THINK A Journal of Poetry, criticism, and reviews spring 2015 Volume 5.2 THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Reviews, and Criticism think was founded in 2008 by Christine Yurick, who published ten issues across four volumes, with the last, Vol. 4.1, appearing in 2011. In 2013, Western State Colorado University acquired the journal. It is now housed at Western and is affiliated with Western’s graduate pro- gram in Creative Writing. Issues began in Fall 2014 with Volume 5.1. In keeping with its original mission, think publishes poems that empha- size craft and clarity. We are looking for metered, rhymed poems, in received or nonce forms, or free verse with a clear organizing principle. The language we admire in poetry and in prose is both intellectually precise and emotionally rich. We welcome work from both established and emerging poets. Staff David J. Rothman, Editor Susan Spear, Managing Editor Laura E. Anderson, Editorial Assistant Christin Oberman, Student Intern Western State Colorado University Graduate Program in Creative Writing, Poetry Concentration Advisory Board Peter Bridges, Dana Gioia, Enid Holden, David Mason, Marilyn Taylor Advisory Editors Ernest Hilbert, Mark Todd, David Yezzi SUBMISSIONS: Submit only previously unpublished poems via submittable.com. Please include a brief bio and all contact informa- tion, including mailing address. Payment is one copy of the journal. The rights revert to the poet on publication. Query the editors about book reviews and critical essays. SUBSCRIPTIONS: conundrum-press.com/think-journal/ think is printed and distributed by conundrum press, a division of Sam- izdat Publishing Group, PO Box 1353, Golden, Colorado 80402. Table of Contents From the Editors 7 featured poet: bruce bennett Ex Cathedra 15 Recurrent Things 16 POETRY Rhina P. Espaillat Three Missives 21 Luke Bauerline Offering 22 Jan Schreiber At the Edge of the Woods 23 Brett Mertins Short Song for a Stomped Cricket 24 Robert Boliek Lines Written on an I Ching Text 25 Wendy Videlock The Poem As 26 Mark J. Mitchell The Art of the Fugue 27 Matt Tordoff The Russian Soprano Anna Netrebko, a Portrait in Three Scenes 28 Bethany Pope Electric Erasure 30 T. S. Kerrigan A Page from the Devil’s Notebooks 33 Matriarch 34 Burt Myers Taste 35 Acute 36 James Matthew Wilson Stations of Divorce 37 Gail White If She Comes Back 38 James McKee The Exes 39 Jennifer Fandel Coming to Shore 42 Jere Paulmeno Petition Addressed to Myself 43 SPECIAL FEATURE: LYRIC, NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND PEDAGOGY Christopher Norris A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History 47 Frederick Turner Lyric and the Content of Poetry 69 ESSAYS Jan Schreiber The Phoenix Line: History of a Style 85 Kyle Harvey Fractal: The Wallace Stevens Centos 99 reviews Sisters and Courtesans 104 Anna M. Evans Reviewed by Dick Davis Survivor’s Picnic: Poems 108 Debra Bruce Reviewed by Marilyn L. Taylor CONTRIBUTORS 111 From the Editors A journal worth its pulp does not exist primarily to speak to people, but rather for them. Each issue can become a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a specific and focused conversation. If successful, it weaves together a community, however frayed and far-flung. Other- wise, especially given the time and effort, why bother? When Christine Yurick founded THINK it was clear from the first that she had the ability to bring together people who would enjoy conversing with each other in print and in person. That is why she succeeded. She carefully sought out writers (and readers) with particular interests and engaged them. Many first learned of the journal when she wrote out of the blue and invited a submission. She would speak of the journal’s mission to emphasize clarity and craft, though never at the expense of feeling. She had an unerring sense for readers and writers who shared such interests, and she fulfilled her promise to bring them together. You hold the results in your hands. In a time when far too many poets and critics muddy the waters merely to make them appear deep, THINK’s mission remains vital. Even the most exuberant, Dionysian, and intense subjects and themes can be orderly. If anything, they cry out for stays against their own confusion; this is one of the purposes of art. It is why we read poems at funerals. King Lear is ink. Serious consideration of that work alone (so disturbing at first it was only performed in Nahum Tate’s bastardized happiness for over 125 years) 7 suggests that anyone who argues disordered times and feelings call for disordered art has not read enough, or deeply enough. Passion and confusion do not oppose lucidity and precision; they require it. In this, the second issue since THINK came to Western State Colorado University, Christine’s original vision is very much alive, and I am particularly struck by the vitality of the work we publish here, and how such a far-flung group of writers has come together in the name of an art that emphasizes clarity, craft and feeling, in both poetry and prose. The current issue has many strengths, but several bear emphasiz- ing. First, we have two poems from our featured poet, Bruce Bennett. Bennett, who taught at Wells College for many decades, is the recip- ient of the first annual Writing the Rockies Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Creative Writing, awarded at Western State Colorado University in July 2015 during the annual conference that concludes the summer residency of our Graduate Program in Creative Writing. As far as we know, this is the only national award for teaching creative writing, and Bennett is a fitting inaugural recipient. Not only a gifted poet with scores of books and chapbooks, he is a gentle and kind man who has passed on his own skill to generations of students. The contemporary teaching of “cre- ative writing” is riven with all kinds of controversy, as it should be, if it is to matter. And that is exactly why we should recognize those who have given so much to it and done it so well. Bennett’s poems in this issue find him in his lighter mode, but the poems are, as always, crafted like diamonds. Those interested in his more somber moods could read his most recent chapbook, Swimming in a Watering Can (Foothills Publishing, 2014), whose title poem exemplifies his ability to convey astonishingly precise, powerful, complex, resonant feelings without having to describe them: 8 Something was stuck. I thought it was some leaves, so I poured out the water from the top. There was this lump. I saw it was a mouse. He must have tried to drink and lost his balance. I stood there staring. Just a little lump wet on the wet ground. Nothing could have saved him. Who could have heard? Who would have heard a mouse swimming? And it was outside, in the dark. I don’t know why the thought of that upsets me. Maybe it’s all the other stuff. It’s just that awful image: paddling in the water, helpless and desperate, nothing to catch hold of, feeling your strength fail, little by little by little, paddling and paddling, sinking, all alone. Notice how the “lump” becomes “you”; it is a sonnet after all. What might have been maudlin becomes empathic, with no clues, and none needed, about “all the other stuff.” It really is the mouse who is “helpless and desperate,” not the speaker, but he can under- stand. This is a skill that comes in time only to those who master both art and themselves. The issue’s special feature on “Lyric, Narrative, History and Pedagogy” covers enough territory, and yet the authors here, Chris- topher Norris and Frederick Turner, arrive prepared. We have placed their work side by side in hopes that the issue might burst into flame in your hands. We were astonished to receive Norris’s lengthy poem, “A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History.” Norris is a noted British phi- losopher and scholar, especially of deconstruction and post-struc- turalism, whose many books include titles such as The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction and Quantum 9 Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics. His poem, a response to the Klee painting Angelus Novus reproduced on this issue’s cover and Walter Benjamin’s commentary on it in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is an extended meditation not only on both of those works, but also on the tragic vision of history Klee’s canvas has come to represent because of Benjamin’s brilliant if extravagant interpretation of it. The poem is certainly not easily accessible. Norris apparently did not get that memo about there being no ideas except in things. For Norris, ideas matter in and of themselves, and he navigates them at will. And yet, without fully grasping Norris’s argument at first, I was attracted to a certain elegant music and syntax, as with, among others, Stevens in his longer works. The meditation on allegory and its beauties and impossibilities is deliciously managed in highly-wrought pentameter ABBA BAAB octets, and unapologetically stands in the tradition of the most ambitious overtly philosophical poems of Pope, Auden, and Stevens. How refreshing on our current scene to encounter such a voice meditating so thoughtfully on weighty subjects, even if it does appear to conclude that allegory is a fool’s game. In contrast, Turner’s erudite essay is astonishingly clear from the first, and is a trenchant explanation and critique of the dominance of lyric in contemporary poetry and its ultimate weakness.