The Southern Review articles from June 1997

The Southern Review archives from June 1997

El-Ephant. (poem)
June 22, 1997... "I represent the elephant," mouths the trunk, which has lassoed out to greet you, and before you can manage a word, that rubbery hose has filched your bag of peanuts. "I'll see to it, of course, that he gets these," and coils back into the...

Beauty. (poem)
June 22, 1997... I We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says, What are you thinking? and I say, Beauty, thinking of how very far we are now from the machine shop and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons of slate skies and the muted...

Sea nettles. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Ghostly, the nettles floated through a net staked in the bay, shimmying in to touch bare legs and backs with slimy tentacles tipped with poison. "Rub sand on the red spot," my mother said to me when I was stung swimming at Chesapeake Beach in...

Dirty poem. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Whoever worships cleanliness dwells in the canton of exclusion, where the church walls inside are whitewashed and the dogs muzzled, the streets empty after curfew, where crucifixes are swaddled in gauze, and only soap rendered from volcanic...

The promise. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Last June at a family reunion as she was hurrying down the mulchy path between the clapboard chapel my aunts had rented and the car, my mother caught sight of my sisters and me -- all three of us at once, minus children and husbands and dogs...

Peripheral resurrections. (poem)
June 22, 1997... It had been the kind of day they sing about in country/westerns -- how the drunk, the day his mother got out of prison to attend the funeral of his wife, put a pistol to his head and missed -- and I just couldn't muster much enthusiasm when I...

From Rome. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Evenings I go down to the Spanish Steps, beneath the window where Keats died, take my place among the derelicts and lovers, and write to my family in the mill town where I grew up. I shuffle through postcards -- Bernini's and Donatello's,...

Terrible. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The man from room 8 is washing and waxing his car. It's a black Ford, with flames stenciled on the doors, and the word Terrible inscribed in an elegant cursive on the pillars of the roof. I think I know his life. I lived it at Red's Motel, on...

Hostess. (poem)
June 22, 1997... One of the guests arrives with irises, all funnel and hood, papery tongues whispering little rumors in their mouths, and leaves his white shoes in the doorway, where the others stumble on the emptiness when they come. He smiles. He says,...

Twelve inches of presidents. (poem)
June 22, 1997... My daughter brings home her ruler, flimsy but informative spotted with presidents clean-shaven to 1860, facial-haired to the next big war, then clean again, as if the climate had changed, polar ice sliding back and forth. Half seem demented:...

G-man. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Didn't we always know J. Edgar Hoover was like that? Of course, by our principle' that something must produce its opposite, like castles giving way to towns, the fletchers zinging from courtyard to guildhall. In the '40s he wore long-hemmed...

A rose of Jericho. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The childless woman sleeps with her own egg, the secret of the seed around which she is the fruit. She sleeps in the rain forest of possibilities, questions stuck to her fur like pollen. A bee falls asleep in the orchid, in the heart of...

Making it love. (poem)
June 22, 1997... We are that landscape of moonlight moving through hills and valleys. In the summer tent of sheets I cling to the smell and taste of your skin, the heat of the day still fragrant there. We are its underworld of burrow and root beneath the...

The Book of Changes. (poem)
June 22, 1997... We have read our horoscopes over coffee, the tea leaves, lines in the palm. We have deciphered the flight of birds, rustling leaves, patterns in water, the motion of objects dropped into a spring, and we have heated turtle shells till they...

Now the cicadas. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Sounding like rattlesnakes in the trees, sounding like leaves hissing in rushes of wind, no, like et engines, like jackhammers, no, sounding as blood would sound if it streamed through your inner ear in place of the quiet pools in that shell...

Postscript: the harebell. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The harebell, on her lissome, now stooping stem, goes on and on into the weather of snow and lonely evergreens. She presides over the frozen garden, an orphan in the only house her colors know. I hear her sing of an earthly everlastingness...

Between Ann Arbor and Chicago a decapitation. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The train's rude massage both lulls and forsakes. Hours gone and to go, a different montage from every window seat, hawthorn and cattail, a river curling past a foundry, suddenly the skeleton of a town: trailer park, three bars, and stone....

The Mormon mission. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Sister Gardner said I am Sister Gardner, this is Sister Ward. Sister Gardner said we have good news about Christ. She was from Boulder and wanted Caracas: from Salt lake, Sister Ward prayed three years for Belize. I asked why Kettering, and...

Headline: 'Clean-Sweep' clears parks & grates. (poem)
June 22, 1997... She was a stench like dead leaves and sparrows clotted beside the river a wound stark as the red palms of Christ a saint to pigeons example to none a stench like roses too long in the vase corroded by the appetite of water. *...

Finally I buy X-ray glasses. (poem)
June 22, 1997... At thirteen I questioned when it would stop, this seeing through. Wouldn't my supercharged glance invade walls and blouses and bones, pierce to atoms and smaller still, even pass through the film of the soul as it tunneled to the scowling mask...

Husbandry. (poem)
June 22, 1997... And let the master's eye be vigilant over all that concerns the farm. Consider the Brown Swiss. They aren't excessive. In both volume and butterfat they fall, if not short, then dreamily between. Bred to tolerate what others can't or won't,...

Moving the rain. (poem)
June 22, 1997... When I read about the priest who refused To baptize a boy named Damien, citing The child born to become the Antichrist In the three Omen movies, I remembered My father telling me the wild pansy Is heartsease, that I should know the old names...

Opening the bone. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Opening the Bone The morning of my operation, I read the history of trepanning, How skulls, for eight thousand years, Have been drilled to lessen the bone. The world's oldest medical Procedure, the book said, but the night Before, a...

First, you're born. (poem)
June 22, 1997... First, You're Born First, you're born. The bloody sundown on the glass will be the scrim for Daddy he's the standing one) and Mommy (seated next to him) to pose before. They take you home. Decades pass. Though few things fall, still...

Julianna by the water. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Julianna by the Water Where the sand is a mirror she saw herself held withdrawn from the ruckus, beholding, beheld. O perfect rescission in this digest of waves, each one a synopsis, what is it I have but the zero the self is, the...

The burning world. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The Burning World I The great slabbed stairways mounting To the dead level of the lot, It looks almost Toltec, pyramidal And squared by its block of streets. I have to imagine the high school, Gone now for decades, the gray brick...

Morning coffee. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Morning Coffee The mist of cataracts is as lovely as a spring lake on a cold morning. Across the patio, fog is advancing through great glass doors, sliding into my brain, into my mind. When I lift the paper over the orange juice, blotches...

I hear the jackdaw's brief against the blooms of summer. (poem)
June 22, 1997... I Hear the Jackdaw's Brief Against the Blooms of Summer Whether the trees welcome the moon's ambiguity, its nervous trying on of new clothes, they sense, even in their rootedness, how one is pitched into the field without ordination,...

The man who steals himself. (poem)
June 22, 1997... First, his hand, then arm, then the rest of him, part by part, so, so slowly you'd think the mattress housed dynamite. So, so slowly, as though it isn't true that for the zillionth time he steals himself...

Story. (poem)
June 22, 1997... A man exiles himself from himself, flip-flops Hemispheres, Berlin for Buenos Aires, As if the backwards swirl of water In the sink could reverse the course Of his life. He leaves the black castle oozing smoke From a...

Empire builder. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Trains have carried me away ever since my mother's mother scolded her (I heard) in Minneapolis for stepping off the Hiawatha from Chicago pregnant with me in 1943, the Forty Niner meanwhile aiming to send my father...

Countdown. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Calling the children in from hide-&-seek, asking them to call it a day & stop blending with shadows as if they went back to where they hid out before they were born, we parents could be standing on the shore &...

The boys. (poem)
June 22, 1997... Toward the end it got too dark to say who was who in the father-&-son game commemorating the last soccer season. Play no sooner began than the pale sun of November gave up the ghost, the earth frozen the earliest in...

Vermeer. (poem)
June 22, 1997... For awhile after my father died my clearest most dreamlike memory recalled him in his yellow bathrobe and sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire ...

Twilight of the Neanderthals. (poem)
June 22, 1997... 1. Fog The rain has finally stopped and now a cold fog has settled over the burned-out forest where we have come to gather firewood, I think... or maybe berries of some kind. Up...

The politics of rain. (short story)
June 22, 1997... The Clouds Above Angola that day hung thick with rain and electricity, piled in columns that stretched into the sky like entrails. Hah! Clouds like entrails. I know what you call me -- Blas, the poetic butcher. But that's what they looked...

Sailor's valentine. (short story)
June 22, 1997... Bob Williams drunk for seven years, surprised his wife by sobering up and opening a candy store in an abandoned boxcar that had sat for years beside the railroad tracks. He got the proper licenses, cleaned the place up, and made all the candy...

Clemens non Papa. (short story)
June 22, 1997... The undersigned, Jacobus Clemens, musician by profession, native of Ypres, and bound to that city by ties of kinship and affection, does solemnly attest and swear that he is not the pope. What is the need for this statement? As should be...

Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906-1946.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

Conversations with and About Beckett.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett.
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

In search of Sam. (recent books on Samuel Beckett)
June 22, 1997... In Nausea and Then in The Words, Sartre demonstrated the fraudulence of biography and the deeper fraudulence of autobiography, yet still he spent his sunset years writing a long biography of Flaubert -- in conception, one of the longest...

The remnants of a pensum: Samuel Beckett's lifework.
June 22, 1997... In its cadence no less than in its expression of residual obligation, the phrase "the remnants of at pensum" is unmistakably Beckett's. I invoke it here because it sums up, even as it anticipates, everything I have to say about Beckett and...

Transmogrifications of life-writing. (St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Beckett)
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1754.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph.
June 22, 1997... Choosing five recent (and excellent) books(*) from a vast secondary literature -- with an eye to their usefulness as structuring element rather than with the intent to render exact critical judgement -- I will argue in this essay that in the...

An opera with no acts: 'Four Saints in Three Acts.' (by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson)
June 22, 1997... Four saints in three acts, by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, is an opera that tries to be a picture -- an opera in which the text defies discursivity and the music defies temporal progression. Stein claimed that her writings were addressed...

Wallace Stevens and the seasons.
June 22, 1997... "Le silence de ces espaces infinis m'effraie": this saying of Pascal, repeated in a letter to Wallace Stevens by his friend Jean Wahl, expresses a terror of the void, a metaphysical fear of universal emptiness that runs, never far beneath the...

Remembering Cleanth Brooks. (adapted from talk given at dedication of monument, Murray, Kentucky, October 1996)
June 22, 1997... It was the good fortune of the town of Murray that Cleanth Brooks was born here rather than in another of the nine places where his family lived during his preteen years. It was, of course, his good fortune too. It is fine to have a native son...

The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel.
June 22, 1997... In the past decade, critics seem to have found the power of Melville's works so threatening that they feel they must seize interpretive control over it, and only the strongest determinants and delimitations of meaning have sufficed. Thus,...

Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel.
June 22, 1997... In the past decade, critics seem to have found the power of Melville's works so threatening that they feel they must seize interpretive control over it, and only the strongest determinants and delimitations of meaning have sufficed. Thus,...