To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover -Wallace Stevens There's a type of poem very much among us which means to sound compassionate and which tries to tell the reader how he ought to feel about the nonspecific predicament of an often unspecified person. Here, for instance, is Peter…
So far, I thought while snipping hairs from my nostril, the visit was going fine. I hadn't been expected, first of all, and so the initial surprise pleased my parents so much that any mention of our past difficulties dissolved in the affectionate air. Rather than asking – either pained or demandingly – why I…
I fly in sharp as Mies van der Rohe. I sit on the old couch at a raucous angle, toss out reels of the latest information but they look away, the kingfisher and his wife, my mother. Outside a jay is throwing seeds from his feeder. All around, the pines are black or pure white,…
The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove…
The two boys stood mute with the anticipation of commerce. Talmidge was giving them last-minute instructions. "Now, your business is to sell. Stay out from in front of the spectators. And don't ever just stand still watching the matches. Keep moving." "When do we get our nuts?" Nick asked. Talmidge ignored the question. He was…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O’Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Rosellen Brown Associate Fiction Editors Andre Dubus DeWitt Henry CONTRIBUTORS MICHAEL BENEDIKT currently teaches at Boston University. His latest book is Night Cries (Wesleyan, 1976), and the poem here is from a ms. in progress entitled, “The Badminton at Great Barrington; or, Gustave Mahler…
Except for critics like Hilton Kramer and George Levine in The New York Times Book Review or Naomi Bliven in The New Yorker, Martin Green's reviewers have treated each book in isolation, remarking with surprise that here is a very smart man whom we must keep our eye on. This is unfortunate, because Green's work…
When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, and during the years when I was first falling in love with books and girls, I used to imagine that my Uncle Nathan was twins. Even back then, I guess, his life was a great sadness to me. What I couldn't figure out was how a…
The Nightingale What is it to be free? The unconfined Lose purpose, strength, and at the last, the mind. ANTHONY HECHT: a couplet to accompany Aesop The American poets who were born up and down the 1920s have come into their full powers and fame well before now, though the contours of some careers have…
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