Front Cover by Orra White Hitchcock
Four Grasses, C. 1817
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 12 7/8 x7 7/8 INCHES
Volume 51, Issue 2
At times, the absurdity of the so-called news cycle feels like an obscenity. A matter of distance, really. Could it ever feel less than obscene when the subject of the news is you? The point was brough home—literally—on an evening in late January, when Myiam Chancy, former editor of Smith College's Meridians, returned to the Happy Valley. Myriam gave a reading from her new novel, The Loneliness of Angels, at a benefit for Haiti (at Food for Thought, a bookstore in Amherst); a host of others decried, declaimed, jammed, and sang that night as well, including MR's own Martín Espada, and all enchanted, but the prophetic voice that most entranced was found in "The Sound of Water." We are honored to republish it here, and we trust that Haiti will stay in the minds, words, and deeds of our readers.
Enchantment, to a different beat, is also sung in Cleopatra Mathis's "Calypso"—surely "the right poison/to make a proper lament." Michael Thurston's capewalk picks up where Calypso lets go: another seaside meditation on ruin, Thurston launches his essay into Thoreauviana, teaching us to sort as well as salvage. In the fullness of time, who among us will be spared the cold, the scarcity , "the sudden losses occasioned by predation"? Though Thoreau, as "On Cape Cod" reminds us, stared down the emptiness we too quickly call charity, no other word seems adequate to the periods measured by Thurston's pace and phrasing.
Geological time has yet another rhythm—the earth's time both is and is not our own. The art and life of Orra White Hitchcock, as meticulously recounted in Daria D'Arienzo's "The 'Union of the Beautiful with the Useful,'" sings a praisesong for the natural world, and her accomplishments have yet to be valued fully, even by those institutions which the Hitchcocks—both Orra and her husband, Edward—helped bring to national prominence. Though daughter, wife, and mother, Orra was most of all "an artist and a passionate scientist, a person capable of [. . .] creat[ing] an illustrated life of her own." Time to set the record straight.
Let me end by sending you to your libraries. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger gives us a lyrical, moving commentary on the Hungarian photographer André Kertész's "A Red Hussar Leaving, June 1919, Budapest." This photo shows a woman holding a small child; she faces a soldier with his back to us, a crowd surrounds them. According to Berger, though we may sense it, we cannnot understand the power of this image unless we know that the soldier is leaving to join a doomed struggle, that of the Hungarian Red Army. This defeat led to the occupation of Budapest, and, "very soon after, the first European fascist regime under Horthy was established." For Berger, the lesson of this photograph is contained in "the parting look between the man and the woman": in it is a resistance—an opposition—to history. A protest "against people being the objects of history," a gesture in which "history ceases to have the monopoly of time."
How could this be? A lovely phrase, yes, but does it make sense? How could history not be equated with—not have a monopoly over—time?
Only if other histories are possible.
—Jim Hicks
for the editors
Entries
poetry
Decomposition of the Soul
By Rosa Alice Branco, Translated by Alexis Levitin
nonfiction
On Cape Cod
By Michael Thurston
nonfiction
Adrienne Rich, Anne Halley, Marilyn Hacker
By Jules Chametzky
fiction
The Sound of Water
By Myriam J.A. Chancy
poetry
Calypso
By Cleopatra Mathis
poetry
I Thought It's Time
By Jean Valentine
poetry
Diana
By Jean Valentine
poetry
Proof
By Barbara Perez
nonfiction
Helen and Jose Iglesias
By Jules Chametzky
nonfiction
Having It All
By Robert Erwin
nonfiction
The "Union of the Beautful with the Useful": Though the Eyes of Orra White Hitchcock
By Daria D'Arienzo
nonfiction
Mercy Flynt Morris and Nancy Flynt: A Portrait of Two Massachusetts Sisters in the Early Republic
By Jessica Lang
poetry
As if the sky ...
By Gary Young
poetry
Ode to th Boulders in the Orchard
By Teddy Macker
fiction
Guests
By James Meyer
fiction
Against the Dying
By Wilson Roberts
nonfiction
Toni Morrison, the Slave Narratives, and Modernism
By Robin Dizard
fiction
Big Sister
By Edith Pearlman
poetry
Bulls-eye
By Joanne Dominique Dwyer
poetry
Dear Words
By Stephen Lindow
poetry
No Complaint Book
By Rosa Alice Branco
poetry
Divine Caress
By Rosa Alice Branco
translation
Decomposition of the Soul, No Complaint Book, and Divine Caress
Alexis Levitin
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Jim Hicks
Decomposition of the Soul, No Complaint Book,
and Divine Caress, poems by Rosa Alice Branco,
translated by Alexis Levitin
The Sound of Water, a story by Myriam J.A.Chancy
On the Training of Expert Witnesses,
a poem by G.C. Waldrep
On Cape Cod, an essay by Michael Thurston
Calypso, a poem by Cleopatra Mathis
I Thought It's Time and Diana,
poems by Jean Valentine
Proof, a poem by Barbara Perez
Helen and Jose Iglesias, portraits by Jules Chametzky
Having It All, an essay by Robert Erwin
The "Union of the Beautiful with the Useful":
Through the Eyes of Orra White Hitchcock,
an essay by Daria D'Arienzo
Orra White Hitchock Folio,
art by Orra White Hitchcock
Mercy Flynt Morris and Nancy Flynt:
A Portrait of Two Massachusetts Sisters
in the Early Republic, an essay by Jessica Lang
As if the sky..., a poem by Gary Young
Ode to the Boulders in the Orchard,
a poem by Teddy Macker
Guests, a story by James Meyer
Against the Dying, a story by Wilson Roberts
Toni Morrison, the Slave Narratives, and Modernism,
an essay by Robin Dizard
Big Sister, a story by Edith Pearlman
Bulls-eye, a poem by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Adrienne Rich, Anne Halley, Marilyn Hacker,
portraits by Jules Chametzky
Dear Words, a poem by Stephen Lindow