The Southern Review articles from September 2002

The Southern Review archives from September 2002

An editor's note.(Editorial)
September 22, 2002... FROM TIME TO TIME The Southern Review has published special issues that featured contemporary fiction and poetry written in the South. Those issues also typically offered critical writing done on southern literature, but seldom was such...

Louis D. Rubin Jr., a man for all seasons.
September 22, 2002... LOUIS RUBIN, FOR WHOM the tired phrases Renaissance man and man of letters are perfectly accurate but do not seem sufficient, has suggested more than once that he was a late bloomer. To hear him tell the story of his early life, he nearly...

Louis Rubin, newspapering, and the autobiographical impulse.
September 22, 2002... THE WAY I CAN BEST UNDERSTAND Louis Rubin, professionally speaking, is to approach him not, or at least not exclusively, as a scholar--although he is generally considered to be the most prominent figure in southern literary studies over the...

"I want you to think about something": Louis D. Rubin Jr. and the establishment of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
September 22, 2002... I LIKE TO THINK OF MYSELF as the original Rubin Groupie at Hollins College (now Hollins University). At fall registration in 1957--Louis's first year there--he introduced himself to me, not as the new English Lit. professor he was, but as "a...

Louis Rubin: a Charleston Jew, boat-building, and the shaping form of memory.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... "We are our memory."--Louis Rubin, Small Craft Advisory "IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING," T. S. Eliot proclaims at the end of "Burnt Norton." Louis Rubin has followed this dictum in writing the three book-length memoirs he has published to date....

Riddle me this.
September 22, 2002... ALONE OF THE FOUR BROTHERS, my Uncle Dan, next oldest to Harry, left Charleston as a young man. While working as a newspaperman he taught himself to write plays. In his thirties he had five new plays on Broadway in seven years, then spent a...

Kind of Blue.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Kind of Blue Dusk-blue, a heron stalks the steady melody of our backyard pond, wings a riff of twilight. He settles to stand, uneasy column of smoke in the sun's eddy. He isn't quite the tune, which is suburban, ...

No Elegy in November.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... No Elegy in November for A.W.H. They will not turn, the dead, from lacy ash or stone outward-facing. Having fled along the oldest route all planetary matter takes, they race like light from dim creation, invincibly...

They're Red-Hot: Duet with Robert Johnson #5.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... They're Red--Hot: Duet with Robert Johnson #5 A midnight chime finds me at home, a belle Brokedown in sobs and bombed on fairy tales: I got a girl She long and tall She sleeps Or doesn't, by a kitchen's princess phone....

Terraplane Blues: Duet with Robert Johnson #6.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Terraplane Blues: Duet with Robert Johnson #6 And this is how death smiles: A woman's plump lips curve Dark-purple in the smoky air, Air hot with mid-August and Mississippi, which swerves In hell's direction every year ...

Elder Gogol's Pond at Plokhino Skete.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... There is no one to read it. There is no one to read it. --Saint Eleazar Elder Gogol's Pond at Plikhino Skete Like a small yellowish waterfall the ghost of Sophia Agapit rises from our pond. The eyes are red and...

Alzheimer's.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Alzheimer's I had located the reflecting pines in the dark glass of my husband's backyard. It was then that this hen the size of a house said, "Ruth, it's a bargain. Listen, girlfriend, take the cruise: Alaskan crab,...

Death by Compass.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Death by Compass We are scrolling between rims of glass, a cold sweat on Rimbaud's radical carafe of tea made with the skin of yellow African herbs, gunpowder, and a bright urine falling from his tall black nurse...

Evening Mist.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Evening Mist Far from the dust of the city he has made his way, looking beyond to where flowers are not, nor tinted leaves And come to this solitary hut, this abode of emptiness among the dunes the light...

The Hag Ibaragi.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The Hag Ibaragi The shadow she casts is a dragon's her breath hot piss through snow Eyes: a civet cat's at night, molten amber She hunts the bare ground of the heart bitter hours in Old Japan when the...

Beneath the Bridge.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Only the written word remains.--Horace Beneath the Bridge I. Dickey's Lot So I will start with the end: Staring at light on water, A dock that will not give Beneath your feet again. Of your time there is...

Winter Preparations.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Winter Preparations I find you nailing up the framing boards, mixing the cement. You work each time I leave. I come back, there's another course of brick. The drywall's leaning against a tree. You smile with a look...

Pornography in Hell.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Pornography in Hell Locked as we are in this fantastic chain of flesh--ten billion bodies endlessly writhing without love or speech, denied even simple affection for each other and by now afflicted with...

Huddle Brothers; Ivanhoe, Virginia; circa 1963.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Huddle Brothers; Ivanhoe, Virginia; circa 1963 Stiffly posed before the forsythia bush, they wear coats, ties, and bemused faces; as if their mother's just called to them from the porch, "You boys hold your shoulders back...

A Photograph in an Old Anthology.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... A Photograph in an Old Anthology At Pier 1 you can still see the very wicker chair in which Pound was photographed, with a white flame for hair and Ezekiel eyes: an image that goes with tea and empire and...

Nudes.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Nudes 1. I was not more than five. A girl in the fields had shown me what girls have down there, but only a glimpse before our parents were around us with their hoes, so for all the years of childhood and on into...

Brains.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Brains When I moved in with her, I thought now I won't have to look it up: rubidium, Calvin Trillin, the fourth-longest river in Brazil. The lunar mountain ranges zoomed in. Zygotes and paramecia made...

Twig.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Twig Snapped branch from which no fruit dangles maidens bachelors stillbirths snipped vas deferens tubes of Fallopia seeds scattered blown: the uncle who married a woman who would not yield the...

Coastal remnants of the Genteel.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... for Charlie Geer Coastal remnants of the Genteel Charleston streets smell of horse piss and jasmine; geldings whose pedigree once galloped on the strand now ferry gluttons of the city. I walk through sailors'...

Prism.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Prism I. Ice All diamond I'd thought & no rough The white-blond shadows along the bed Like shifting pillows of snow made flesh & in the excruciating ballet of Departure it's hard not to recall the snow leopard...

Wave.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Wave A few memories float-- two orange cats entwined on the green armchair, birthday lunch with my mother in the department-store tearoom when women still wore hats and white gloves-- but most are lost. An only...

The Art of the Novel.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The Art of the Novel In 1790 a woman could die by falling for her guardian who happens to be a priest or a man who is penniless. A Simple Story. Ruined. As if a woman were a building and love centuries of bad...

Heaven.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Heaven An ocean liner. The other passengers everyone I love or might have loved, and in the center of the ship a library with mahogany tables. Cats curled on open periodicals. No fleas. Pellegrino in the fountains,...

James Lee Bucky Declines the Offer.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... James Lee Bucky Declines the Offer Ma'am, I said, speaking into the mouthpiece of my blue cordless unit, I don't care if it's free or comes with beer and fresh oysters: It's not for nothing they call it a cell-phone. ...

Following Orion.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Following Orion for Bob Wrigley Hunting coyotes two nights back, we were talking softly about the stars, how Orion goes down so early in this season, and Cy, pointing to tracks, said, through his frosty breath, he...

Queen City, Skins.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Queen City, Skins The radio has told us Daddy Grace is free: the jury said Louvenia Royster was never raped, the evidence hearsay, trumped up, too late. Downtown to scout pawnshops for a trap set, I am watching the...

The Circle.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The Circle I read of the five-year prison term imposed for letting the video camera zoom in as the woman in red stiletto heels stomped a guinea pig to death. Silent, violent wriggles, the old rough trades still raking...

The Whale Road.(Short Story)
September 22, 2002... WAYNE PUNCHED THE HEAVY BAG for a while and worked up a big, hard sweat, and then the gunny put the gloves on him and he got into the ring, a small one they had set up in one corner of the weight room. He sparred four rounds with a heavyweight,...

"A conspiracy of friendliness": T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and the Bollingen controversy.
September 22, 2002... IN 1948 THE FELLOWS IN AMERICAN LETTERS of the Library of Congress announced the creation of a new prize for poetry: one thousand dollars for the best book published by an American citizen during the previous year. The prize would be called the...

"Longing for the future" in Donald Harington's The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.
September 22, 2002... Farther along we'll know all about it, Farther along we'll understand why; Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, We'll understand it, all by and by. (Traditional Hymn) "DONALD HAZINGTON," Fred Chappell has written, "is not an...

O'Neill.(works of Eugene O'Neill revisited)
September 22, 2002... WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE at Oberlin College, from 1949 until 1953, the reputation of Eugene O'Neill, in spite of his general recognition as America's most successful playwright and his great fame abroad, was under attack. The English faculty...

Editing All the King's Men.
September 22, 2002... A NEW EDITION OF ANY WORK, especially of a standard text, involves an exploration of each step in the complicated process that gets a novel first on the author's paper and eventually into readers' hands. New texts--"restored" or "corrected,"...

A problem in spatial composition: on the order of Or Else.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... AS ITS TITLE AFFIRMS, Robert Penn Warren's Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974 is both poems and a poem, both a collection of poems written in a six-year period and a single, continuous sequence. As Dave Smith has written, "It is through the...

Toward evaluating the biographies of William Faulkner.
September 22, 2002... WHEN FRIENDS OF Gertrude Stein first saw the portrait of her done in 1906 by Picasso, for which Stein had at least eighty sittings, they turned to the famous artist and said, "Gertrude doesn't look anything like that." To which he coyly...

The Fugitives gather.
September 22, 2002... 8:00 p.m. Saturday, March 24, 1923. Nashville, Tennessee. The home of Mr. and Mrs. James Frank. THE CURTAIN RISES, REVEALING a sizable and comfortable living room. At center stage is Mrs. Frank, nee Rose Hirsch. Downstage left on a chaise...

The state of Robert Penn Warren: a review.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... SINCE ROBERT PENN WARREN'S DEATH in 1989, critics and scholars have worked w uncover more information about his life and work and to develop critical perspectives on his literary career. Warren's advocates may not agree on a number of...