The Midwest Quarterly articles from September 1994

The Midwest Quarterly archives from September 1994

Dancing under water: art and survival in Susan Straight's 'Aquaboogie.'
September 22, 1994... THESE LINES, from a song called "Aqua Boogie," are used by Susan Straight as the epigraph to her collection of short stories, Aquaboogie. The lines are aptly chosen. In order to survive, the characters in Straight's stories, almost...

Male bonding and American literature.
September 22, 1994... I AM TALKING with my friend Tom on a warm, nearly cloudless May evening. We are in his backyard, scattering grass clippings from the bag his son, age 8, filled when he eagerly mowed the yard earlier in the day. While we joke about Chemlawn...

T.S. Eliot's poetry: intimations of Wordsworth's romantic concerns. (William Wordsworth)
September 22, 1994... READERS HAVE ALWAYS acknowledged T. S. Eliot as a great innovator and transformer of English poetry. Throughout most of his writing career, Eliot attempted to write poetry that would reflect his anti-Romantic taste and preferences. With no...

For the absent. (poem)
September 22, 1994... You were meant to find yourself in a farmhouse, in a churchbell town, raced down the mapled lane by animals at each hard wing, to watch seasons quartered through framed panes of old glass for which there are no...

Entitled to one moon poem. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I am as flat as a sheet of paper. I take up no space whatsoever between the bedcovers. I cannot rise Unless a wind blows me downstairs through the crack under the closed door. I am as brittle as a porcelain tea...

Meadow stars. (poem)
September 22, 1994... and I would save every shred, bill, post card, receipt stuffed in a box in the basement and expect my beneficiaries to look at the ticket to Kabuki-za and thrill that they saw it through my seat in the high, hot balcony...

The dream tyger. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Today is a day for the Dream Tyger as he moves through Baltimore suburbs changing his eye color changing his skin nourished by the burnt yellow & the fractured peach of October elms but always walking with a...

For the first time. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I wake early look out at a flicker perched on a limb silent as bark and everything is just as it was from the beginning back to matching back of opposing seasons a double thickness of days bound...

Thinking about the universe over lunch and dinner. (poem)
September 22, 1994... If, as they tell us, we live In a finite universe, I am concerned. Anything That comes to an end must Have some shape--a spilled Bottle of ink? a month-old bar Of soap? The people who know These things don't...

4:30 a.m. I could. (poem)
September 22, 1994... 4:30 a.m. I could big moon guide me to sea to dance with flesh to the shark & explore the deepest join the giant sea no heads & no way to swim now & let the with the rip tide out the porposie & feed...

On the Oregon trail in Western Nebraska, 14 July 1993. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Because the busted pod of the soapweed smells like home I go a final time to pillage my grandmother's garden. There I am, standing knee-deep in tomatoes and onions and peavines, there I am bending over to...

Prediction. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The world might end in crispness like a smack on the bottom at birth. A division of skin or fascia at autopsy. The closing of doors, the departure of planes. Endings without confetti. An unpeddled note on a harpsichord....

Elegy. (poem)
September 22, 1994... 1. The stare of the bereaved, a peeled potato. One child old enough to understand one not. This evening, the open microphone stands before the gathered. Last night, it transported a sonata. If you hear now, ...

Mid-July. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Tonight's crickets are legging out Their same old tune, relentless. I love their constancy, their high Chirping, love them because crickets, Mostly invisible, never change Their shrilling--keep on, keep on-- Their...

Patience. (poem)
September 22, 1994... If the fly will stay on the glass door and save its green and the peanut butter cat stick long enough to the roof above it, he will open for them both. One in, one out. One inquisitive mint, one sinuous dessert. Today's...

A wall of heartwood. (poem)
September 22, 1994... My neighbor's got himself a small landscaping problem, is no longer pleased with the slope of grass down from his yard to the sidewalk. So he wants a wall-- a terraced effect with a few petunias planted in dirt hauled...

The last spring. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The early light, already mellow, inches up his steps; it bleeds through the blinds, and slides down the sheer drop of sleep. He draws a breath, it makes a sound, and he knows, in the belly of old age, he knows he can rise,...

The longing of bones. (poem)
September 22, 1994... My friend was hit in the eye by an AK47 round, his mouth shaping the perfect "O" of death as the back of his head exploded. He didn't utter a sound, just turned in an almost graceful pirouette that never stopped until...

Political illusions, crap-detection, and neo-Puritanism: unapproved notes from a classroom teacher.
September 22, 1994... IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, as a Vietnam veteran subsisting on G.I. Bill checks, I experienced one of those rare and profound moments: I discovered a document that changed my life. For in November of 1969, a little more than a year after the...

From invitation to experience: a narrative of (dis)engagement.
September 22, 1994... EDUCATORS NATIONWIDE have long been deploring the withering of our students' abilities to read, write, and think critically. Nowhere is this crisis felt more severely than in the Humanities, where reading and writing are often the defining...

Can the increasing use of public opinion polling be justified?
September 22, 1994... HERBERT ASHER characterizes the measurement of public opinion as "a growth industry in the United States" (2). The polls conducted and reported by the major communications media exemplified by CBS News/New York Times, ABC News/Washington...

After the Rain.
September 22, 1994... This is a remarkable volume of poetry. Carter has the most authentic voice of any poet currently writing in America. He knows that a lived human life is made up of moments, that in the lives of even the most commonplace farmer or druggist or...