A%Vietf of Literature ' ^- Tj* Liural Jirts
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M /5CELL4 /VY A%vietf of Literature ' ^- tj* LiUral jirts Round Table Thoughts on Recent American Poetry: Louis Gallo; with Michael Dennis Browne, Philip Martin, Bob Tisdale, Chris Wallace-Crabbe. New Fiction Richard Grayson, Lawrence Osgood, William Peden, James Ross. Features Michael Fanning: Jimmy Connors, Oedipus Rex Ulf Zimmemann: Rilke's Novel City. New Poetry Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Philip Dacey, Mark Moe, Frederic Will, Robert Willson, David Fisher, Gail Trebbe, Margaret Robinson, Judith Minty, Pamela Espeland, Marjorie Hawksworth, Conrad Hilberry, Edward Hirsch, Jacqueline Hoefer, Christopher Howell, Malcolm Stiles McCollum. Reviews of: Blaising's The Art of Life (Carol Holly); Paige's Agrarian Revolution (Kim Rodner); Anais Nin's Waste of Timelessness (Harriet Zinnes); Sartre's Life Situations (Donald Schier); Simone Weil: A Life (Bardwell Smith). VOL. XVII, No. 1, Winter 1977 $2.00 Distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. de Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. All volumes available on microfilm through University Microfilms, 313 North First Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Unsolicited manuscripts — which are submitted at the author's risk and which will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envrlope — should be sent to The Editor, The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057. Beginning with Vol. XVII, No. I, the magazine will appear three times a year. Subscription rates: $2.00 for a single copy; $5.50 for a year; $10.00 for two years. The Carleton Miscellany is not an official publication of Carleton College, nor are the views expressed in its pages necessarily those of the College. The editors assume no responsibility for the views of individual contributors. Copyright 1977 by Carleton College Cover design and title by Betsy Edwards ClitLETOtf J^ISCEHAHY A %eyietf of Literature <&• tlje Liberal Arts Advisory Editors Richard Wollheim Philip Martin John Wain A.K. Ramanujan Chris Wallace-Crabbe Editorial Board Robert Bonner Paul Riesman Charles Carlin Davis Taylor Roy Elveton Robert Tisdale David Porter John Wright Keith Harrison, Editor Donald Schier, Associate Editor Carolyn Soule, Managing Editor Editorial Assistants Mary Ellen Hoffmann Laurie Kutchins Jennifer Snodgrass Brian Kitely NOTES ON FUTURE ISSUES Volume XVII, No. 2 will feature writers of the Midwest, with poems by Keith Gunderson, Jerald Bullis, Hunt Hawkins, Tom Jackoway and others; stories by Mary Ellen Carew, and features by Don Schier and others. Round Table will be given to a discussion by Errol Harris' Testament of a Philosophical Dissenter, an important statement on philosophy and science. Volume XVII, No. 3 will contain an article on Antarctic exploration by Evan Connell, poems by Harold Witt, a story by Peter Meinke and a Round Table on Clifford Geertz' germinal article on The Balinese Cockfight. Volume XVIII, No. 1 will be an International Issue, featuring writers in English from overseas. So far we have stories by Jon Bovey (France), poems by Agha Shahid Ali (Kashmir) and we expect contributions by writers in Australia, England, Canada and many other places inside and outside the Anglophonic Zone. AN APPEAL Please ask your friends, wives, husbands, children, librarians to join our list of subscribers. Our annual subscription rate is only $5.50 (3 issues) which, in the present economy, is risibly inexpensive. There's a subscription form enclosed for you to pass on. Help us to spread word of The Miscellany. You'll notice we've never resorted to commercial advertising to maintain ourselves, and we'd like to stay this way. More subscriptions would help enormously. CONTENTS Vol. XVII, No.l 1977-78 (Winter) Comments, Tributes 4 Poems by Mark Moe and Jacqueline Hoefer 8 ROUND TABLE Thoughts on Recent American Poetry, by Louis Gallo 12 Replies: Blood Relations, by Bob Tisdale A Dungeon with the Door Open, by Philip Martin Drawing a Bead on Louis Gallo from Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Michael Dennis Browne Mendeleef, Grass Roots and the Wombat Mandala, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe Louis Gallo Replies to the Replies 40 • Nixon to Haldeman, poem by Robert Willson 42 Jimmy Connors, Oedipus Rex, an article by Michal Fanning 43 Clean, a story by James Ross 54 Poems by Frederic Will, Margaret Robinson, Pamela Espeland, Conrad Hilberry, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, David Fisher 60 Rain on the Roof, a story by Richard Grayson 70 From Prag to Paris: Rilke's Novel City, an article by Ulf Zimmermann 76 Family Portrait, a story by William Peden 90 Poems by Judith Minty, Philip Dacey, Marjorie Hawksworth, Gail Trebbe, Christopher Howell 92 The Madness of My Brother, a story by Lawrence Osgood 101 Poems by Edward Hirsch and Malcom Stiles McCollum 116 REVIEWS Harriet Zinnes on Anais Nin; Kim Rodner on Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution; Bardwell Smith on Simone Weil; Carol Holly on Blaising's The Art of Life; Donald Schier on Sartre H8 Books Received 143 Notes on Contributors 148 COMMENTS, TRIBUTES The Miscellany has been going sixteen years now. Sixteen years of extraordinarily turbulent social, political and intellectual change. There was, in retrospect, a certain leisured ease in the ambience of the early sixties when the magazine first appeared. Not so now. Too much has happened. There's no need here to toll out an exhaustive litany of that change nor to give my own guesses about the future. Instead I want to limit my observations to a couple of things which I think are relevant to the existence and purpose of this magazine. • In the intellectual climate of the last few years at least one broad change can be pointed to with some definiteness. Partly because of the effect of Black Studies and third-world programs in colleges, partly because of the influence of books by Thomas Kuhn and others—but there are many causes—we are being forced to be more inclusive in our thinking. For one thing, readers and teachers of literature have begun to see that literary works sometimes demand to be seen in con texts larger than that of literature itself. That the results are often messy and half-baked cannot be denied. Nevertheless the interest shown by literary scholars in such fields as history, anthropology, religion, philosophy, politics—and many other "non-literary" fields— points to a significant shift in emphasis. The well-wrought urn has become, for the most part, an archaism. There are many who see the social or psychological occasions of a work as legitimate fields of study, complementing, though not opposing, an interest in the formal properties of the work itself. It's as if we had taken T.S. Eliot's descrip tion of criticism—by one of his characters in the dialogue on dramatic poetry—not as a warning, but as a desideratum: You can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you cannot draw a line between criticism and meta physics; you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later. Yet, those who agree would also endorse the warning which ends that same speech: "The best you can do is to accept these conditions and know what you are doing when you do it." We still have, and we will always have, the dogmatists—those who will want to reduce a com plex work of art to a set of extra-literary preconceptions. But I believe our best minds are developing a double, or even a multiple vision, learning the methods and character of other disciplines and enriching the study of the works themselves by seeing that their occasions are indeed manifold and interrelated. • What Eliot—or his "character"—maintains about criticism and the impossibility of drawing lines, with any absoluteness, in literary dis cussions, also applies to the whole realm of the liberal arts—to history and the humanities, to the social sciences—and at least to certain areas of the "hard" or "natural" sciences. A man might begin talking about physics and quite legitimately go on to poetry or politics; begin with folk-lore and end with linguistics; begin with linguistics and end with symbolic logic or mathematics. And so on. It is not a question of asserting anything as foolish as that all disciplines are one. They are not. For heuristic purposes, clear edges are useful and, for adminis trative purposes, the divisions might even be unavoidable. But it is also important, particularly in those disciplines whose main medium of expression is the written and spoken word, to stress their interdepen dence. That disciplines have their shibboleths, their arcana, their special vocabularies, their "traditions"—that is undeniable and, to some degree, inevitable. But where disciplines strive to differentiate themselves absolutely from all others I believe we begin to find the kind of involution which can prove, and has proven at times, highly debilitating. For "traditions" can often be nothing better than the function of an habitual closed-mindedness, special vocabularies a form of fear and distrust. • These thoughts have influenced me in the shaping of an editorial policy. It is not a matter of making a sharp change but of building on what we always have been: a miscellany. We would like in these pages—among other things—to encourage a lively discussion, a well- articulated debate on some important questions in the whole range of the liberal arts. All these disciplines are the inheritors of a magnificent expressive instrument—the English language. And we would like to assist, however we can, in its preservation, for we have seen signs around us that its foundation is being undermined, sometimes in those quarters where one would least expect it: in the centers of liberal learning themselves. • We are not, let it be very firmly noted, concerned with a school- marmish notion of good usage.