The Southern Review articles from January 2001

The Southern Review archives from January 2001

Poetry Punishes You for Your Absence.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... She's not an easy lover who simply tilts her head when you appear on the front stoop. You hope the porch light will cast heavenly redemption like a church-basement Christmas pageant. No, there's scowling, silence. And...

Question and Answer: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm afraid of truth, the way once something is given, it becomes a gift. Memory cannot remain pure memory once spoken. My grandfather told me how it felt before the amputations to have his dead legs float in the...

The Orphan Poem.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I gave it up because I was too young, too wild, unsuited to tending its needs, and it was needy, squalling, and I was tender, needy myself. And so there was a basket, and a gentle sea, or maybe there was a basket ...

Portokali.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The night before we went to Epidaurus we stayed in a seaside town called Portokali. Portokali means orange, both the fruit and the color, as in English. We checked into "Mike's." We were lucky to find a hotel in the...

To Frank O'Hara.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Along the Avenue of the Americas dudes shoot the breeze, dribbling the globe of a basketball, ballhopping each other or whatever's the New York for slag, greg, and razz. Honking taxis, common as cockroaches here,...

Giants.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Millions of ways, there are, to anger God. An early one: leave his heaven for sex, And father the giveaway of giants. After creation, in the last chapter Before the flood, is the short-short story Of those Nephilim,...

Pushing the Black Thread.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Hagop Sandaldjian, the world's only microminiature sculptor, was described as "a very calm man." Last night I couldn't thread a needle. I took it under three kinds of light; I licked that thread; I ran it between My...

End of Days.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... There are those who swear it will start with the sun Snapping a fiery whip, lashing the hills with flame, While others hear men and women screaming, Being run through by burnished swords of wind, Scalding-hot needles of...

Bagatelle for a Young Woman Frozen to Death While Making the Shapes of Angels in the Snow.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Drunk, I would guess, and defenseless Against even the familiar, shopworn forms Beauty loves to take on, and longing, She sat alone, the night after Christmas, Staring down into the darkness next door, Where the...

Martha at the Threshold of Heaven.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Martha Beitel, 1901-1997 I knew it was down there, Having descended one evening Into a cellar filled with shadows Flung skittering from the bulb, And made my way back hurriedly To the surface of my rooms, ...

December: Two Views.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... 1. Deer in Rain, New Homestead Hill Umber and gray, in the welter of the thicket, Wet light streaking the trees, In the stillness of the dream they inhabit, Four deer forage among the fallen leaves, White tails...

Six, Sex, Say.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Do you think they wanted sex? asks the naive girl in the film about a femme fatale who betrays just about everyone stupid enough to get involved with her, but since they are in New Zealand it sounds like, Do you think...

13th-Arrondissement Blues.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... As we sit down for yet another sublime meal at Quan Hue on the Avenue de Choisy, instead of the usual Vietnamese hit parade a tape of Beatles tunes erupts in the quiet room-- not covers, but the Fab Four themselves...

Small purchase.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I drove my father for lettuce on the day his wife didn't die but that was reasonably his fear. His wife is my mother, which has to be stated if facts are what we're here to collect. I often forget whole parts of my...

Translating small talk.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... In calling my mother the first time after she's home from surgery I'm asking if she's still alive. The actual words hide in the tornado that passed forty miles to the east last night and made flapjacks of cars. That...

Fifteen frames per second on a Sun Sparc/5.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I watched a movie of my mother's heart. The two stars of the film were 95% blockage and little metal stent. Because angioplasty is the surgery she had, while waiting I stretched on a gurney and sang Angie by the Stones but...

End of tyranny.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Being surrounded by extinctions, how do we notice one or two? It's a good meal, the famous meat loaf and unimpeachable jello, mandarin oranges and banana slices, fruit encased in the demise of a horse. She's at the end...

The World Book.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... When the woman in blue serge held up the sun, my mother opened the storm door, taking the whole volume of S into her hands. The sun shone as a sun should, and we sat down at the table leafing through silks...

Downpour.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... A sudden, intense rain spills over the beach towels I've hung to dry, then stops as abruptly as it came. The July sky, like a calm face after anger, holds only a single cloud. Now hours will pass before ...

The Fugawi.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm walking up Park toward Grand Central when the second prostitute in as many blocks says, "Hey, Dave! Wanna date?" and I, attending my first meeting of the Modern Language Association, pause open-mouthed and say,...

The Land of Cockaigne.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "Everybody eat like that," says the cashier in the Piccadilly, eyeing my etouffee, cornbread, greens, beans, slaw, and pie, "wouldn't be no war," but I am by myself tonight, so I think of Barbara, who is in Chicago,...

Partial Acts.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... When I was fifteen, made of the finest luck, my mother sewed me a dress straight from a favorite painting. As the scene reopens, I'm thirty-three, nel mezzo del cammin, wrapped in a faded robe in front of a...

The Second Life of Art.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... There were the years when out of loneliness I did nothing but read. I read expectantly, as if erudition were the principal requirement for a life of momentous encounters, and as I read I imagined my own extraordinary ...

Snail after Snail.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... From the can you finger one shell-less snail; the raw animal, shapeless and green-black, gleams in its bloodless grease. From the box one snail-less shell, its bone spiral dry, bleached white, like something surfaced ...

For Emma Francesca at 5 1/2 Weeks.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... If you climb this many years and from that height turn and look back to when you left your mother's blood to take up breath here in the middle of things, death infinite behind you and before; if you try to wake the...

Stone.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The slit peach twists open: little round jar, dripping. July, and there are few secrets--the stone is finished with the flesh: no resistance as I pull it from the meat. The slight cry is a tiny yes: This is...

The Floating Days of Taylor Touchstone.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Fort Walton Beach, FL. Taylor Touchstone, a ten-year-old autistic boy, somehow survived for four days lost and alone in a swamp infested with poisonous snakes and alligators. The New York Times Where is your country, Taylor...

The Lizards.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... These cool September evenings keep my windows up all night. Tiny lizards on the screen, breathing. And if I cannot sleep, I stay attentive to the room where I am stranded. And the window, and the lizards. Out of...

Ode for Orville and Wilbur Wright.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I don't yearn for their steep excursion Into fame and fortune, for it had The usual price, and Orville died bitter And Wilbur died young. I envy them Only the slender and empty distance they left Between them and a...

Seen and So Believed.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Strange to spy your wife on 9th Street and stare At the familiar whorl of wavy hair Above one shoulder, the glancing facet Of her profiled cheek, to stand for a moment Exquisitely obsessed, blown away in place, Like a...

Photograph of Liberated Prisoner, Dachau, 1945.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "Let none of it remain until the morning, anything that remains until the morning you shall burn..." --Exodus 12:10 He has the look of Moses shambling down from God, Barefoot, in those ludicrous sackcloth pajamas, Sparse...

The Secret House.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Then is it sin To rush into the secret house of death Ere death dare come to us? --Cleopatra over Antony's corpse, act IV, sc. 15 Could yours be the Greek Revival facade glimpsed through a mossy avenue of oaks? The...

Dogs.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Across the street, chained to the back porch and intent on barking the crowns off my front teeth, a black pit bull is practicing take me take me take me take me, he knows his human is leaving any day now for the coast,...

The Emerging.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Cabbage heads piled like slaughter in the truck bed as he bumps and jolts out of the field, stops at the farmhouse to pick up his wife and daughter, the boy left behind to worm brightleaf, the truck halfway to...

Still Life.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Farewell, said our ancient ancestors, great snails and ammonites who before they vanished turned photographers, leaving us pictures, posing themselves in darkness, in mud. Pelographers, then. Their...

July 6, 1947.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The nation was baffled Saturday by the "flying saucers" reported seen in 28 states by hundreds of persons while conjectures of their meaning flew as furiously as the reported speed of the silvery discs. --Portland Oregonian, July 6, 1947...

A Cemetery in Brooklyn.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Cast-iron sky. A flock of gulls hover like scavenger angels above the city, blocks that are beehives of teeming cells. And in this cemetery in Brooklyn I search with my father down side streets of stone-encrypted...

Boeing Print Shop.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I ran a Multilith, twenty-year-old ink-slinging monster that liked to suck the thin Itek plate into the rollers and set it flapping like a storm-blown window shade. I was making three sixty-five an hour after a...

Caregiver.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... My mother is melting away, a raft of bones. For a decade, her brittle scaffolding has supported my father's weight, too. Now, in the nursing home, the little left of him is tended by hefty women in...

God Bless America.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... "Don't be extras. Be a nation!" --Cecil B. DeMille BILLY CLAMM SAID: "QUACK! QUACK! Over there, Duckies, is where Paul Revere began his famous midnight ride through the streets to warn colonists of the British invasion. The ride was...

Nineteen Amenities.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... WE ARE NOT BIG-TIME, and as Tricia says, it takes no lethal act of imagination to see that. Here is how bad it gets: Outside Jacksonville we're cruising high because Tricia's Blitz made his best showing all winter, coming from the outside eight...

Eating.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN, in North Carolina, on their first date, driving north to go canoeing in the mountains, they hit an owl. Whether the owl had been hunting something or not they didn't know. Sissy was sitting up, leaning against Russell's...

Wallace Porter Sees the Elephant.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... CIRCUS PROPRIETORS ARE NOT BORN to sawdust and spangles. Consider this: P. T. Barnum was nothing more than a dry-goods peddler --that is, until he bought a black woman for $1,000, a sum he quickly recouped by displaying her as George...

Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... THE GIRL WAS YOUNG when she did it, and she didn't live there. This was in 1962. She was eighteen. She'd been hired to tidy the place. It was three, maybe four years before anybody noticed. The letters were so small, and they always ate in the...

Worms.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... THE PRETTY LADY REPORTER had quickly introduced herself as Dora Hawkins, and right away began to interview Billy Hair about his worm farm, scribbling notes, flipping through her pad, all while struggling to save her shoes from the mud. Despite...

Plinking.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... MILLARD WAS OUT BACK PRACTICING. He had hung his homemade "Gone Plinking" sign on the doorknob of the Swap Shop and was sitting on a sweetgum stump loading the tubes for his Ruger. It was a cheap piece of artillery, but the pump action allowed...

Via Negativa: The Way of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... IN THE FIRST SUSTAINED CRITICAL ANALYSIS of Outer Dark, Vereen Bell concluded that McCarthy's second novel was "as brutally nihilistic as any serious novel written in this century." He is not alone in this opinion; many reviewers saw in the...

"I Ain't Gonna Be No Topsy" Because "Paris Is My Old Kentucky Home".(Stephen Foster's cultural role in American music)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... "I AIN'T GONNA BE NO TOPSY..." served in the first instance as a contribution to the international conference called "Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures" that convened in May of 2000 in Regensburg, Germany. Because the issues...

Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art by Ronald Schuchard. New York: Oxford University Press. $45.00 (cloth). LIONEL JOHNSON'S POEM "THE DARK ANGEL" has given Ronald Schuchard not only the title of his book and epigraphs for...

Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern by Michael North. New York: Oxford University Press. $35.00 (cloth). LIONEL JOHNSON'S POEM "THE DARK ANGEL" has given Ronald Schuchard not only the title of his book and epigraphs for each...

Ghost Quartet.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Ghost Quartet by Richard Burgin. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books. $25.95 (cloth). IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE DIDACTIC FICTION has garnered serious consideration. For the past thirty years John Steinbeck, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore...

Plum & Jaggers.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Plum & Jaggers by Susan Richards Shreve. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $21.00 (cloth). IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE DIDACTIC FICTION has garnered serious consideration. For the past thirty years John Steinbeck, Jack London, Upton Sinclair,...

Buddha's Little Finger.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin. New York: Viking. $25.95 (cloth). IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE DIDACTIC FICTION has garnered serious consideration. For the past thirty years John Steinbeck, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore...

Being Dead.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Being Dead by Jim Crace. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $21.00 (cloth). IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE DIDACTIC FICTION has garnered serious consideration. For the past thirty years John Steinbeck, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore...