The Southern Review articles from March 1995

The Southern Review archives from March 1995

An extended family. (Louisiana State University faculty in the 1930s)(Cleanth Brooks)
March 22, 1995... The intellectual ferment at LSU in the late '30s and early '40s extended beyond the editorial offices of The Southern Review into the general life of the university. During the Depression those institutions fortunate enough to have money to spend...

A reminiscence for Cleanth Brooks. (writer and teacher)(Cleanth Brooks)
March 22, 1995... An early episode in the life of our late friend Cleanth Brooks might interest other people. Cleanth, after crossing for various lengths of time with Robert Penn Warren at Vanderbilt, Oxford, and Louisiana State University, came to the English...

Remembering Cleanth Brooks. (English literature teacher and author)(Cleanth Brooks)
March 22, 1995... I welcome the opportunity, first of all, to record my indebtedness as a teacher and an editor to Cleanth Brooks. The first edition of his and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry came out early in my career. The book convinced me that the...

Cleanth Brooks: the long conversation. (English literature teacher and poet)(Cleanth Brooks)
March 22, 1995... A memory: one morning in early April of last year I dial the number of Cleanth Brooks's home in New Haven. It is about a month before he is to die of cancer, and I know he is confined to his bed. The phone is answered by Carver Blanchard, a...

"A singular association": the Brooks-Warren literary correspondence. (Cleanth Brooks; Robert Penn Warren)
March 22, 1995... They met in 1924 in Nashville: Robert Penn Warren was nineteen; Cleanth Brooks, a freshman, was almost eighteen. For sixty-five years their friendship grew as they collaborated on five textbooks and an anthology - An Approach to Literature...

Cleanth Brooks: some personal recollections. (literature teacher and author)
March 22, 1995... Like everyone else of my generation, I absorbed Cleanth Brooks's and Robert Penn Warren's critical teaching as part of the received wisdom of the profession. This teaching did not, contrary to the views of some contemporaries and some latter-day...

Night on the 'River Queen.' (poem)
March 22, 1995... Palm Sunday, 1865 "Play 'Dixie,' "he had said, and as the band Puffed gamely through a tune that once again They might feel free to like, he saw them turn, The knot of prisoners beyond the crowd, The moldy hardtack in their hands, inert. Poor...

What Ellen said. (poem)
March 22, 1995... She hadn't said it. What was it she said? He leaned both hands there, on the sink, and watched That pale, thin face regard him stupidly: An old man running water from the tap, As if to fill the cup he wouldn't take. It had not changed. That...

For Jay Gatsby. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Once it was the pulse of the green light where Daisy throbs on and off at the end of the dock, her promise the new world stretched out before us - yes, I believed in that and more than Nick longed to be your sidekick at parties in the blue...

For Lear. (poem)
March 22, 1995... I have to get this down before the light dies. That leaves me thirteen minutes before sunset at 6:14. A minute gone already? Here I go, the best I can: my mother called at dawn; my father's in the hospital again, reason unknown, and I saw my...

The bone pit. (poem)
March 22, 1995... 1. Roisterers drunk, cursing in the cheap London alehouses as the dead cart with its load trundles by them, following it to the edge of the bone pit as the bodies are tumbled in on top of one another, half-clothed, naked, the flash now and...

View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. (poem)
March 22, 1995... For Doris Craig and Michael Olshausen A white substitute teacher At an all-Black public high school, He sought me out saying my poems Showed promise, range, a gift, And had I ever heard of T. S. Eliot? No. Then Robert Hayden perhaps? Hayden,...

The wind devil. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Grade-school recess: Buck-buck and tag In the sharp fall air, The trees in their litmus, The names from a list I've been learning Fumbling through my head. "Buck-buck, how many Fingers up?" - the boys, Cutting teeth, flinging themselves Against...

Alzheimer's. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Chairs move by themselves, and books. Grandchildren visit, stand new and nameless, their faces' puzzles missing pieces. She's like a fish in deep ocean, its body made of light. She floats through rooms, through my eyes, an old woman bereft of...

Crow dream. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Some nights I feel my left hip being eaten away by a disease I had as a child, or in some other life that hides beneath my eyelids and speaks to me through the voice of a friend or relative I know is dead. Tonight I am a crow, suspended high...

Strandhill. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Manannan mac Lir drifts like a gray fog along this lonely coast, the crones of Sligo say, his voice in the rising wind muttering black spells, troubling the blood's memory with dreams of ancient storms, the wreckage on dark shores. I...

The sacred secular. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Perish the thought that what we left behind, that bloodless realm from which all worlds broke free, should have the power to dominate our mind and drag us from the passionate will to be. Better this swallow weaving through warm air, with...

My father recounts a story from his youth. (poem)
March 22, 1995... He who discovered three tektites along the sheer banks of Crater Lake, mounted them above the fishtank, who unearthed four hundred flint ceremonial blades from the muck of a neolithic lake in central Ohio, photographed them, put them in a book,...

You are talking to another man at the party. (poem)
March 22, 1995... This crowded room brings to mind the cornfield in Ohio where, years ago, we searched for arrowheads - how from behind us there came the sound of a rifle shot, then again, every ten minutes, to scare away the crows. After a while we didn't notice...

Among the believers. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Even the young back then died old. My great-aunt's brow at twenty-eight was labored by a hardscrabble world no final breath could smooth away. They laid her out in her wedding dress. The life that killed in her arms, the head turned to suckle her...

Harvest. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Our shovels and mattocks clattered and clanged as the truck hugged the mountain, lunged and curved away from the church, a morning's work to break and heave the deep black dirt, burying ourselves to bury him. That afternoon we came again,...

Four last songs. (poem)
March 22, 1995... after Strauss, Vier Letzte Lieder in memory of my brother (1954-1992), a suicide 1. Spring IN HOLLOWS GOING TO DUSK/ I DREAMED A LONG TIME Once more I got up and put on the CDs; Once more, hunched in a blanket, I remembered the...

Shadow-runners. (poem)
March 22, 1995... A thought from nowhere last night just as sleep drew me under: "I woke up this morning and saw your face." Lost mother, lost son, living beloved- are you now all one? In the dream-night, later, across the star-twinkling heavens, A huge shadow...

Arlington, 1964. (poem)
March 22, 1995... At Williamsburg our mother dressed us twinlike in red-white-and-blue, complete with knickers and tricorn hats. It wasn't far from there to Arlington, where for that first year or so, until they sealed it forever beneath cold stone, the grave...

First summer away. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Ocala, 1970 My first letters back were full of homesickness. I missed the dinners at the kitchen table, even my collector's presidents plate with its thirty-odd airbrushed faces arrayed at the rim like pushed-away vegetables. Here I was...

Drive-by. (poem)
March 22, 1995... We were just coming out of the movies and crossing the busy road before the mall, dodging the cars, and almost to the curb, on our way to grabbing a late, quick meal, when we heard the engine gun, the tires peel, and blur of voices as...

Thanksgiving story. (poem)
March 22, 1995... Too poor on a graduate student budget to fly home for Thanksgiving, and all my friends that year from out of state, nevertheless I felt I could fend for myself in town (midwestern, America's breadbasket- and about as big). Downtown, its neon...

At the station. (poem)
March 22, 1995... The blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind. - Robert Johnson The man, turning, moves away from the platform. Growing smaller, he does not say Come back. She won't. Each glowing light dims the farther it moves from reach,...

Shangri-la. (poem)
March 22, 1995... By ten o'clock the snow has stopped and a west wind has pushed the clouds apart exposing little bits of sky like ponds of windswept ice where now and then Orion or some other constellation drifts partly into view.... No traffic. No sounds...

Disgracing are verse: sense, censors, nonsense, and extrasensory deception.
March 22, 1995... I. Secret Codes, Conundrums, Hums "Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge dock florist. Disc ladle gull orphan worry ladle cluck wetter putty rat hut, end fur disc raisin,...

The persistence of memory. (short story)
March 22, 1995... I keep a saint's ear in a jewelry box, in my underwear drawer next to my bras and panties. It is a real human ear, not a hoax. I keep it in a small, white jewelry box, where it rests on a bedding of the purest white cotton balls. The cotton balls...

"All of us dislike the laws of nature": new fiction in review.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. - Robert Parrish, The Magician's Handbook, quoted in Tim...

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

The Mortician's Apprentice.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

A Stranger in This World.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

Various Antidotes.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

Felicia's Journey.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

In The Lake of the Woods.
March 22, 1995... In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation. --Robert Parrish, The Magician's...

American formalism. (poetry)
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

The Dear Past and Other Poems: 1919-1994.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

The Color Wheel.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...

Talking to Birds.
March 22, 1995... The great bulk of poetry published in the United States during the last eight decades has been written in free verse, but the free versifiers have not had it all their own way. Since the inception in or about 1915 of the imagist/free verse...