The Southern Review articles from March 1993

The Southern Review archives from March 1993

Poetic forms and the lyric subject.
March 22, 1993... LET ME BEGIN with a quotation touching on the history of English poetry: It is interesting to notice... that poems in traditional formal structures ... seem to concern themselves with something like a traditional ...

Romantic lyric voice: what shall we call the "I"?
March 22, 1993... WHEN WE COMMENT on "personal lyrics" or Erlebnislyrik, we are uncertain how to refer to the "I." Among such lyrics are, in the nineteenth century, Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode, the Conversation Poems, the odes of John Keats, and the...

In defense of lyric: point of view.
March 22, 1993... IN THE AUGUST 15, 1991 ISSUE of The New York Review of Books, building toward the term "romantic alchemy" with which to celebrate John Ashbery as the "voice of our times," John Bayley cites five specific achievements: Ashbery's use of the...

The poem as journey.
March 22, 1993... "I AM WRITING TO YOU from a far-off country," "I am writing to you from the end of the world," Henri Michaux, the French Surrealist poet, says. Precisely. Most, if not all, good poems come from that place, or those two places if they have...

Wrappings. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Gauze-draped islands are lovely but redundant, since language already upholsters any world we live in, lumpy under its covers after a million years of revision, humans gathering and regathering their wits. Comforting florals, ruffles and...

Trimmings. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Never fished, never cleaned a fish, so I'm stupidly surprised by all the blood in the bag of heads and tails. Must have thought cold blood meant no blood or blue blood, not this bright red looking just like mine or anyone's as it spatters...

Dream factory: the autobiography of Lana Turner. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Before I auditioned for the Major Bowes Amateur Hour and sang "The Basin Street Blues," my father shot craps, hit a winning streak and stuffed the bills into his left sock. They found him slumped against a wall on the corner of Mariposa and...

Married love. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Dog days. A passing shower. Two grackles Scattering the birdbath birds. A reshuffled Breeze dealt off the crowns of the sycamore Trees behind the house, where you're back Out on your beachtowel reading a magazine, Naked in the after-rain. The...

Fire. (poem)
March 22, 1993... The story of a woman who will leave a man. A man who thinks in metaphors. A woman Who thinks the reason she'll leave has less to do With him than her. Some flaw. Some ache for things That end. A second nature inside of her: a land That's seized...

Pig. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Washing dishes, my mother at the store, Her kitchen unchanged since I used to place My ring with the glass ruby heart on a ledge And plunge my hands into the soapy water, I watched a blank fog drift over the snow. I listened to the sounds of the...

October petunia. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Scarlet, banded white, the last petunia Blooms extravagantly on my patio, A little flame above the brown destruction Of flying leaves. The scraggly mint Sends out its fast, ugly runners, claiming More territory for its future spring The way I...

Learning to drive. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Somewhere down in that floating smog The road led to Frost's farmhouse Which I longed to visit, to study His view of New Hampshire mountains And get his feel for summer meadows, Alders and birches. I thought I'd learn How he turned a...

The city of the dead. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Mixed in with all these unknown citizens, The famous dead are hard to find. My map Sends me scurrying up steps, down streets Of monuments, past granite crypts, to find Balzac behind a fence of iron spearheads. Scraggly geraniums deck Gertrude...

Abbey Hill. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Last season's unpicked blackcurrants clung To the roadside stonework. Litter papered the hedges, Jettisoned from passing Cars. I climbed above the village's Rooftops and turf smoke; the squared-off wedges Of Herefords' blunt faces eyed me With...

Wireless. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Anchorite of insomnia, 3 A.M. exile thumbing a skyful Of shortwave radio Static, through unidentifiable Squiggles of blurted Morse, I nudge the dial Millimeter by millimeter Across a spatter Of languages--three different Englishes--, Goldberg...

The sketch. (poem)
March 22, 1993... The nature of drawing's in erasure yet I see you hiding behind the windows you don't know I'm driving by. They need washing or brushing up or I'm around the block waiting for the light to change. It slips to green the way the girl's arm slips...

The moon. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Ask me no more; the moon may draw the seas as your face explains the coffee you drink to avoid. To walk at your side is to court more than tides or fish swallowing what's whole, birds undone by their own rasps or what your eyes ask. Waves keep...

Dying. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Something plain is missing. Not that I mean to strip you away. Or the woods too filled up the afternoons wait for a bare branch. The constructed is everywhere: the yellow dots stuck on and the Italian windows full of shoes. He thinks he thinks a...

Lightning at night. (poem)
March 22, 1993... The white flash blows you back against me... the whole sky's ablaze, sulfuric blues and grays, utterly still, and for one moment we see things the same--trees whipped and shorn as if shamed, beyond which is boiling, now green, a perilous sea of...

Windchime. (poem)
March 22, 1993... How delicate can you make your voice still ring? White hair, white gloves, tea in an etched clear pitcher, the women of the family serve each other's plates then sit still for the story to come--the last one fans away, diffuse from too long a...

The Anatomy Theater at Padua. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Since there's no malice in science, there's nothing personal about this rowdy scene-pickpockets among the learned, a dog scampering among the dandies. One student has brought a monkey to chitter from its leash and spill orange rind on the crowd's...

Mouths. (poem)
March 22, 1993... A hauntingly ugly dream, but then they always Are, aren't they? I think, staggering through The dark, standing, waiting, palm on the wall, Hearing at last the comforting tattoo Of urine striking water, and only then Aware of my dry mouth, stiff...

From a train window at night. (poem)
March 22, 1993... For some reason, the train has quietly stopped. The silence, deep enough to awaken me, Makes me prop myself on my elbow, and look out, and guess Somewhere in Tennessee Is where we are or, rather, I may be, Because the dark is such there is no...

Dorothy later. (poem)
March 22, 1993... "Holmes," I said in a whisper, "a child has done this horrid thing." -A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four she puts her slippered feet on the lion's head her rug her decorator boudoir in gilded cages Aunt Em her overalled spouse made miniature sing...

The bog. (poem)
March 22, 1993... When you came north that spring, we all got out to look for moose, roads loopy as orbits in a star book, and ended at the bog. Our car door cracked its dead weight once, twice, three times until the four of us slipped out, our kid just a little...

An eagle finer than truth. (poem)
March 22, 1993... When something I read years ago attributed this to Keats, I would not believe it: Poetry is not so fine a thing as philosophy for the same reason an eagle is not so fine a thing as truth.... No, no, not my main man of loaded rifts, languorous...

Florida Bay. (poem)
March 22, 1993... A flittering of breeze, so hesitant, rustles my face before the sun is up, so subtle that it seems the diffident touch of my children's fingers on my cheek. I sit there with a wobbly coffee cup cocked on one drowsy knee. For over a week, this...

Speaking Mexican. (poem)
March 22, 1993... -picking cotton with migrant workers near Egypt, Arkansas, 1961 Money, I remember, candy, cigarette. Tits and hurry, mother, father, moon. After dark, sometimes, their voices met and sailed out over the evening, a sound we fastened to, as we went...

Christmas Eve at the Chula Vista Marina. (poem)
March 22, 1993... While pelicans dive by the list of our mast, my father eats Lebkuchen. His thumbs, sticky with glaze, tear divots in the cakes. His hands are huge and dry as the Southwest, a place he would gladly blacktop and where, tonight, there is a half-moon...

While the river is wide. (poem)
March 22, 1993... It is helpful to be reminded how the sun sets unfailingly fast and final no matter the clearness or the depth of haze, reddening and trailed out like a turning wake in placid water. I believe we should make these steps away from each other as...

Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Over the branch of a small cherry, below the white flurry of blossoms, someone has looped a maroon sash. It seems somber, a marker maybe. Today the cherry trees are out throwing their white and pink confetti, tree after tree, on the people...

A good life. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Back then I liked the whole messy business, the house roaring to warmth on a timer, towels tilting in faded pastel stacks except for the damp ones hung after he'd gone. And I was thick with myself; blood flushed in fierce double-time to my heart...

Highway to nowhere. (poem)
March 22, 1993... Don't kid yourself. Yearning for our own private driveway to heaven, we would have ended on a rocky ten-mile stretch of land in northern Minnesota, wheedling advice from any expert who crossed our path, how to build an interstate. And we would...

Things left undone. (short story)
March 22, 1993... ON THE MORNING his son was born, Denny McCready walked out to the banks of the Chesapeake to see the dawn. As a farmer does on his endless spirals, lost in meditation to the tractor's unwavering drone, he had been picturing and repicturing this...

Hungarian stew. (short story)
March 22, 1993... MALINA IS DREAMING about a particular bench in Lazienki Park, a bench where she often sits and reads on warm summer afternoons while Petita, her cocker spaniel, prowls the pathways, looking for an unsuspecting cat. She's been going to that...

The graduation. (short story)
March 22, 1993... Sophie pressed a folded paper into Frank's hand and said, "Don't read this till after the plane takes off." Then she kissed him, her dark bangs brushing his nose, and walked down the ramp to the plane. She was wearing a clingy knit dress and a...

Dry spell. (short story)
March 22, 1993... JAY DUNN KNOWS that his rain dance is not working. By the light of the breaking day, he pulls on his work boots and Dekalb cap before stepping out the screen door of the farmhouse. It's still cool at this hour of the morning. There are 250 baby...

From 'A Lesson Before Dying.' (fiction) (excerpt)
March 22, 1993... TWO THINGS HAPPENED at the school during the weeks before I visited Jefferson in jail. The superintendent of schools made his annual visit, and we got out our first load of wood for winter. We heard on Monday by Farrell Jarreau who had...

What Binds Us to This World.
March 22, 1993... What Binds Us to This World by Robert Cording. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press. $9.95 (paper). The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press. $8.95 (paper). Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa....

The Gathering of My Name.
March 22, 1993... What Binds Us to This World by Robert Cording. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press. $9.95 (paper). The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press. $8.95 (paper). Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa....

Magic City.
March 22, 1993... What Binds Us to This World by Robert Cording. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press. $9.95 (paper). The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press. $8.95 (paper). Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa....

Among the Dog Eaters.
March 22, 1993... What Binds Us to This World by Robert Cording. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press. $9.95 (paper). The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press. $8.95 (paper). Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa....

What Saves Us.
March 22, 1993... What Binds Us to This World by Robert Cording. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press. $9.95 (paper). The Gathering of My Name by Cornelius Eady. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press. $8.95 (paper). Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa....

Cowboys Are My Weakness.
March 22, 1993... Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. New York: Norton. $19.95 (cloth). Private Property by Debra Jo Immergut. New York: Random House. $20.00 (cloth). Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth by Patricia Lear. New York: Knopf. $19.00...

Private Property.
March 22, 1993... Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. New York: Norton. $19.95 (cloth). Private Property by Debra Jo Immergut. New York: Random House. $20.00 (cloth). Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth by Patricia Lear. New York: Knopf. $19.00...

Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, and So Forth.
March 22, 1993... Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. New York: Norton. $19.95 (cloth). Private Property by Debra Jo Immergut. New York: Random House. $20.00 (cloth). Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth by Patricia Lear. New York: Knopf. $19.00...

Bone.
March 22, 1993... Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. New York: Norton. $19.95 (cloth). Private Property by Debra Jo Immergut. New York: Random House. $20.00 (cloth). Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth by Patricia Lear. New York: Knopf. $19.00...

Watching TV with the Red Chinese.
March 22, 1993... Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. New York: Norton. $19.95 (cloth). Private Property by Debra Jo Immergut. New York: Random House. $20.00 (cloth). Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth by Patricia Lear. New York: Knopf. $19.00...