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COLUMBIA REVIEW Summer 1977 $2.00 ifiUlM

COLUMBIA REVIEW VOLUME 56, NO. 2

SUMMER 1977

Editor-in-Chief Willard Uncapher Associate Editor Christopher Hawthorne

Managing Editor Thornton Davidson

Faculty Advisor David Shapiro

Business Manager John Lenz

Editorial Board: B. Doherty. K. Dunlap, L. George, J. Harrison J- Lyons, M. Meltzer, J. Neimark

Cover by Eve Sinaiko, BC '78. COLUMBIA REVIEW is the literary magazine• o 304 Ferris Booth Hall. Columbia University New lorK be returned without a stamped, self-addresse enve ope.

"Music Written To Order” © Copyright David Shapiro 1977

r.„c Mntc ” "Lieht Bends. JVIilkwood,” “Rachel.” “Le Message Des Mots. g Copyright Anne Cherner 1977.

Prism Refracts"

"Flotations In A Classroom" ©John Soldo. 1977. iimriA review for reprinting Part 11 of

NOTE: I wish to thank the staff of COL Porenchyma The correction of typograp it merit to the poetic text.

„rors is indicative of their commit-

James Cascaito

CONTENTS Poetry: Anne Cherner

5*^ Le Message Des Mots ' Milkweed ') / Rachel Light Bends, A Prism Refracts

1 3 4 5

Pellegrino D’Acierno

Mimesis

Scott Morgan

And So We Leave A Party On Park A venue

9 11

Jill Neimark

New York City Shed Water

12 13

James Cascaito

Parenchyma

Thornton Davidson

A Name For Desire

Daniel Meltz

Epic Poem Naples, Florida Minutes After The First Drink

20 22 23

Allan Horing

A Philosophy Of Ice

Pamela Margoshes

Untitled Untitled

25 27

John Soldo

Flotations In A Classroom

Charles Arcudi

Summer Died

Christopher Hawthorne

(Three) Young Poets At A Reading The Idea Of A Warrior Scones

31 32 33

David Shapiro

Music Written To Order

Essays: David Gorman

Structuralism: The Outlines Of The Movement

Brian Doherty

Under the Proscenium Arch/ Barthelme’s Literary Miniatures

Reviews: Christopher Hawthorne

Kenneth Koch’s “The Duplications”

Jill Neimark

Elizabeth Bishops’s “Geography III”

Willard Uncapher

John Berryman’s “Henry’s Fate

Prizes In Literature For 1977

Contributors Column

58 59

LE MESSAGE DES MOTS

We were eating hearts of palm in early May. From the deep white of the fruit, desire skipped in undulating streamers of blue to the song of the parakeet. You sighed, “This is the life.”

Then we had the prime of life. I was holding it in my palm. On my finger perched a parakeet, revolving his head to show the deep colored circles of his neck, blue and green. In the sky clouds skipped. The bird watched them and skipped a note accidentally, upsetting the still life. In the expanse of the sky, a blue hush settled like leaves of the palm, the oracular tree, whose deep boughs hide the mystery of the parakeet.

This is ridiculous,” said the parakeet. ‘Notes were made to be skipped. The error is not deep or deadly serious, and life goes on.” Turning, the palm settled its crown of feathers, greening blue. The sky was slowly giving up blue. A sunset gathered round the parakeet, and was trapped at the head of the palm. We held our hearts as a long ray skipped away from the mass of wood and leaf, like as a dancer bending deep.

In rose warm shade the grass grew deep, twining our legs to the yard’s blue edge. Tea leaves told you the meaning of i e.

Perched on a teapot the parakeet prophesied sublimely, no detail skipped, fortunes secret as the lineage of the palm.

We knew the deep root of the parakeet, round as the blue stone’s circles skipped on the lake, the life circles ringing the palm.

MILKWEED

Along the bottoms of Bear Mountain Park, brown reptilian hoods creep over the grass tops. They are milkweed, I know, because another autumn in western Massachusetts you named them for me. You peeled open a brown shell, and inside, the oval seeds clustered flat at one end, extending their delicate tails. Under your breath, they were white parachutists.

The woods that day were on fire with autumn as far as I could see, until the bluish haze of cloud and sky caught and blurred them. We had come down from our vantage point on the hill, to where the milkweed was splitting open, then farther back into the trees where we lay listening to the birds’ last songs. This year I spot the milkweed first, a whole field before the trail ahead. Though they catch the breeze better than any kite, 1 hoard them in a paper bag, brown pods rattling under my grasp. A week later filmy hairs crowd at the brim; the pods have burst, seeds floating out like just — hatched spiders to the wind, a moment I Wasn’t meant to keep.

RACHEL Twelve years since Rachel was dying in her hospital room They’ve torn that hospital down where the elevator always sank two inches below the floor below the dusty windows You could not lift your hands from the bed linen They did not belong to you but were linen too worn transparent by washing the veins folds in the material Who knew you as a girl in czarist Russia smooth-skinned and blond, eyes cornflower blue but a Jew, you’d come to this end, Rachel, in an Alabama winter A gas station stands on the hospital lot the house and store sold under other names

They chased you all your life Work’s claws bit into your shoulder Lines bit into your skin your hair went grey In the end, they took your flesh too Oh Rachel your biblical ancestor waiting for her lover at the well twice seven years if patience is a virtue Rachel nights I dream they come for me the knock on the door the knock in the heart to spirit me away

light bends, a prism refracts In a glass feeder the bird picks at seed, narcissi thrust starry edges through midwinter soil to rings of mist: niore the weather’s fool to insist on this season’s illusion. She plucks the flower of false spring; her nails slice the stalk where sap bleeds, gluing her fingers. In the vase the flower bends, a baby’s ear, translucent as the first skin. Poised in the room like the bird, when she moves, she recalls clear rain falling in a landscape without wind streaking the iron-colored lawns in lengths of darker metal.

^ho is to know if she is turning her head, if the narcissus and the bird are one movement; the earth reaching up and bending down once more returning to the notion of itself

where all time is this succession of water splitting into days, where the bird forever folds its wing in a grey wash nf trees above the white narcissus rimmed with an orange throat. ^he holds the prism like a chrysalis between her clearer fingers. Before her eyes the glass ®ads to her own image; h^r face becomes the outline of the room.

Anne Cherner

MIMESIS the meriggio goes barefoot like zero recoil from the white world lighting cannot assume its masks of shadow the excesses, the hurl of things anti-rhythm and then measures of Etruscan deaths

they dance suppliants in the absence of the unconscious threatening to displace your arcane writing:

fish grows into horse red sodomizes pink

the bull of asym metry

gores the slender world into copulation

my changeless body drags its lingering animal dialectic from the white noise of the horizon shadow-diving into grave of space some vermillion gesture all poses and proffers the self-begetting egg that world hides the changes of fire and water the vibration of space and silence invents the reckless body it ravishes the brides of quietness the lion changes the gazelle with ancient ornaments stars of blood symmetries taken by chance

two-personed time slut of symmetry sidereal addicted to death allows the clinamen: of generation and contrast the blue-backed dolphins deviate through the invisible net of waves

Pellegrino D’Acieroo

and so we leave Leaving spider plants and wife in Brooklyn, newspaper ink profiling his narrow, black and white fingers, Henry Miller sought wet, luminous streets of bread and unmade beds speaking France’s language with a moonlight groan. A European? a pert amoebic visitor in shredded underwear searching and indulging for a piano teacher’s reprimand, ^slap from the depths of a shawl. concurrence of need of stuffy of old of sensations between us, but me, reading what he has written; he, drunk from pandering in fountains in antique, glass vial sunsets; we both seek grace. an influential conduit of illuminating IMPORT— what.? o I know his adopted wooden kitchens and blond ladies Htghted on tables, wearing dresses as hats, rococo mirrors Reflecting their laughter at America’s artlessness and youth. odent with his paragraphs and together we hate America s ’^S&tng and ascetic scowls, its lack of green feathers, Pened lips at dawn and dancers, its sunglasses and its - Purgations, its accurate depiction by Larry Rivers. RRejodious Henry, wish for more than he showed me: like a child with color mixed hands '^hich feel nipples and bellies and murmur warm sounds ^^R^tively, red, yellow, blue, stripes! unequivocally Bering the green garter to the tense, deceptive corset, like Picasso instead of Raphael.

to°d Wn I seT"

treg Il„'. Siehr

thousand four hundred and fifty six miles scenery, as crass as soup, and meet striped corduroy Maria, whom I meet on Primrose Hill, hand, on green sheep lawns while the 3nd gathers like scarves around the towering observers in the leafy haze. henry’s colors like Van Gogh’s flowers and upon them around the ankles of the hill, I am transfixed.

My eyes are provoked, kissed, companions of aroused cellos and lithe violins, without velvet coffins, celebrating— Maria. Maria, part of the carpet but a flower beneath the driftwood bench, beneath its splinters; A woman who had been to Paris with warm red lips sitting in mist, as if in the soft penumbra of a Chinese hat, a cook pouring milk in Vermeer quietude, shadowed stillness. It is true that I did not follow her up Milleresque accordian stairs in cracked plaster tenements, harassing her children in the tiled vestibule, but she put her head in the refrigerator and I wrote of the tropics anyway. She sang serving lunch and she resembled the curtains, plaid with smiles of love and use. I was sure this couldn’t be in America and convinced Maria of her stripes, her polished shoulders and joy. Joy, the mimosa of that foreign land, the inimitable jewel never in the mud, never in Brooklyn. There only white fish on the back of Joe’s dirty truck resembling old women’s breasts wrapped in newspaper. Not for Henry or myself; and so we leave.

A PARTY ON PARK AVENUE

What a view from this Chippendale; we’re so vulnerable when we sit, maybe a Lautrec orientation, your face from below, your neck maybe kindergarten watching the words fall from your lips wet chalk from a blackboard words from an overhead projector, loud, maniacal, then whispered when I stand. Now, Gauguin, in this tropical foyer: I hope skin doesn’t hurt your morality. Did you know I’m a friend to Rodin, not the sculptor, the monster from the hills? Now there is a way I have of saying there is a way I have which implies 1 have had the hernias, busted knuckles and jaw Watched television and built an empire mastered the finite and cared less about death, everyone’s kamikazi outcome. In fact I m enraptured — I could spray deodorant Watching you dance; reverential, I could vacuum in the dark, remembering your dance. ^ut when you kick the Chippendale with your misplaced pirouette you leave me no choice but to stand and rave. Scott Morgan

NEW YORK CITY

Here we have; new antitheses that codify god. Oh —there are still calico skirts in the spring that break lyrical against new architecture modelled after the Oriental. In China the recess of scooped stone meets brazen, pressed sunlight and tourists stop speaking for hours or months. In Rome, too, apertures carve themselves into ruins and dry out like pumice. All this I can bear, temples float in the hollows of the land, but these new sentences, these abstract absolutes in stone, all this undeterred line lays the pall of carved cliff in grids across cement-ways. The human is reinstated occasionally by a hand hailing a taxi but even that warps into Adam on a chapel vault.

I’m not saying I’m not in love. I just find it difficult to be bland here. New York is a Babylon born of delicacy. Her secret: the inner temple walls, the relentless, recent grace. As if I were flesh dissolving inside old greek coffins, the city makes me ache and die in the air.

SHED WATER I no longer lust after delicacy but. an apt and modern narcissus — post conceit out of steel, feed on human water, glut on whitecaps of sound. The street heaves and heralds me as an unheard of alloy; rose womb that fits, strangely silent, round Parnassus valley and flushes neath suns; to glint, to bloom. Waterways on the stomach of sounds, thrush-foam, truncated, struck froth and terror tightened to blindness in the breadth of the sunI buy a coral headband, pull the hair back from my face and pluck it till music comes.

On the rasp, the shuffle of streets, I know how to move; out of walls I weld rhythm, slabs shift on the floor (for the waltz, so strangely silent.) I wake, I bend people to my whisper.

Threshed here into steel and clay, lepers and Sirens alter the fragrance of islandseyes fossil along my flesh and I am awaiting your advance, your retreat, you remind me somehow of the sand that feast of ubiquitous heat. Jill Neimark

PARENCHYMA part two

i swear there was nothing in the trees, in the park, next day. no green, no leaves in the naked trees, no life but for the morning breathing its barrenness into me. with its comical heave preposterous and i went back to the streets where life is for sure in trucks and traffic, there’s certainty there, i said certainty in clamorous motion, proof of life. yes. i prefer to be where the scuttle is. because the return of the leaves comes only by way of singsong sureness, couched in the clutch of faith, equating spring with dull promises, of jesuses and other sources of knowledge, give me the trucks in motion dance of the gasoline, i said to myself on a corner near a bar retraced my steps to home, no one was there, i was glad and said so. went back to my problem on certainty or not 1. definition nature (that is the thing that makes trees die and grow invented thought the treble of existence endowed the makeshift afternoon with mysteries specific to the stars the thing that made us for to labor and to yearn) is force meant to reflect itself eats music whittles and amazes in bad authority 2. conjecture if the mishap gas of the early days had danced itself an inch the other way cloaking out around this rounded place the beams of the hot machine then would melancholy have known another form but circumstance seems to have yielded shielding only what it should rendering its sweet bastard vulnerable in the now to lizardlife to synthesis and doubt

3. statement the globe grows fact more than what is made there never was if hurricane move or petal or peninsula then it has done so and so it is the same is to be said for love and what it changes in the main roses will continue to be sold till storm move city to sea waterlife not yet reborn yet lives within the we 4. observation events repeat themselves in humdrum turn the simple wind of spring will march again can be noted prior to its coming almost charted nearly timed but never does glum predictability with wonder interfere down here as even boring February knows and has been known to give birth from top of head grave digger to aspects of perspective undreamed of 5. praise to where? you ask? from where? to the heavens from no reason but happen all song in deed in gest and act for fact that feet have crossed the threshold what feet? o some godlike feet walked across the doorway luminous and hymns unheard have risen to the brown skies who are glad when chant-intent comes soaring to their doors *:his is just so. i said, knew in fact that it was just so *^hat the meatless must be sung as well, alone or not better yet alone, no intrusion, silent study, mind singing of the centuries, organizing, categorizing adding up the certainty of the day the vision of life microphonous sprays the heart with melody of done and we will sing the afternoon away

against the shadow of typewriter shops against the gleam of elevator doors towards the expenditure of the new past the will be before the grown out present twilight’s threat to lamp and clock even the ones in the eagle land will sing in the western land all gifted with banks and bombs and lunatics sing till the mushrooms bloom across the blue i remembered how one night he had appeared with flowers in that cap he always wears, he always wore, how he had said the twig has little relevance to everything is false because it may become as all things may baroque or not. take the f^*^ of horsetail, he had said, and gut to music made, the need for trees for poet and for write and not. what is given is a all sworn for drain my friend, as there are tulips for the table and the brain, and there are basins of life untapped and unhurled, remember this, he had said to me. and i remembering, went back to my song

to poesy

have come many a one tongue-forthed and plying your cement at swanlake edge and those who would chart a thought and those who not would dare to side you in knowing you are no swallow and no hurricane-caught bird and are like to no wing-borne truth to your dismay and sorrow and so you make the fool to lift the note tackling most clockingly the one who molds you to your own chagrin decks you with nobility and walking death

makes you to watch the crumpling gypsies wend their way amid the spattered walls tattered warted strangers in the halls of the trains of the city bowels

who made you once to smell the oleander on the day of nestor’s pale return from the scabby shores of troy there was oleander in the air that day dirty farmers come to greet their king long pink lines of them the people sang the song in praise of water work rested on clovered hillsides day took drunk to bed and bees made noise like to the hum of soft electric tone the young you make to make you to be young so soon who sing no more the lovely tune

as always you are nothing you can not taste you do not feel but by way of inks and of machines conjuring up for you the salts of desire hot beneath the pen-wrought tongue or feeding you on the clotted spoon of war and every age would hate you sufficiently as needs would be for putting down the should-be-warped-out strings but for the sake of what? mythology? the hand that turned the soil turns the dial changing however nothing as always and mercury is become a force for lighting lights on bridges where lovers go

to hear the wind of river in the not late spring at night when self-esteem is laid to rest with dark’s persistence insisting on the dream yet the level-headed people proclaim your death in many tongues and in so doing allow you to have been at sometime somewhere someone unto yourself others of us know better than this would never grant you life of any kind on your own those who would not rid ourselves of you holy wordgod strike us to you more

James Cascaito

A NAME FOR DESIRE After I gathered each name for desire Into a recess where what I knew Might be better off, the tension Of stretching my hands and touching only What those hands could touch left me.

Earlier, when the sun seemed to make The pillars at some distance appear straighter Than they really were, I felt that rising In this room would correct an hour or two Of what went on yesterday: Of singing too soft for the tiles That line the shower or water reminding Me of sand on the shore —like heat Hissing in the early summer. Even now These sounds, what were the smaller movements Of morning, return. And my hands and feet That were once subject to any winding Impulse, a rush of feeling across the floor. Wish that they were less confined. But somehow I remain confident that the

^lips of time that are repetition Have been avoided. I begin by naming a few Things I want, sticking on labels and at last Noticing the way the sun near the pillars pulls Some letters from their positions, slightly.

Thornton Davidson

AN EPIC POEM The first epic poem since Keats ran Endymion on a reel to reel to America and her serfless heritage; An epic poem situated on four square islands —none of them perfectly square but all of them more square than round — beside a bureau in a bedroom where upright pens and potted foliage frame the pink window. We are somewhere to the right of the square of Gibraltar, sometime before the migration northward of the cape people. It is long after the day Michael Spill predicted the Messiah would come and charted with thick crayons the route to purgatory. We are close to the fall of the Olympian empire which left smooth fragments beside the rusting canyons. ***

An epic poem sits on cotton clouds in a glistening diarama. Its subject is sorted from familiar pages and well smudged pages. Characters have affairs in character. What is level and obedient comes this high, appraise the alchemical value of passion which the characters — mostly women with long hair—mistake for power because they let themselves gather when, like a heroine in Hardy, they were always being gathered. ***

There is no heroine in an epic poem. You could tell me that that isn’t so and I could agree with you.

But there is no heroine as brave as what she did: she purchased a ticket, she rode through heartsleeves, she made a few dollars in her spare time. ***

Young marrieds will best understand the security of a new home and baby. On sticks, on sticks with benches come tolerance which is often as moving, but for the people sticks arrange, not for young marrieds.

NAPLES, FLORIDA A morning is six mornings here In homes from blue to blue There are fewer than complications In these sand forests And doubling fronds.

That pink streak in the evening sky! That shiny line that divides the sky! And glows like a crack In the black egg of heaven.

One young girl beside the lighted pools Checking the time of her shy body Does one lap and one lap In recorded time.

MINUTES AFTER THE FIRST DRINK The elements of a diatribe: 1) forces; 2) counter-forces. The sum of the sides divided by two, the sum of the elements: on this hangs the tragedy of human existence, air, lights, the course of our collisions. (If there are two lunches every day, one of them will be echoed in a diatribe with dinner and breakfast at either end.) Vase, moon, secrecy, you comb out your hair. Globe rides down the street on the side of a truck. She was smoking a cigarette from the pack I just bought. This Way in the bench and Are you listening to every word I say?” Nothing

about you is un pleasant, world! I have made all my phonecalls. Daniel Mekz

A PHILOSOPHY OF ICE This fall while everything lazy Quarters the brown of decay, Philosophy has been considering How it might outlast the season. Things do what they must to survive: It will allow itself to freeze. And soon enough, I should know. It displays itself in the snow A philosophy of ice. Its crystal symmetry approached From any angle sticks you With the same frosty points.

Come April, I suppose It will become a philosophy of thaw, I have seen it do this before; Its own cool logic by drops Seeping into the thin cracks Between idea and thought. And still later, under bright light; Hot sun of open inspection. Over the gay paper heads of blossoms All thinking themselves new. Slippery Philosophy will pass by Nature And, turned to vapor, rise.

Allan Horing

untitled Water clenches and unclenches its fists Round lilies lounge and dive Sun crisscrosses the fluid hearth There was a pelican for dinner and later Sibling starlings cry encore As the sun bows and flees Lazy Laurie and I circle on a float He wears red, and I, liking the ensemble, want to say encore But I let him wave at a passing trout who mumbles my words Lurking among the reeds I sense a dovetail dinner companion But am silent as Lazy paddles downstream Tiny fishes lament the passing of our craft Octagonal sunstripes cut the way Lazy Laurie informs me of the dinner menu Not trout again, I protest in tones of quiet disdain Trout again, he asserts, but with sauce of the lavender lagoons A pretty party we make strolling through lilies and herring eyes Fourteen eagles chorale an evening hymn I would try knitting but am touched by reflections in the sanguine depths Laurie pulls in the line with dinner gleaming on a touseled palette He is charming I think if we were in Italy I would toss him a coin Penny for your thoughts he says Lazy Laurie is a bon vivant I think perhaps I will write him an LO.U. Dinner he chants And dinner it is with glowing reports of nearby birds glide beneath rows of weeping willow trees I reach and use the bows as oars Lazy sings a German ballad in a memorable voice 1 recite of the passing of blackbirds overhead Oh Laurie Laurie I want to circle your float with wreaths of honey ^hich I hope will sweeten forever your opinion of me Laurie oh Laurie I want to hand you a platter of gilded hooks and lines

p ddle with you downstream till the waters dry beneath a bottomless moon.

UNTITLED A tiny, taut fig in full bloom you present your scarlet, open-faced agendas of pain your docile, time-lapse traumas and hints of psycho-domestications your colors brimming with scents of violation, and voila! you self-present in the crisp open air your newly-built habitat of bill-board protestations derivations and harmonies from the annotated former years chiseled entries on memory’s mortar such manifold speculations Oh, but the open air is your stage you crack the whip and it’s guilt-throb off and running you are the coach and four of accusatory necessity brandish the power you who are in full bloom the tiny, taut fig of audacious uncertainty bursting and gleaming spread your seed, your lovely fertilations sway in the gardens of careful disappointment polish your garden until perfection intervenes; yours the tidying hand forever in motion across an ivory sky. Pamela Margoshes

FLOTATIONS IN A CLASSROOM

An afternoon of years Collects upon common varnish Cracking vertical cacti Up on the window jambs.

Its sill, mute testimony To tired janitors, Erasers laden with chalk Like brackish clouds from the sea.

Bears the brunt of the boys’ abuse As my once unleavened brain Strikes to the dulled varnish Peppered with city soot From the morning’s collapsed ash skyDistant, cool as the lecturer Swishing in black soutaneAnd raises my blood in beats

To the furious vertex Of clouds of might which decree In fluid geometries The thunder’s clarity. John J. Soldo

SUMMER DIED

Summer died birthing complexity and remorse; put up a fight oh, she put up a fight And we were all proud to know that summer had fallen — thrown through the embers. not a note . . . June, July, August, September curls its wings, its shy leaves turn their faces from the wind as stars cross stars, move lazily through the quarter from place to place moving like confused tenants avoiding a celestial slumlord . . • King Columbus rules October with open arms and jolly good cigars, though little of what he says passes into law, beld in check by Parliamentary Solstice, while the Duke of Denver ropes the setting sun and digs his heels into the early hours of November. Ah, let us give thanks—to the eleventh hour, when the hero, unmasked, reveals the secret to his final tnc when the distance runner draws his second wind when lovers — grappling for release accept the finality of intimacy with the solidity of tomorrow, when wrinkled poets scrape the dusty bowl, what, but for a flash of fantasy and a rush of visceral beauty before some rustic pastor tings his rust-brown church bell signal to the poor that the rich must sometime sleep. And death emerges as a complaint, a crank mummy bothered by cobwebs, a frustrated black rat concerned with dew,

as an overwrought Indian annoyed by sandcrabs and sandflies and mealworms and bacilli, while back on the spread a keeper sleeps and cows low, echoes ground into the mist the sated furnace growls and moans. While a dusty scarecrow dances, a phantom on the snow-covered cornfield — through the width of a moonbeam along the cloudy path to the sunrise.

Charles Arcudi

(THREE) YOUNG POETS AT A READING

We sit, from the lights. The grey flows into future white. We will drink black coffee, tonight, in thick white cups. Sure of each, sure of the clean ice cubes in our mouths. And dreaming upon anisette: Of roaring artists in raw-eyed bars. ff> sitting here, I screamed, it was only because ft seemed pressing. Now it does. Think of those vines, those ruinous watchers. And rather, sip the lean eyes rippled Near the edge of your saucer.

Later, our beasts may be broken. Or later, our spare change Under glass in a grey library, displayed. are intense in our dark coats) ’ ®fiall be shafted in blazing light, Hr pencils enshrined for all thrashing laps to see. Ht now, the swoop, the awe of the intimate marbled counter! tid mothers so mickle close! P we may quaff glazed flagons with the best —

There, in the flame, is a rose slug: ®ut only after the pastel shells are gone.

THE IDEA OF A WARRIOR

I say this, and I am tired. I remain tired until my face Is pouchy and unfamiliar, And powder falls off it, as off a mask. Whenever I move my head. I am growing so my pate is wrinkled Now, the skin too big for my skull. And it has as many furrows as a plain. At night, it breeds leopards and zebras. When the moon was out, last night. And it stood just above the mountains, I tried to lick my dry lips, Because I thought it would give me pleasure. But I could not feel them.

Would you please tell my son And his wife, who live near the village. That I have gone to the waterfall. Where the mist rises to the mouth of the gorge. Look; it is bright today, and. Holding my trophies to my chest, I will throw myself Into the blue foam, near the shallows.

SCONES

Things have not come to me as they have come to the ancient greats, in a diffusion through sand to the soil below, or something which spread over their tongues at breakfast, and shed the vapored past to their eyes. One morning, elves sat on my toast — but they were silent and obnoxious, and looked not as I expected elves to look: black and made of wire, with pitched grimaces. They put their undissolving feet in the cups, embraced one another, bit my fingers; look my early miracles and left. What could I say then? Only later, that I had an infatuation with the Baroness Blixen, the loose bones in her face; crushing, with her sharp fingers, in Africa, the beans, which now were the liquid beaded on the table — or maybe it was just her name, hiding her under-names in her velvet cloak, or her hanging hyena furs — the features from the ribands of the plain forcing all the labor to a line. the black elves and the lions lying back. So I strutted, aimless in the dust, sweeping in tails, varnished like a coffee table. Late in the day, I sweated and peeled, panting and wishing the nightmare to break my back. But then, fire spread across the veldt, and I found myself under

sheets, astride soft-featured women. So now the elves sat in soft circles, burning the table cloth. Lor years, then, I was taken with circles, taken with dripping grace,

SCONES Things have not come to me as they have come to the ancient greats, in a diffusion through sand to the soil below, or something which spread over their tongues at breakfast, and shed the vapored past to their eyes. One morning, elves sat on my toast but they were silent and obnoxious, and looked not as I expected elves to look: black and made of wire, with pitched grimaces. They put their undissolving feet in the cups, embraced one another, bit my fingers; took my early miracles and left.

What could I say then? Only later, that I had an infatuation with the Baroness Blixen, the loose bones in her face; crushing, with her sharp fingers, in Africa, the beans, which now were the liquid beaded on the table — or maybe it was just her name, hiding her under-names in her velvet cloak, or her hanging hyena furs — the features from the ribands of the plain forcing all the labor to a line, the black elves and the lions lying back. So I strutted, aimless in the dust, sweeping in tails, varnished like a coffee table. Late in the day, I sweated and peeled, panting and wishing the nightmare to break my back. But then, fire spread across the veldt, and I found myself under

sheets, astride ®oft-featured women.

So now the elves sat in soft circles, burning the table cloth. Lor years, then, I was taken with circles, ’•^hen with dripping grace, 33

with the circle of a burning blue brain melting a dance down to the floor. Wrapped and leprous. I took a quick scuffle with her, in the grave. For months, I took the mixing bowl. In painless light, I made raised pastry, as my parents once had done. I used a wooden spoon to stir, to tip the heads and breasts of lamp-lost virgins. But then, the crust shattered on my hand. Tendons rose to meet me. Serve me breakfast, quietly now, and I will dip and dance and die, press my hard arm against the table. I no longer wish to chew, and the negro counterman IS merciless to my spare smile. Do you see my henchmen basking near the cocoa urns, keeping the women away from me? Do you feel the raw windows and the greedy light? Glance my way. languidly, tor elves have imperfect grips, and deserts are close to our skins.

Christopher Hawthorne

MUSIC WRITTEN TO ORDER Now and then, now and then, now and then Now-ness and then-ness And between now and then You hear the sound of a projector And revisit your ancient home, your new home of late.

You find only the gardener’s sun has survived, A detail that wanted to be a Psyche Meriting daily squibs to the dead. A white breast on a white nipple would make a nice sculpture. But you would want more milk. You would want Mother back. You go where you must go, Naomi goes M/ith Ruth, the record with the record player Adults move magnetised to the earth. All other insects forage at random . . •

Yes the early Christians wore masks And had listened to Terence Accounting for the look of no look Cubicle said to be that of Love and Psyche Consciousness you loved Rounds you preferred . , Sliding into the sky, looking wearily past the pmk toward the white M^here everything is unsigned, unsinged

In the life of the individual as well as the state everythirig is late An old vine on three stories Cf brick administration building that cannot administrate Snow in the strictest sense . Snow so grasped I could hold to be a fiction e profited by the wind . , r Twining up a rainspout, a wire, or the chain link fence 35

Through persian blinds again Big emphasis on little jealousies Taking the part for the part again Is it rain or ripples on that stream of sphinx white paper

Inside, the unknown girl in a circle Looks shyly down Bone necklace and ghostly braids seeping Into the blue air of the postcard A day like Swiss Independence Every door you closed I have opened Reality more strong than the traitor’s arm Quite vanquished me Your hands were blooded bloom Now the tide hastes out of the view of whims The sonatas and the caprices unaccompanied Unaccompanied now and needing no accompaniment

The sluggish window rose Upon a vista truly opaque: The view golden but cold, Mother. Cold Pastoral! Sister.

The sluggish window rose Upon the inside-outside scene: So the mind turned to finishing Excited, near the truth.

With lips upon your back The pleasure of seeing you Replaced by the pleasure of not seeing you. Yet you see me every moment, and momently — When you see the oak leaf, pierced In purple and stapled to paper When you see the brindled grid, and now you see The house of music splashed with ink.

Concealed Words The parts of speech got tangled up There need be no order and no questions and no players guessing which quiet game is fun no map of the world or outline of your face as memory of you is a bad master so it’s our job to draw you like your France 2^ rny Russia placed in truant space in alternating colors like bones Another game played lying down Wretch how could you deceive as you deceft She answered, I promised to cleave and I ve cleft What tree is often found in ladies mouths? What flower do they tread under foot?

They took me to the operating room and took out my E —energy etc. We thought of each other as food Two wrongs as good as a feast The fairest universe driven to pasture with a blow You traded proverbs, skipped from instrument to instrument. Musical instruments like the longest rivers Scouting for words, for concealed words I played with the imaginary opponent in the centre of a tracery of lines of colour Going always in the direction of arrows.

Haven’t

Do you have a lion in your house? Do you have a serpent in your house? No fortunately I do not have a lion in my house.

Do you have a woman leaning slightly past the spirals in your house? No I do not have the edge of her dress in my house. Do you have a lion in your house? No I do not have the outline of her body in my house. Do you have a trouvaille in your house? No fortunately I do not have a lion in my house.

Do you have the goddess Hygeia headless as a house? No I do not have her right hand casting a shadow on my house.

Do you have a lion in your house?

No I do not have her light peplos folds full of life in my house. ?have “truth is the consequences” in your house? No fortunately I do not have a lion in my house. What do you have in your high heavy house? Do you have a rendering of her brilliant pitiless hair falling on your house? ° Do you have a lion in your house? No fortunately I do not have a lion in my house.

Rivulet Near the Truth Sunken rocks are sunless like a fence in iniquity or a hedge in oblivion or sunshine at supper like the Supreme Being in surgery restrained by oscillating powers sweeping the dirty body useless as if agreeable stuff like saccharine might look upon love’s clean teeth

Sheep have no tact at least that one can appreciate and the playhouse is hidden like a title on a title page Today we lie down doing time listening to Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto a small quantity of music the guitar the hat the heart up to the quick and up upon and in with touched in the wind next to you traces of a harness like a lattice

in the backyard in space so we amused ourselves under true pretences swimming in leaves bankrupt as Danae 38

begging in befuddlement meddling in water in dirty water excited by mud fainting with color like Davy Jones dancing on the back step upon nothing on war dances St Vitus attended us the dove splashing and then immersed us with a blow launched into lightness Sophocles had not written his Aeschyleia yet There are two kinds of sleep orthodox and paradoxical During orthodox there are no dreams but normal diplomatic relations like a sentence made up to include the sleepers of the whole alphabet all the tired out explanations actually a hole in the ground concealing a sniper with a sound of spiders coasting on a rubber ocean constantly infusing poison in the fly with the kiss a mother reserves for a violent child a silk of shiny metal

After an hour of that kiss paradoxical sleep begins and it lasts ten minutes before orthodox is resumed I believe that orthodox sleep (the big changes, playing many parts, silences dissolved by a file) serves a function and that paradoxical sleep (a micro-chip and micro instabilities) is important, too

But we are alive another way

The vista out this window makes a plea in a vague style pale as a persian blind giggling like refined gold ^mpted to please like a pill; Look The loophole is opening now looming like a looking glass the thirsty soul examines itself and we each other As it is said you hug a belief as the playhouse is hidden David Shapiro

STRUCTURALISM: THE OUTLINES OF THE MOVEMENT

European vogue and, like so many Eurowas imported to America at about the time its currency continent was waning. Structuralism is not dead, because inctual movements by their nature are not susceptible to the peroblivion implied by such a term. What happens rather is 3t the initial impetus of movements comes to a halt, and their are fixed. Once this occurs, the move"^ay continue to exercise a widespread influence, or may pass o obsolescence for a time: this cyclical movement is the fate of any of ideas, turn and turn about. And it is into this stage that orahsm is now passing. The energy of European intellectuals is ccted elsewhere, though the structuralist framework of thought JOS an important influence; meanwhile we are left at a vantage nt where we can begin to descry, in the always receding landscape intellectual history, the broad outlines of the territory apPriated and worked by the disparate group whose common in® are now become more apparent than their differences: the of structuralism. out such a retrospect, the founding fathers of the nation stand bel^ years ago they seemed only impressive names movement: not only Saussure, ^nt Freud and Marx as well. If anything, the Saussurian inheritance fr structuralism seems a relatively minor one now, a few sections a posthumously assembled text of no great length in itself, iiting to notions of semiology, synchronicity, and the theory of exiigo in a manner far less developed than in it was in the writings of torce, gestalt psychology, or Durkheim and Mauss. Both the Privileged position of linguistics in the science of signs, and the arjary nature of the signifier are ideas that have seriously been into question since then, and the implied binary/digital ^Pistemology of Saussure, so often invoked in the theoretical writings structuralism, has in fact been belied by the practice of structural of ™'^st of whom have clearly used a polyvalent/analog mode of in their work, which they simply recast in a development aussurian terminology. The philosophical thinking of the young ^rx. however, and the metapsychological and hermeneutic j^tings of Freud, have increased their stature annually among those fenced by structural thought, and the structural bias of their

thinking has become more and more prominent a factor in the postwar interpretations of their work, particularly since the in corporation of the newly-rediscovered Grundrisse and Project for a Scientific Psychology. It was Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, of course, who defined what structuralism as a movement was to be, and supplied the focus, phraseology, and, with seeming reluctance, the beginnings of a philosophical stance. It is becoming clear now that their mutual dependence on each other has been overrated; the linguistic usage adopted by Levi-Strauss after his 1945 encounter withjakobson was a passing phase that obscured his fundamentally mathematical models, while the diversity of Jakobson’s interests were not a sign of the Frenchman’s influence, but of the fertility of the philologist’s own thinking. What they now appear to have in common, it seems, is a certain style of working, characterized by sudden shifts of focus, and a frequently zooming movement from the exhaustingly precise minutiae of a text, a myth, a grammar, or a ritual, to the broadest and most startling speculations about the organization of the human mind, the status of the subject in experience, and the principles of perception, expression, and intellection. They also hold in common a highly idiosyncratic and obscure writing style, Jakobson’s forbid dingly technological, Levi-Strauss’ decidedly precious and symboliste, and a stance of thoroughgoing naivete that leads the linguist to base his literary interpretations on the comparison and contrast of a poem’s simplest elements, the anthropologist to approach myth as an entanglement, however elaborate, of themes reducible to ultimate oppositions and mediations. Only one other figure can actually approach the range and power of these great speculators in structural thought: Piaget. There is a special integrity to his long-ignored work in child development and epistemology. He has chosen to emphasize the genetic and logical where Levi-Strauss and Jakobson have remained committed to syn chronic research, the former aloof from the reality of history, the lat ter from that of semantics. Piaget s commitment to structure remains as deep as theirs, nevertheless, and the resolute, absorbent breadth of his work has been as essential as theirs in mediating and synthesizing many large trends of modern inquiry. Moreover, only Piaget among his generation took care to ground his work completely in 21 systematically developed epistemology, using the growth of logic in the child as a privileged model, and criticizing the loosely-adopted

inguistic one—arguing, as Levi-Strauss and Jakobson have both since come to do, that linguistics is a part of the general science of signs, and not the other way round, since the perceiving and making of signs in children precedes the assimilation of language. ft was not solely through the efforts of these three that the struc turalist method came to have its first applications, and perhaps its tiiost lasting successes in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and genetic epistemology. But they were large contributors; as they are 3rge targets for the critique of structuralism by thinkers in other schools (for a school it had now become), or those taking indepen dent stances. What also developed during the period of the method’s gestation and growth —the late fifties and after —were outlooks of a elosely related and partially dependent nature. First and most original of these developments was the psychoanalytical school ofJac ques Lacan, whose allusive and often deliberately absurd style and theoretical approach read almost like a parody of the work of a LeviStrauss. Lacan too takes the stance of the completest naivete in his fanatically literal readings of Freud, while his adoption of an thropological and linguistic terminology in analyzing the nature of the unconscious seems as much calculated to be appealing as to ra tionalize the contradictions of the Freudian inheritance, which is a tuaze of functional and structural topology, description and prescrip*-tun, an energetics as well as a hermeneutics. Lacan’s influence has been immense, and his vogue continues in France when Levi-Strauss’ seems at an end. But the most important aspect of his work in retrospect appears to lie in its effort to apply a structural method to the pure and rigorous decoding of texts. Two younger critics have to some extent followed his lead. Roland Barthes and still is a prodigiously talented literary critique, but his struc tural analyses have always seemed more appropriate to the type of pop sociology which is the bastard child of Saussure’s dream of a general semiology; while Barthes’ own interests have given way in creasingly to a pursuit of the modish and eye-catching, his work t>ecoming a brilliant but often superficial record of each new fashion of terminology or approach. Less willful yet also more eccentric is Louis Althusser, who wished to do for Marx what Lacan had done for Freud in terms of a literal decoding, as well as to supply Marx ''^th an epistemological framework drawn from the shifts and pat terns in the Marxian corpus. While his work in the latter direction f*as been largely rejected, his scrupulous, minute readings of Capital 43

ifonlybyoutraXgîtVuime^ revolutionized traditional Marxology, by Marxists structuralism, which came under fire method: the Dolemr h” suspiciously non-ideological more excitimr « etween Levi-Strauss and Sartre was one of the mid-sixties, thouZh^\*'^ Parisian intellectual community of the blances as much as recognition of mutual resemThe most independeL quieted this struggle at last, turalist is Michel Foucanlt remains recognizably strucFoucault has rpdpP j ’ he also denies any resemblance, ideas in terms of aâ h bnown in America as the history of pressions of historicanWnkprri?^ decoding, not the ex in history viewed as h decoding of permutations He attempts to define presence and flow of discourse, marginal institutio^^ Z discourse by analyzing the clinics, prisons and ° history: madness, madhouses, As structuralism series on sexuality. commodating to views .^‘■^rne less of an outrage and more acthe signs of the move ''^bich it had previously defined itself, group of young critirr^^^*^ Passing into history became evident. A the late sixties, joined publication Tel Quel emerged in their diversity of interests in the desire to develop a complet last Saussure’s semiolo °f structuralism and to establish at sorb and supplant stru' ^Y^lphne in a way which would both abque and that of such The difference between their critiorthodox psychoanalv ’ * ^’'^^’"^tiralist schools as orthodox Marxism, their attack on structur 1' Pbcnomenology, was essentially that than without: the stud tâme from wzthin the movement rather selfconsciously remin,challenged their teachers in a manner ts the leading figure °f both Oedipus and May, 1968. Derrida tgure some day of th group (and will clearly be a father®ttd his contemporaries^q'tm of Freud or Levi-Strauss): whether he o crs, Braudrillard — ’ii * unknown to Americans —Kristeva, structuralism, or even a method as comprehensive as possible to say. We in tT "obieu as exciting, is still not Jakobson and Placet ®remain the students of men like an this brief circurn much more overall comprehension suggests: we cannot even begin to me generation of strucmmhT^”*^ successors until we finally assimilate 44

David Gorman

UNDER THE PROSCENIUM ARCH/ BARTHELME’S literary miniatures

The only people who have achieved anything have been those who had no intentions at all. - Oscar Wilde The herd turned onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. People looking out of their cars saw thousands and thousands of porcupines. The porcupines looked like badly engineered vacuum-cleaner attach ments. — Donald Barthelme Where is Thomas Pynchon? Has he been sighted? No, he has yet to be found. So much for Thomas Pynchon, he showed promise, too bad. Rudolph Wurlitzer is in the flats, he will probably remain there, totally determined and determining that determination that affects him. John Barth by writing about John Barth writing about John Barth wrote himself into the surface of a Klein bottle. Other fictioneers are having their own problems, apart from the three incredible shrinking men above; Pynchon to a point. Ground Zero, Wurlitzer to a two-dimensional strand, Barth to an object ®oemmgly tri-spatial to the non-topologist, but just as planar as Rudolph’s beach. Most of these authors in attempting subversion have succeeded only in undermining themselves. Most seem now, from the perspective of the cool detached Seventies, overly manic: burroughs, overly topical: J.G. Ballard, overly mythic: Coover, over ly exclusionary: Davenport, overly solipsistic; Sukenick. The texts are surviving but not thriving. I am not going too far out on the circuit by pointing out that too many circuits and connections not being completed or even intended. Post-modern fiction in the nglish-speaking world is on very unstable foundations resting, it is m danger of collapsing into a single fictioneer who alone will be able *^o chart a course among the scattered corpses of his compatriots be'^'veen excess, as with Dieter Rot’s magnificent approaches to ^egative minimalism, and success, exemplified best, perhaps, by Rainbow and its inclusion of enough discrete sexual in cidences to appeal to the repressed critics of the world, who all read, would read, nothing but hard-core pornography in their spare time which is when they are not asleep or out on cocaine or heavy OSes of marijuana injected right above the metatarsus, so that they get high enough to appreciate the lousy urban environment in which 45

they are forced to live, to let the world shrink to a hoccie ball, to the non-topologist, but more ragged per ratio of diameter t any known planet. And as they are falling into torpor, they come up with some insane theory which their homosexual friends m publishing business get printed for them, and which all writers, w because they have been brought up to believe everything they tea examine the said theories more than perfunctorily and feel c(^ pelled to believe them because they resembles the fiction t y themselves write or read. The purblind critics then select the mos ricochet-like items, thus perpetuating a sterile evolution of no p^a^ ticular importance to anyone in particular and in fact damaging those involved irreparably. Success has, indeed, been proven ma tistic and incompatible with the needs of a contemporary literature. Surely, one asks, items of merit have been produced in the p^ decade and a half? Why yes, of course. Giles-Goat Boy, The CTyt S of Lot 49, and Nog stand out as mature, fully-realized texts of a tounding complexity and outstanding humanity, an absolute y necessary synthesis for fiction. Those three novels have yet m equalled by their authors and will not be, ever. This trio represents a series of increasing perception of entropy, first implicit and un consideration, then explicit and conspiratorial, finally, internalize , in Nog, Wurlitzer’s elegant apex. The only possibilities for the authors in question were; expansion without increased ‘quality an excellence of textual information; contraction to the realm of t self and the purely self-conscious; and horizontal scene-shifting iti volving, basically, a transformation of nothing but locale. So, one faced with a paradigm of two vertical options and one horizonta which have been chosen by Pynchon, Barth, and Wurlitzer in respec tive order. I do not want to seem to take the position of berating the American literary geniuses. Much to the contrary, I think the text mentioned are among the ten finest in any language of the post-joy era to date, the Irishman having been not so much a ominating his future and successors, but, a feeble man who utilise the paltry resources of his time in a clever manner and indicate a ternate routes, some of which have been taken, some abandone ■ point I have remained under the proscenium arch of IS eft in fictionalization. I would now like to discuss the arch itso man who comes closest to being the exact analogue of tha arc . We are all under the proscenium arch today, everybody is coO nected, and all the world’s a sage. Pynchon’s Rocket Parabola is » 46

model of the arch, so is the music of Terry Riley and Cecil Taylor, as are the paintings of Morris Louis and Frank Stella. The arch is the theatre of our senses and consciousnesses, from trash of street to debris of art, it is all there, all we know, but what do we do with it all? To define the limits, to be the limit, of boredom, of triviality, this is to be truly relevant and postmodern, to go beyond this limit is to join the trash or the debris whose relations to each other and the world is constantly being reassessed, even as I am doing so now. Will the piece you are reading fall below your vantage or will it escape in to the azure, this piece. Under The Proscenium Arch, why read anything, and why, especially, this verbal mass, how did you come across this verbal mass, did you expect this? Donald Barthelme has been more consistent in dealing with his art than any other American fictioneer, and at the same time, more varied. His range is incredi ble, as wide as Pynchon’s and with, perhaps, deeper roots. He is not afraid to openly discuss any matter of concern outside of his selfeonscious feedback system, for example, “The revolution of the past generation in the religious sciences has scarcely penetrated popular consciousness and has yet to significantly influence public attitudes that rest upon totally outmoded conceptions.” This quote from his ■Snow White (1967) is not atypical of his non-isolation from the pres ent in which he performs. Barthelme is the only writer left who can make one foam at the mouth with true literary fervor. His most important theoretical tenet ’s never to be boring, and he is remarkably effective in coming to terms with all that can mean. He always willing to throw in or out strange twists and fragments (which he has lost faith in), to a degree that no other fictioneers achieve, outside of the postDADA schools of fragment-worship, which are for the greatest fraction uniformly un interesting and dull. Barthelme’s clear as light prose style/form and his sharper than Swift/Sterne wit (he is fond of Rabelais) combine "rith an auditory facility surpassed only by Pynchon and Gaddis: “a learned man come to call saying ‘this with the newspaper is not kosher you know that.’ . . . judged him to be with some one of the governments.”, this last from This Newspaper Here. Barthelme can be indulgent to a perimeter of extremity-pursuit, not defined by any esthetic-ideological canon, but indicated by true internal processing of the environ, from Sentence, a marvel of the extensional approach, and quite accessible on its own terms, not being a watered down Joyce by any means, though Barthelme has been quoted as admiring 47

Finnegans Wake as a part of the landscape in which he lives, a sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for t bottom— if not the bottom of this page then of some other page where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think about the question raised by its own . . . existence.” Barthelme’s structures are muC fresher and uninhibited than Barth’s Funhouse/Chimera Moebius labyrinths. Barthelme alludes to his literary difficulties but does not spin them out, as Barth does, in agonizing detail, the kind of which makes Chimera unbearable. A consideration of the more disconcerting Barthelme texts may serve as an indication of the nature of the perimeter that encloses the canon of America’s only fragment-distrusting prose writer. Balloon”, which the reader may locate in the collection entitle , Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, is perhaps representative o Barthelme’s early object fetishism/fascination, which has since bee succeeded by a more personally based object fetishism, more close y related to dramatic occurrences encountered in life. The balloon i question is John Ashberry’s convex mirror, on a larger scale, but not quite as polished (one can excuse Mr. Barthelme for his homespu textures of the mid-Sixties, as his style became less ragged, a co responding loss of innocence, highly visible in Sadness, was note Barthelme s image, reflected in the huge balloon, which hovers ov a considerable portion of Manhattan Island, becomes stretched o of proportion to the expected, yet one must come to terms with author s situation, ‘critical opinion’ becomes divided and is recor e regarding the balloon/Barthelme, the writer just accustoming himself to submission before the reviewer’s unrelenting scalpe • monstrous pourings” “harp” XXXXXXX “certain contrasts wit darker portions inner joy” . , . “conservative eclecticisms that so far governed modern balloon design” “abnormal vigor warm, soft, lazy passages” “Has unity been sacrificed for a sprawling quality? . , . munching”.” Though the balloon comments signify the state of the state of contemporary art as a discrete, holsi k more likely to be a solipsistic paint on Barthelm e a f. The image of the balloon no longer is directly analogous art elme s head, his mirror has lost contact with what he sees to o jective, and must be rejected if the author is to operate in his e virons. The extraction of the balloon object proved, “easy; rrai carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in irgmia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, sometiirr 48

perhaps when we are angry with one another,” The balloon is resur rected in the Sadness text in the form of King Kong at “The Party”, now self-propelled and self-conscious. The magnum delectus among Barthelme tomes, by general con sensus among members of the Donald Barthelme Memorial Rotographical Society, as I might have indicated previously, with nary a thought in governance of my action, actual or supposed, is that Czfy) “Views of My Father Weeping”, the first item recognizable as a literary shard in the City Life hypercompendium, is both Marxist and Freudian/Proustian in dealing with the nature of memory (“I was trying to think of the reason my father had died. Then I remember: he was run over by a carriage.”), the structure of in dustrial society (“blue and green livery is not unusual.”), and the nature of what later becomes the ‘Dead Father’ in Barthelme s 1975 novelistic text. Barthelme, in ‘VoMFW’, has begun to experience sadness in a big way, here with regard to the deceased culture that is ‘west Civilization’. “Paraguay” is, without the slightest trace of a doubt, the author’s most apocalyptically frightening item. Forget black humour’, this “paraguay ” is off the visible spectrum into what n^ay be a kind of ultraviolet irony, more effective in its anti-war sentinient and ecological awareness than any other text, musical or dramatic, literary or painterly; this little pastoral scenario is even more harrowing than Vonnegut’s Cat ’s CTadle in its vision of the end game. it is not amusing, it is. well, interesting, as no other text can be. an example: “Heavy yellow drops like pancake batter fall from its Another story in City Life, “The Glass Mountain, deals with a ^^if, the Ur-artist. who attempts to scale a smooth-walled highrising mlding using ‘plumber’s friends.’ and is strangely affecting in spite bs arrogance. Arrogance characterizes City Life to a degree comP ^tely absent in all the previous and subsequent Barthelme. A cersuper-charged intellectuality is at work, whether inspired by 5 ^^^'^’nogenic philtres or Fad #6 sherry, in the text, and is supremely -confident: “Wednesday. I receive a note urgently requesting a feting, ‘/III men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their iural propensities, ” the note concludes. This is surely true. Yet the vacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my ex Perience.” (“The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend”) Barthelme would in '7 retrive that fundamentally innocent optimistic tonality sat r productive an almost unbearable confidence and self"staction, as well as some of the most truly unfettered texts pro49

duced since the original of textual organization. Sadness (1972), published two years after City Life, represents a definite fall from grace. It is an uncompelling work, and is, for, I think, Barthelme, somewhat depressing to say the least. In “The Par ty,” Barthelme fumbles earnestly, “I praised a Bonnard. It was not a Bonnard. My new glasses, I explained, and I’m terribly sorry, but significant variations elude me, vodka exhausts me, I was young once, essential services are being maintained.” Barthelme, not unlike the New York City he inhabits, is in a state of decay, just hanging on at dull cocktail parties and the like, surveying. “Daumier” is the only truly innovative text in the compilation, here Barthelme creates a surrogate persona, Daumier, which mitoses into second- and thirdperson components. Finally, the author dismantles the structure m what proves to be a rather touching manner. Sadness is fraught with disillusion in relation to ‘family life,’ the mind, and existence, negative facets are explored. Sadness may be of a greater proximity to what Barthelme, the man, is like than his prior releases, but it w earthbound and without the joy/bliss one has a right to demand of a contemporary text. If one may be permitted to assess Sadness as a loss of vision, then Barthelme s latest. Amateurs (1976), is indicative of the departure of coherence, of thematic unity; the units presented have very little relation to each other, appearing as random sequential entries in the OED might, mayhaps, appear. “Our 'Work and Why We Do It” is a blatant restatement of the much earlier Barthelme, collected in Unspeakable Practices . . “This Newspaper Here.” “The Wound’ repeats L lapse (to be found in the unimpressive Gmlty Pleasures (1974)), both tiring film spoofs. The best item in the assortment, Porcupines At the University,” quoted at the commencement of this production now subject to your scrutiny, does little, beside providing some easy humour, but, mirable dictu, retrieve the fundamental structure and device resource catalogue encountered in the short story labeled nothing more than “City Life.” At this late date, one can only hope that Barthelme attempt some ealthy, feckless radical experimentation of the type that led to and Unspeakable, the Creator-principle knows such activity t e part of one of America’s most valuable commodities is at least seven years overdue now, seven years too lengthily extended. iterature is able to function as a keystone in the proscenium arch o cu ture such as no other art form can. A fictioneer can freely 50

discuss any cultural phenomen that captures his attention, a concep tual artist is limited by the strictures of his conception, a musician can deal with visual contexts only in an ineffective, impressionistic fashion, if at all. Only the fictioneer, analysis will demonstrate, has the license to retrieve all cultural artifact genera. Though the fic tioneer pays dearly in terms of beauty and viscerality, which he can not evoke as readily as the composer or dramatist, he does have the last word’ in the cultural network, it is he who passes judgment on the total sphere, and the proscenium arch itself. Among fiction constructors of the past fifteen years, Donald Barclme has provided more moments of unqualified pleasure than all ut Pynchon; but where Pynchon is continuously ironicizing his crea tion, setting himself apart from his texts, Barthelme is almost always trect: in City Life he acknowledges the “Tolstoy Museum,” and then proceeds to bypass it; Pynchon concentrates on those who bypass, the underground, US, yet he writes in manners obviously in the tradi tions of Western Literature signified by the Tolstoy Museum. Pynon forfeits the right to comment on the ‘important’ figures, perhaps because he sees them in THEIR camp, allies of the perva'k '^P^ânoid-produced Enemy, but also so that he may co-opt and ’ their techniques without calling attention to the fact that he s oing so. Barthelme has never felt any such compulsion, and even ° ay does not, a story in Amateurs, “The Educational Experience,” ^^®ays and deflates Vivaldi (as Pynchon himself is wont to do, by ^’^‘ônio’s Lost Kazoo Concerto, which I am sure the ’an master would prefer to have us forget or misplace, if his soul „^®till capable of such thoughts), Tacitus, Herodotus, Pindar and thaU^'*” scripts,” in that order, an array that is so condensed B be of any concern or import to the reader. pro then has proven to be an invaluable component of the be ^tiium arch/cultural scene, in fact, he has been in a position to ^he eye of the storm, the keystone of that arch, reflecting society and its peregrinations. His fewe his latest stories are more of a task to read, they hold P^^^sures, surprise connections. One of Barthelme s recent ‘typi'^^’® literary Lichtenstein surface treatment, in which a tion \ ■^’êrican genre is inverted and exposed through magnificaQuesf compositional elements, the uncollected “The Party” typifies this approach, so does The Discovery in which concerns the realization of the fact that one of the 51

discuss any cultural phenomen that captures his attention, a concep tual artist is limited by the strictures of his conception, a musician can deal with visual contexts only in an ineffective, impressionistic fashion, if at all. Only the fictioneer, analysis will demonstrate, has the license to retrieve all cultural artifact genera. Though the fic tioneer pays dearly in terms of beauty and viscerality, which he can not evoke as readily as the composer or dramatist, he does have the last word’ in the cultural network, it is he who passes judgment on the total sphere, and the proscenium arch itself. Among fiction constructors of the past fifteen years, Donald Barclme has provided more moments of unqualified pleasure than all tit Pynchon; but where Pynchon is continuously ironicizing his crea tion, setting himself apart from his texts, Barthelme is almost always irect: in City Life he acknowledges the “Tolstoy Museum,” and then proceeds to bypass it; Pynchon concentrates on those who bypass, the underground, US, yet he writes in manners obviously in the tradi tions of Western Literature signified by the Tolstoy Museum. Pynon forfeits the right to comment on the ‘important’ figures. Perhaps because he sees them in THEIR camp, allies of the perva5^^/puranoid-produced Enemy, but also so that he may co-opt and .5 techniques without calling attention to the fact that he oing so. Barthelme has never felt any such compulsion, and even ay does not, a story in Amateurs, “The Educational Experience,” and deflates Vivaldi (as Pynchon himself is wont to do, by Antonio’s Lost Kazoo Concerto, which I am sure the is st rnaster would prefer to have us forget or misplace, if his soul ‘‘Cla of such thoughts), Tacitus, Herodotus, Pindar and that^^*^ scripts,” in that order, an array that is so condensed B to be of any concern or import to the reader. pros ^fien has proven to be an invaluable component of the be arch/cultural scene, in fact, he has been in a position to the eye of the storm, the keystone of that arch, lates^”^^ reflecting society and its peregrinations. His fewe latest stories are more of a task to read, they hold devic P^^asures, surprise connections. One of Barthelme s recent ‘typic%’® literary Lichtenstein surface treatment, in which a tion of genre is inverted and exposed through magnificaQuesti ^^'^l^uical, compositional elements, the uncollected The typifies this approach, so does “The Discovery in which concerns the realization of the fact that one of the 51

that case it ? h°pe Barthelme is not being self-referential in which is far P°®^*hle he has mistaken his own peculiar flatness, jectophilism"?’^^?^'"^’^ French school of determined Obright Pa’”Rn°^ ullness, “I guess you think I’m dull, too, is that

nr ‘dull.’ Thev h never been uninteresting, uncaptivating, spirit I suppose b of late, city life does tax the a meal he cons'd^^ «^ertain limit is reached when Barthelme serves Fritos, and oth ^’^gant, in “Daumier,” consisting of Saltines, Tab, a fiery lim washed down with generous amounts o which will not d”'^ under license by the Coca-Cola Company and pleads age-old secret recipe no matter how one ^ulate to certain yearly allows a small quantity to cir very rigi(j require ^nd bibbers whose credentials meet t e fashionable dentp*^-^^*^^Cellar-master.” A certain amount o above its times B allowable, but the best literature has risen tnainingyj-eg to s best does so with a vengeance, while re ft seems, in the m that environment the author contactsttpon the text in Barthelme, that the milieu is imposing ^hhe retaining snn reverse, the text must regain contro Barthelm ’ P^titaneity, too intelligej^j not^ effecting a recouping of his powers, he i .providrnVee^f-P^-ch a recovery, and he will succee S 0 stays away from the Tab. Brian Spencer Doherty

THE DUPLICATIONS By Kenneth Koch. Random House. The Duplications, Kenneth Koch’s first long work in over fifteen years, is a mad. farcical poem which, in the course of its pages, takes its readers on a giddy jaunt around the world, jumping from South America, to Africa, to Greece, to various obscure islands in the Mediterranean. Its levels of absurdity and humor are equally varied; Koch juggles language wth astounding dexterity. By using characters who are familiar to us, yet removed CWalt Disney animals, for instance), he manages to keep just out of our grasp, a movement so impor tant in a light-toned poem. The verse IS humorous rather than satirical — but modernistically humorous, fitting well to Jean Arp’s definition: “hunaor/is water from the beyond/mixed with wine from down here.” Unlike Ko, or a Season on Earth, Koch s earlier long poem in a humorous vein, also written in ottava 'rtma. The Duplications shows itself to be a work of maturity. In Ko, the structure of the long poem was not yet resolved sufficiently for the younger poet, and as a result the language was often turgid, the rhymes over-clever, the imagery blunt. In The Duplica tions, the language is volatile and ^aceful, the rhymes masterful, the ‘tnages treated with a subtle skill. Although it has lost some of the auda city of Ko, it has gained immeasura bly in technique. His characters are tossed about between situations and scenes which seemingly have nothing to do with one another, but maintainttig an odd linguistic continuity. Koch tends to rescue rather than destroy his creations, placing him more in the genre of humor than satire. One finds

oneself more at ease with the poet, and less ambiguous toward the poem, Kenneth Koch’s voice is perhaps the most unusually appealing in contem porary poetry. It is not rarified, but rather, manages to maintain poetic integrity without convincing us that he is hopelessly beyond us. In his use of jargon, cacaphonous rhythms, and meta-slang, he remains an almost universally pleasurable poet. The poem has such a constantly moving texture that one finds it difficult to quote, but here is a characteristic passage:

Aqua is saved, the deadly dart it had Intended for the lovely young Etruscan Held in its trunk, unsent! McDrew, gone mad In his frustrated wait for the con cussion Of poison dart and girl, picks up a shad Seen lying on a fish-store plank and throws it In fury at the slowly moving pair. Huddel swerves round and grabs him by the hair. "Damn you! Who are you? Why'd you throw that fish? ‘American commander?' What the hell! You followed me from Samos! Boy, you'll wish You never joined the service! Ring out, bell. And hide his screams!" But, with a savage swish. The lions rushed and took him, like a shell The ocean takes, from HuddeTs hands, and left Him staring, as if of all sense bereft, (p 61)

But despite his closeness to us, C s world IS not our own. The colnltr. and clear’lv themselves clearly between each character bet-en each emotion. There is a pri

primkN?

-’-ds,

"'here events

assert th

reference to superfluous details.

lo us, my love, are Mouldings, ^re bellboys, elevators, Kleenex coarse far romance! (p 14)

snarled at fnr -des: liCman

^ybeen his

Beckett for instance-“he h '"°dd just slightly out r ours, the resub h *"c>dence cept the events in '^“e, for his world is" r ^o, in which he rP a'lsible. Unlike

cess.

now plays off y '"’th great „ -t suc-

'Uust not Maturing" as an unconscious occurs over ib

assume that artist is an

merely

''’■■■“■a. Cd,'"""’ P°ctns, the prodi

n Be coni?P ^^Pllcaiions it see poem into its L,,

TBelongp cise above^the s

‘

®’’°"'ter ddeen ’”-^®don.

put the

eomple^^Bled him

sensuality of his '^«»nes frantic «‘rt«er work, and

forced him to tighten the style which appeared rough, on occasion in The

Art of Love. The humorous poets of the so called New York School have often been criticized for being "unable to deal “realistically” with important topics. It is true that much false op timism has been generated from Ken neth Koch’s sincere optimism, and that his style forbids "serious treat ment of certain subjects, but these limitations are self-imposed, and ac tually serve as a form, productive rather than detrimental in its pline. In “The Age of Deception . poetry of this sort has an importance merely because it gives pleasure. Ken neth Koch, as a poet, is necessary. Christopher Hawthorne GEOGRAPHYIH By Elizabeth Bishop Farrar, Straus, Giroux This is a precise, polished colle of ten poems (including one trans a tion from the Spanish of Octavi Paz). What is most amazing is th the personal simplicity of Bishop speech leads us into conflagration fire, ashes eruptions and hissing sea We begin with the visit ‘ with Au Conseulo to keep her dentist s ap pointment” and, using National Ge graphic much like Alices looki glass, we find ourselves “falling, ing/our eyes glued to the cover. Our eyes glued to the cover t waiting room, the idle moose on country road or the objects on desk — we make the headlong leap to the “rich mud/in burning rivu and emerge grasping at least highlights of Bishop’s topographyShe depicts the appearance o a^^^ chosen object with an aura of naiv and fresh scrutiny, and then forces beyond into unexpected metapho

we are in the dentist’s office, a "magazine inadvertantly leads us to:

Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire hke the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. J read it right straight through. b was too shy to stop. "I Poem , the poet stops us in a n" family sketch of Scotia town, and suddenly life and art merge.

Which is which? and the memory of it cramped on a piece of Bristol board, but how live, how touching In detail lhat we get forfree c little of our earthly trust. Not niuch. rei^ej’ and dabs she

to Us ^^/amiliar and vouchsafes it ^tream^'^k recognize the the farmer’s house nnmeasurable terrain 185o’s certain Realists in the Pcasants^f'"'^'^ ^®”ailiar scenes of Bishop , '"Bildhood memories, '"cidentr'^R^^ highly personal

and the ' as Well

their’s a ' work, as in tiqnity of ”atiniations of classical anvalug Scandeur and transcendant

z«.r 1 d’’ poems, “Crusoe Pnoc old*i reveals her ttn-renam ^t*d . . . un-rediscovered, ^“yasifsh.:" as naturtales of tf, "’^ce recounting familiar Bnt the shipwrecked at sea, a es become gruesome in

ways never expected: Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed offood and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it fora baby goat. I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, in finities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one . . . At this point the poet has already accustomed us to the archipelago where snails look like beds of irises, where goats resemble gulls, where “the one kind of berry, a dark red” becomes a “home brew. I’d drink/the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff/that went straight to my head/and play my home made flute/(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)/and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats./ Home-made, home-madel But aren’t we all?” On the busride west in “The Moose”, crystalline fog settles on hens, cabbages, and on “lupins like apostles.” The passengers sleep and sigh as the bus forages on in “moon light and mist.” The murmuring of voices becomes “Grandparents voices/uninterruptedly/talking, in Eternity . . ■ the way they talked/in the old featherbed.” The appearance of the moose is an extension of Bishop's childlike reverie on this journey that delicately approaches the

fantastical. The moose, “homely as a house/(or, safe as houses) is both in nocent and reassuring, and that is why “we feel/(we all feel) this sweet/sensationofjoy," " “12 O'clock News” treats the writers desk as a planet, whose con structions are often terrifying and in explicable. It includes elucidation of the gooseneck lamp as the moon-“It gives very little light; it could be the aslTi

signboards,

baUnc^h" bSarre

and "masterful and unsettling as Kafka's. Her style is tahngh..„a

appropriate!^:’’”

''olcanic. More

weigh less than light lasting as long as this J lasts phrase ISict-ivio Paz translation) Jill Neimark HENRY'S FATE By John Berryman ^rrar, Strains f~” Thp . fiiroux published p«buXr„:£'””'’“■»».«

P°«"1S. a selection of f “^Pleted unfinished poems //"’Sments and

^"«ion about his h ".“"‘^’uding ^’“holism, therapy ‘ug prelude to his 1979 “nsettl^Hection of Dream ^•^de some of theXTR y« published are e their insight into bT ‘"^^ntions about the

Creation of

Henry, the central figure of the poems, and about the work as a whole. The strained, eliptical, and per sonal style of the Songs often dis courages the casual reader. Misread ing the tone, confusing a series of syn tactical connections, the poems can appear flat and arbitrary. However, when read slowly, the blurred picture takes on sharp edges. The words, which often seem to strain for an identity separate from the poem, coalesce to express a particular idea, and in the case of these Songs, to ex press another facet of Henry s char acter. One of the new poems explains, “There's madness in the book. And saneness,/he argued. Ha! Its all a matter of/control (& so forth) of the subject.” Berryman tries to extend the range of his feeling by embracing every detail of his life. The height ened effect of the style reflects this ambition. There is an innovative urge to create new dimensions for his art and life, and yet not to falsify. M'hereas Henry might sometimes bore us, still, probable at the very same instant, he will also entertain us, reaching as he does for what Will'®*^ Phillips terms, “the connections be tween the real, the forbidden, and th® fantastic.” In Henry's realm the rea the forbidden, and the fantastic are no longer as distinct as these wor might indicate. Because Henry has no single personality, we respond com to his differing, seemingly tradictory characteristics, codger Henry contain within hisse Henry young, Henry almost beaut ful/Henry the seducer.” Berryma^ has written, as Proust might have, am less impressed than I used to be the universal notion of the continu' Y of consciousness.” The psyche nee

wh' ^ound by a linear logic by fh *k **■ In perhaps id definition of Henry and this a of the personality yet given, the w Dream Song. “I’m reading my book backwards," concludes:

human personality, that’s im possible. T'he lines of nature & of will, that's impossible. I give the whole thing up. ^uly there resides a living voice ich if can make we make out of choice ^ot giving the whole thing up.

"Thi

hoice, once made, binds Berry-

^'ie^r E r of freedom, for whendone labour of travel is orrnj/ o**‘ With his life on him like a ton.”

filitv madness and the volarefer Personality implies a social ‘bis v71aril-’ ®‘andard. By affirming the ®o'’fyman must accept isoIaX"'^'’"^"' P®'" sense of and • ‘be split between social eomnr “Many bore un-

down/in the forests of the soul.” Henry is struggling to be free, to play, yet he must accept the need to make money, to have knowledge, to be socially responsible. The collection is uneven, which is especially true of the later poems. Often a mannerism seems used as an easy escape from finding the right Word. Often the references seem too vague, yet the poems with their heightened style somehow always con vey an inexplicable enthusiasm. Someone has asked, what would hap pen if just one person of our age tried to tell the truth about himselP What would the answer be, and what would it look like? “I/with my intent to be true beyond belief,/which is merely human,” Henry declares. These poems, with their new revelations about Henry and Berryman himself, are a part of perhaps the most am bitious attempt in recent years to form such an answer.

Willard Uncapher

the T fiellevue or have I fonnd out./How ®orryman°"’" '"bom that w g’^eatly admired, suggested bfe or * perfection either in ®berna ' oreation. The second iife as ■ isolates us from ordinary Des"‘'°"^^''®‘^^P‘b°f''ision.

‘ion, bXk

sense of painful isola‘r

Bellevu ' earlier reference to Wit a d bke a playful taunt, assman b abound: “Legman "'ander abominable Henry/ ^gog:/t^ P‘®"oe and Italy ffenrv ■ ° what visible places.” ®‘range 'i ^°™®bow always comic, Pointinp'^'^^^*'^’ ‘^“‘nk, always "disapPeople, letting everyone

PRIZES IN LITERATURE AWARDED BY COLUMBIA COLLEGE

The Academy of American Poets Prize A prize of $100 given by the Academy to the poet ten the best poem or group of poems submitted during year. The winners for 1977; Ann Cherner and Brad Gooc

writ' ^cadernir

Van Rensselaer Poetry Prize Mariatrna A prize of about $100 from the income of the Griswold V an Rensselaer Fund given to the Columbia The dent who is the author of the best example of English lyric winner for 1977; Jonathan Haines for “Came Home. George Edward Woodberry Poetry Prize A prize of about $100 from the income of the Woodberry Prize Fund, awarded every second year to a University undergraduate for the best original poem. The wi 1977; Scott Morgan

for

Bennet Cerf Prize (Columbia College) critic^^ A prize awarded for the best piece of poetry, prose, or writing submitted by an English major from Columbia Co winner for 1977; Michael Bornstein for his short story,

Seymour Brick Award for Playwriting College A prize of about $400 awarded annually to the undergraduate who submits the best one-act or full length p prize was established in memory of Seymour Brick by his son. The winner for 1977; Michael Bornstein for “Bressman Fifty.”

Judges; Professors Wallace Gray (Chairman) David Shapiro Howard Schless

CONTRIBUTORS COLUMN Charles Arcudi is a member of the class of 1979, Columbia College. J(imes Cascatto received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and is presently a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia’s Italian Herature Program. He has previously published in Books Abroad, ® fagzonz critiche (Catania). Alla bottega (Milano) and Internat^nal Poetry Review. Part One of “Parenchyma” was published in COLUMBIA REVIEW.

Cherner received her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and is presently an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at Columbia’s Qol of Fine Arts. She is the winner of the Joan Grey Untermeyer ontest and the recipient of the Mademoiselle Poetry Prize for 1976 ^rid the Academy of American Poets Prize for 1977.

^llegrtno DAczerno is an Associate Professor in Columbia’s Italian Apartment. His first book of poetry, Asymmetries, will soon be published. ^hornton Davidson is a member of the class of 1979, Columbia Col-

and is the Managing Editor of COLUMBIA REVIEW. Doherty is a member of the class of 1979, Columbia College, ®ud IS on the staff of COLUMBIA REVIEW. He has previously published inJester, the humor magazine of Columbia College.

’s a member of the class of 1977, Columbia College, bas previously published in numerous campus journals.

Hawthorne is a member of the class of 1979, Columbia and is the Associate Editor of COLUMBIA REVIEW. He previously published in its pages. Horzng is a member of the class of 1979, Columbia College. He previously published in Soundings, Fortnight, and Pegasus.

^dTgoshes is a member of the class of 1977, Barnard Coland has previously published in The Barnard Literary SO'Ztne, Considered Embrace, and COLUMBIA REVIEW. member of the class of 1978, Columbia College, has previously published in COLUMBIA REVIEW.

Morgan is a member of the class of 1977, Columbia College, 59

is the recinip I Columbian, the yearbook of Columbia College. He recipient of the Woodberry Poetry Prize for 1977.

is on thesis

iished in its pag«

number of the class of 1979, Barnard College, and REVIEW. She has previously pub-

Jo/m Soldo . "^ent. His book Professor in Columbia’s English Depart His SeZected Poems^rK ’ ,America, -was published in ‘ ooming, ’ biography of T.S. Eliot, and a novel are fort

Panzd Shapiro f E’^glish at ColnrJh’^'^’r'^'^*^ critic, translator, is Assistant Professor o soon be publishpri^ oilege. His latest book of poetry. Lateness, review. ■ previously appeared in COLUMBi ^Mard Uncabh and is Edit?" ^ member of the class of 1978, Columbia Co ' published in its COLUMBIA REVIEW. He has previous/ P^ges.

ISSN: 0010-1982