The Midwest Quarterly articles from January 1998

The Midwest Quarterly archives from January 1998

The melting pot, vegetable soup and the martini cocktail: competing explanations of U.S. cultural pluralism.
January 1, 1998... MY PECULIAR TITLE adds a couple of more items to a familiar list of key metaphors putting into vivid language the myths, symbols, images, and other intellectual constructs citizens and foreigners alike use to explain the ideals and purposes...

From the Dust Bowl to California: the beautiful fraud.
January 1, 1998... "And the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, two hundred and fifty thousand, and three hundred thousand. Behind them new tractors were going on the land and the tenants were being forced off. And new waves were on the way,...

Poetic neurosis. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Talk is a foreign language She is only fluent in the written word When clip art people look her in the eye and speak and wait for a response she tries to say something sensible...

Buffalo jump. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Buffalo jump, Buffalo jump, buffalo buffalo jump! buffalo What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want for Christmas, child? Bones. I would like to be white bones Hunched beneath a...

Outside of town. (poem)
January 1, 1998... sit old warehouses, dank, infested, retired from storing things none of us remember. They aren't marked like moving boxes, or distinguishable like grain elevators. Lightless, distant, their wooden boards have fallen deep...

Just before dawn. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Just before dawn the great blue heron glides its bony frame into the dusty light, flapping slow above the russet field, giant harvester inching through the rows, its operator my father, perhaps, pulling an ancient...

Interrupted by the hardness of things. (poem)
January 1, 1998... oh heart within the heart of eyes, remote to the tenderest degree, when will YOU love your visions as yourself.? i sought you in the bluebird's cry. i traced you in his trilling timbres to the apple blossom...

Teacup poetry. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Shattered, from last night's misery, no real signs of life at this address. We've used too much cyclamate and it's gone to our head, we've grown rather ultra-pensive, used a lot of Kleenex, and blind mice have been...

Awards. (poem)
January 1, 1998... They weave so many tales. And how. The taste of sand should count, and the size of the rain drops. And the river that hides in the sea. That I talk to myself should count for a great deal. And why does temperature count,...

Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Not so long ago there was enough sun to be careless, enough to walk the fencerow or sit and smoke, to scratch a dog's fat belly... to consider moving and not move. Now sky presses down like the meaty thumb of a corrupt...

Neighbor. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Across a stubble field his old house is an accordion played by wind. A life of hauling lobster traps has worn him to the bone. After dark we watch him carrying a lamp from room to room talking to shadows on...

Philosophy. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Blue frame for stark trees etched and bare: there must be a reason for winter -- time good for work, and for thought, or to sit inside and stare inward/outward looking into the darkness from...

Shadows of Moremi. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Bush shadows stencil the tent, and the woman lies supine on the cot eyeing them. outside, midday heat devours the air, and light and shadow are deadened. For an instant, even the cape doves suspend their song. The...

July wind. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Do you love the wind? it's the first thing I remember; the clacking of oak leaves waving their green and golden hands outside my screened porch window. I am lying inside hot skin set on white chenille -- a...

Doves and horses. (poem)
January 1, 1998... The whinny of a dapple wing announced a swirl of dust -- a mane, a tail -- but when the air was settled, where the horse had been an instant's whirl was just the hearing of a horse. And in the clearing...

A: "aesthetic": as collage. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Ambergris, for example, could enter into it. Imagine that slow turning of the mill. Or the way the pond greens with algae -- even a marketplace in a war zone, its antique pattern of complacency. ...

Traveling through the dark: the wilderness surrealism of the Far West.
January 1, 1998... In the last three decades, as an outgrowth of the I Sixties and in response to the influx of people and translations from all comers of the world, a particular kind of symbolist literature became prominent, the surreal. Some form of...

There's no place like home: the Midwest in American film musicals.
January 1, 1998... THE HEARTLAND. The midwest has been called that for reasons ranging from its geographical location to the fact that it produces the grain for the location of cereal that's supposed to lower our cholesterol. It is a place where things grow....

Modernism and region: Illinois poetry and the modern.
January 1, 1998... "The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark." William Carlos Williams, Paterson Among the many definitions of modernity, the most stable and...

Beyond the love triangle: trios in "The Awakening." (novelist Kate Chopin)
January 1, 1998... it's a truism (not less true for being one) that modern literature's appeal, or much of it, normally lies in its characters and their self-discoveries and revelations: in short, that revealing character is the name of the literary game. ...

Before We Lost Our Ways.
January 1, 1998... Mark Sanders' latest collection of poetry, Before We Lost Our Ways, is sad and personal, filled with loss, doubt, failed dreams, and what Sanders calls "Ongoing Extinctions." Its literal setting is the plains world of the flatlander (this in...

Trio with Four Players.
January 1, 1998... In John Wheatcroft's neo-Jamesian novel Trio with Four Players, middle-aged Cobbett Stoddard, professor of music at Harkness College in Pennsylvania, trapped in a loveless marriage, becomes entranced by his student, the shy, aloof Elizabeth....

The Significance of Free Will.
January 1, 1998... No one has done more in this generation to rehabilitate free will than Robert Kane (Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin). Calling his position "free willist" -- an expression borrowed from William James -- Kane develops a nuanced...