his wife and daughters.
Jon Thompson teaches Twentieth Century literature at North Carolina State University. “Ferocious Alphabets” is part of a book of fragmentary essays he is currently writing on American literature.
William Tucker (cover artist) was born in 1935 and studied classics at Oxford University. In 1965, his work was included in the landmark New Generation sculpture exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1978 and now lives in Western Massachusetts. Tucker is an influential sculptor and teacher due to his return to seeking a formal balance between abstract and formal issues in modeling the figure. His work is exhibited at the McKee Gallery in New York, and at many of the major museums of the world, including the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.
Peter Viereck, 86, poet and historian, a Pulitzer winner, is publishing three books in 2003 with Transaction Press (Rutgers University): Metapolitics: From Wagner and German Romantics to Hitler; The Unadjusted Man in an Overadjusted Age; and Conservatism Revisited: What Went Wrong? His latest book is Tide & Continuities: Last & First Poems.
Naomi Wallace is a playwright and poet and a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Her collected plays were published by Faber and Faber, and her collection of poems, To Dance a Stony Field, was published by Peterloo Poets, U.K.
John Witte lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches and edits Northwest Review. His poems have appeared in recent issues of Field, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southern Review.