The Southern Review articles from March 1996

The Southern Review archives from March 1996

Us, here, ruled.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I don't know if this sort of thing can happen in other states, but today, on a raised platform at Ground Zero of Lakeside Shopping Center, it's Queen's Day when the queens of many things and places within the state of Louisiana have gathered to...

Fairgrounds.(poem)
March 22, 1996... There he is, the old gambler without a prayer, his head shaped like a GE softwhite, clicking the numbers around in his mouth like ice cubes. Where from here but somewhere better over and over, like the squashed farmers in their chairs predicting...

Summer.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Roomful of early evening, airy curtains plying a slant wind along the open-windowed wall, the screens X-ing a veil on leaves dusk-dampened, cicadas, birds at raucous vespers calling back another house: day's end, the steep backsteps where I'd...

Dreams of the waking life.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Each night I strain to lift off from my temporal body & float away, a tourist in astral realms, but mostly my dreams are clogged with the day's minutiae; my soul must be like that horrible shopping cart, Quasimodo in the universe of wheeled...

Life among flowers.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I would like to lie down on a leaf of banana under a blue sky on a summer day, and never die. To live among flowers, but as a vocation: to press my face into the velvet face, unimpressed by pain. Tiny non-violets dwell in the purple pedestal of...

From the night interstate.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Totally dark now over western New York, and darker still in some other time zone, the radio voice ringing out and the Niagara River's art-decoesque falls and ineffable cathedral glow, those magic light bulbs we had as kids that gathered...

Ruskin at Brantwood.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I His God was everywhere, in fields and sea, the stones of Venice and of Amiens-- and in the goodness of mankind, which he desired through his own, imagining the laborers content, the cities clean, the vision of the artist's eye applied...

The Devil's dream.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Fancy, you called it, your fiddling that filled up the green hollow come the first warm nights, but what has this song got to do with me now, this bedevilment whispering all the way home along Beggarman's Trace like the rustle of silken hems over...

Carrying.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I didn't see it with my eyes--hard to imagine--that Sunday noon, but soon for an hour, the sun breaking in the trees, I heard over and over the women, my grandmother Marg especially, shrill maybe to scare me good, tell my heart how the father,...

One remorseful last day.(poem)
March 22, 1996... To touch--to be. To be within the compass Of another! . . . But life, or art? And if it's life You want, how will you make it good, a passing Grade (be moral person and loving wife)? And if it's art--you know the problems there, You know enough...

As if a star.(poem)
March 22, 1996... And if--and if--? Would that have been enough for you? I think you always looked for more-- more anything. More everything. More of whatever it was that not having all of it tore you up. . . . You in the living room, lights off, with Schoenberg...

The Celtic saints.(poem)
March 22, 1996... One twirls a shamrock to explain the Trinity, another Exorcises a sea-serpent; Coracling everywhere, spinning round In their offshore Dodgems, banging into gales Near Lismore or Greenland, birled like Celtic knots, Their journeys are...

Lochs.(poem)
March 22, 1996... We had to learn so much about lochs As kids, sucking them up through straws, While round about us other lochs appeared-- Loch Transit gurgling through domestic pipes, Loch Radiator Coolant, Loch Tear, Loch Soup, And then the ones we mustn't...

PC.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Interviewed as a New Man Poet By a sharp-suited journalist in half-rim specs With blue, constabular eyes, I'm asked, "Well, Robert, when was the last "Time you washed the bathroom floor? And do you have a plan to keep Family Time "Always...

After I became a poet.(poem)
March 22, 1996... The answering machine speaks After I became a poet and spoke in poems, I noticed the world pulling away. Some hung up on a first line. Some listened and left no hellos, no good-byes, as if something I said offended them. Even my friends...

Perennials.(poem)
March 22, 1996... With his knife he cuts a small country of grass, shakes it like a rabbit's skin, loosening the clumps of blood-dirt. Then he cuts the weeds, their onyx leaves. He cuts with joy, with determination, without fear that they will come back--which...

On forgetting a friend.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I noticed a pain--at first only an indefinable sensation--in my stiff toe. I wondered whether I'd developed a corn, and I remembered Ken, who had filled his feet with glass. His mother's eyes abhorred light after she'd had a glass of tangy...

Hand-painted china.(poem)
March 22, 1996... The slender cake plates had such fiery rims. They caught the lazy radiance of afternoons, like torchlight from a tomb. The old roses opened to my eyes their bold, embellished centers where a soft darkness had been stippled in. They drew down my...

Gin.(poem)
March 22, 1996... When hands crabbed to the mill in gray skirts and bleached petticoats they left their babies with Nurse: two, three, four babies, five or six or eight babies, Nurse dried and dressed and ruckled into sacks. And when they cried, sugared gin was...

Convalescent days.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I wake as a cock crows into the haze of Lacrilube eye-gel. My convalescence has blurred slow, changeable summer. Arranged rose petals imperceptibly age on a windowsill. The sloping lawn is speckled with daisies and dark birds. Leisurely...

Living with stripes.(poem)
March 22, 1996... In tigers, zebras, and other striped creatures, any casual posture plays one beautiful set of lines against another: herringbones and arrows appear and disappear; chevrons widen and narrow. Miniature themes and counterpoints occur in the flexing...

Courtesan.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. --Martin Buber A stag leapt through the open living room window to become a stone. That's the way the morning happened between half-open...

The gathering place.(poem)
March 22, 1996... The soul is on the way towards the earth. --Heidegger I have one dress that in the sun is transparent. My psychic friend thinks I could have been a belly dancer in Baghdad or Iran. We walk, and she talks about time and the walls not...

The vagaries of fishes.(poem)
March 22, 1996... After they passed beneath us I could tell more would be coming, beneath the sand, under the bejeweled sky, under the first layer of earth where water exists in flutes and eddies. I lay there with you, not wanting to leave your side even for them,...

Brass.(poem)
March 22, 1996... My mother remembers the marble steps of her first apartment, the heavy carriage, when Eddie was a baby, that she had to pull up those steps to her third floor each day, and the iceman who carried the block of ice, and her second apartment where...

Heat.(poem)
March 22, 1996... When I was little and summer dredged my skin, I'd sit on the porch-- feet sunk in a bucket of cold water. There I'd hide from chores and family, my mind afloat while toes wrinkled and cooled. At school that year I'd learned the beautiful word...

The blue taps.(poem)
March 22, 1996... He left me the blue taps from his blue bath. He left me the cacti he spoke to. I had to go and take them from his gray house before she sold it. I had to stand there in the blue living room and ask her the names he'd given all the cacti. I had to...

Reconfirming light.(poem)
March 22, 1996... On Mullett Lake in mid-March two pickups are parked by blue ice-shanties. Fishermen are inside. Perch and walleye are what they're after through their holes in the ice, although a week, two weeks from now is best, right before the ice melts and...

Howdy Doody.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Safe in the peanut gallery, when Buffalo Bob called Say kids! What time is it? we thought we knew: Time for Mr. Phineas T. Bluster and Flubadub to have at it; time for the backstage crew to send in Clarabell with his (her?) seltzer spray bottle...

Essay on leaves.(poem)
March 22, 1996... I used to love hard physical labor, cutting and hauling wood, pouring foundations, digging at a tangled, gummed root that wouldn't let go under the blows of a spudbar; even raking the fifty sacks of leaves from my yard was work I could...

Overtime.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Somewhere the thin and tasteful junior executive ties my mother bought me still exist, snitched from the rack of the Salvation Army, bespotted with drool and noosing the fat necks of the citizens of shelter homes all across the Midwest. For...

Minutiae.(poem)
March 22, 1996... Even now, whole patches of grass, still white without moonlight, testify that yes, the fire consumed everything, laid down white ash to mark its territory. The sky is blue, the grass white. How else should I begin? Should I begin with the walls...

Lunch with my daughter.(fiction)
March 22, 1996... She Doesn't Know I'm her father. In fact, her father doesn't know I'm her father. I mean, the man married to her mother doesn't know. He thinks Frannie is his. We've all been friends for a long time. Frannie used to call me Uncle Stan. Now...

Libby.(fiction)
March 22, 1996... If Libby Coe had bought her tomatoes at Kroger, she would probably never have killed Tracy Whitt. There was even another roadside vendor on Franklin Road who sold homegrown tomatoes, and she could have stopped there, but one smotheringly humid...

Fidel agonistes.(fiction)
March 22, 1996... From his balcony, Fidel Castro Ruz looks to the Strait of Florida. A watery moon illuminates an indigo sea; the air is moist and cool for the first time all day. Faint rumba music wafts on the air. Streetlamps cast hazy circles over the...

Angel, hold your horses.(fiction)
March 22, 1996... "Jeanie?" Uncle Billy Said. "Honey, are you awake?" I hadn't been until he spoke, but now I was. Not just awake, but wide awake. It was a skill I'd learned, how to be sound asleep one second, alert the next. It's something I can do today....

Finding the language. (poet describes finding his poetic voice)
March 22, 1996... I was born in 1952 in north Belfast. I lived in Downview for several years before moving to Skegoneill, where I spent most of my boyhood and adolescence. I went to Seaview Primary and then to Orangefield in east Belfast in 1963. After a spell...

Proust, Ava Gardner, and the last frontier. (Marcel Proust)
March 22, 1996... It was the summer of 1943--August. My sister and I and her four-week-old daughter had driven across the country, Louisiana to Nevada, to join her husband, who was on desert maneuvers with the Ninth Armored Division at Needles, California. The...

From "Alabama" to 'A Love Supreme': the evolution of the John Coltrane poem.
March 22, 1996... On September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Klansman known as "Dynamite Bob" detonated several sticks of dynamite in a local church. The explosion wounded several parishioners and killed four girls. Three of them were fourteen years old,...

Secret Life.
March 22, 1996... When I read, in the July 9, 1995 New York Times Book Review, the headline of Daphne Merkin's review of Michael Ryan's Secret Life--"The Curse of Eros: The autobiography of a poet who has struggled to overcome his sex addiction"--my curiosity...

Volcano, a Memoir of Hawai'i.
March 22, 1996... He must have come wanting little, except to belong to the land, red volcanic soil loamed with ferns, drenched in mists and the constant drizzle of 4,000 feet and the cloud-catch of Mauna Loa, amphitheater for rain and sunshowers, and to his own...

Klan of the grandmother.
March 22, 1996... My Mother was born on the "dark day" of the "woeful week" of the "gloomy month" of the year of the Klan LVIII, but no one in my mother's family would have marked the day in the Klan's coded language--except perhaps my grandmother, and she would...

Kyrie.
March 22, 1996... Ellen Bryant voigt's complex, provoking, and subtle new collection, Kyrie, seems on first meeting to be a perverse exercise in almost everything unfashionable and retrograde in contemporary poetry. Even in this time of unapologetic forays into...

The Fugitive at home.
March 22, 1996... Andrew Lytle had a lifelong argument with the machine, which, he maintained, distanced humans from their real condition. To Andrew's mind, the promise of mechanical advantage was about as illusory as easy credit. A good garden was best tended...

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge.
March 22, 1996... by Charles B. Dew. New York: W. W. Norton. $27.50 (cloth). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend to think of themselves...

Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862.
March 22, 1996... by Richard B. McCaslin. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. $29.95 (cloth). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend to think of...

Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950.
March 22, 1996... edited by John C. Inscoe. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $40.00 (cloth). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend...

Race and Class in the American South since 1890.
March 22, 1996... edited by Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern. Providence: Berg Publishers. $19.95 (paper). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with...

Stories of Scottsboro.
March 22, 1996... by James Goodman. New York: Random House. $14.00 (paper). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend to think of themselves...

Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.
March 22, 1996... by David L. Chappell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $35.00 (cloth). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend...

Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1994.
March 22, 1996... by Harry S. Ashmore. New York: Pantheon Books. $25.00 (cloth). Historians have a rather uneasy relationship with the world of letters. Today's professional writers of history--most of them affiliated with universities--tend to think of...

The last agrarian: Andrew Lytle, 1902-1995.
March 22, 1996... Andrew Lytle was not only the last of the Nashville, or Vanderbilt, Agrarians; he had the singular distinction of being the only Agrarian for whom the agricultural way of life was more than a metaphor. Indeed, though early on the attraction of...