Spring 2005 - English Department

Transcription

Spring 2005 - English Department
In This Issue:
David Haynes
Barton Sutter
Bart Schneider
Bill Meissner
Thomas Sparrow
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It would be easy to say Pete
Hautman’s Godless is a banned
book waiting to happen. After all, any young-adult
novel written with the central purpose of challenging what readers think about faith and the Almighty seems destined to stir trouble for librarians
and school boards far and wide.
It would have been equally easy for Hautman to
write a book that settles for tired potshots without
paying attention to the importance religion plays in
many people’s lives and the good it stirs in many
hearts. But, mercifully, Hautman hasn’t done that.
Godless does the nearly impossible. In an era
when the public discourse on religion and values is
often limited to sneering self-righteousness, Godless uses humor and empathy to explore important
ideas and allows for complexity and disagreement
with a minimum of histrionics.
Jason Bock, the narrator of Godless, is a
normal high-school student who, one sunny
afternoon, gets an unusual idea. Flat on his back
after being socked by the town bully, Jason stares
up at his town’s water tower, and in his haze, he
considers for the first time the importance of that
structure.
“It was the biggest thing in town. Water from
that tower was piped to every home and business
for miles around. The water connected all of us. It
kept us alive,” Hautman’s young narrator thinks.
“That was when I came up with the idea of the
water tower being God.”
Jason shares his idea with some friends, and
just for fun, they speculate on its implications. A
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Review by Nick Healy
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Godless
By Pete Hautman
Simon & Schuster, 2004
Price (Hardcover) $15.95
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Spring 2005
Mary Sharratt
Philip Dacey
Dominick Argento
Mark Nowak
Bruce Rubenstein
Louis Jenkins
Steve Healey
George Roberts
Sarah Stonich
Ed Moses
Jonathan Odell
Valerie Miner
Patricia Hampl
Dave Page
and more!
new religion is born. They call it The Church of the
Ten-Legged God and dub themselves the
Chutengodians. They concoct a false history and a
set of rules for believers. Others, including the very
bully who decked Jason, are let in on the joke and
“converted” into the church.
From there the satire takes off. Desperate for
reassurance and meaning in his life, one kid
begins to take the whole idea seriously. Another
grows disenchanted. And still another seizes the
chance to gain power for himself by pretending to
believe. He forms a splinter group, and tension
boils amongst the Chutengodians. These tensions
only aggravate those between the Chutengodians
and their families.
The way that Hautman handles those tensions—especially the ones between Jason and his
devoutly Catholic father and friends—is what
makes his story surprising compelling. Sure, he
allows for a few cheap jokes. (For example, during
an argument about abortion with a Catholic classmate, Jason says he can think of someone who
wouldn’t have been missed.) But mostly, Hautman
allows his characters to talk to each other, to
listen, and to be empathetic. He allows readers to
think, to draw their own conclusions, and to retain
respect for people who don’t share their beliefs.
Godless has gained a lot of attention for
Hautman, Minnesota’s prolific author of suspense
novels and young-adult books. In November 2004,
he was awarded the National Book Award for
Young People’s Literature.
Godless belongs in the hands of young readers
because it treats them with respect, the same as it
does for its characters and their beliefs. This is not
to say the book is short on satire and bite. It has
plenty. But Hautman gives readers a book that
asks them to think without telling them what to
think. And that’s something everyone can believe
in.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 1
Page 2 Corresponder Spring 2005
St. Paul Stories of F. Scott
Fitzgerald
By Patricia Hampl and
Dave Page
Borealis Books, 2004
Price (Softcover) $19.95
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“no strange animal to him but/ just a different
version of himself, (82)” that we can come to
understand both Eakins’ and Dacey’s perspective
on science, the arts, and sport. Poetry, painting,
medicine, geometry, and boxing are all reaching for
similar goals.
What Dacey has written is a biography more
detailed, more developed, more intimate than any
biographer could have ever wished for, but more
than anything else, The Mystery of Max Schmitt:
Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins, is a
peek into the heart of an artist and the heart of a
man. It is not to be overlooked.
Review by Benjamin K.
Drevlow
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Philip Dacey’s Turning Point Poetry Prize
collection of poems, The Mystery of Max Schmitt:
Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins, is a
successful dissection of the achievements of 19th
century painter and teacher Thomas Eakins. While
on the surface the book may appear as just a
poetic biography of the man who studied athletes,
doctors, priests, and poets, and portrayed them all
on canvas, if you look closely you will find that,
between the lines, Dacey has managed to write
himself into the page, and reveal what appears to
be his own personal philosophy on the science of
poetry and its relation to all other arts.
Dacey, a former long-time resident of Minnesota and professor at the state university in
Marshall, is the author of seven full-length books
of poetry, including The Deathbed Playboy, and
has been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, a
Fulbright fellowship to Yugoslavia, and a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts, just to
name a few. He is a St. Louis native, a Peace Corps
volunteer, and father of three, who moved to
Manhattan at the end of 2004.
While the subject of Dacey’s award-winning
book, the life and work of Thomas Eakins, remains
consistent throughout its 93 pages, what varies is
the style and form of the poems in the book, and
the individual voices that tell the reader about this
man who was, at one time, labeled by art committees as a “butcher” and snubbed by critics until his
death in 1916.
With the exception of a few poems, such as
sections of “The Swimming Hole,” “The Students,”
and “Eakins Up-to-Date,” as well as “Seven Hands:
From the Paintings of Thomas Eakins”, a poem
reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird”, most of the poems in
Dacey’s book are spoken in the voices of the people
who knew Thomas Eakins best—his students, his
subjects, his wife, as well as Thomas Eakins and
his paintings themselves. It is through these voices
that we are able to look into the life of Thomas
Eakins with surgical precision.
And it is through the relationships that Eakins
had with his friends and subjects, revealed in
Dacey’s poems, like “In Camden” for example,
where we read about Eakins’ friendship with an
aging Walt Whitman “The Good Grey Poet down/ to
his last disguise, (26),” the subject for a painting
that was never finished, and in “Elegiac,” the first
section in the voice of Billy Smith, a boxer, who is
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Review by Josh Olsen
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The Mystery of Max
Schmitt: Poems on the Life
and Work of Thomas
Eakins
By Philip Dacey
Turning Point, 2004
Price (Softcover) $17.00
One of the great ironies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
brief but vibrant life was his tenuous relationship
with the city in which he was born, the city from
which he would find inspiration for great literary
works and characters, the city from which—it
seemed—Fitzgerald was always attempting to
disassociate himself.
Patricia Hampl and Dave Page’s collection, The
St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a testament
to some of the most memorable, most lucrative
short stories Fitzgerald wrote, but it is also a
testament to the paradoxical and often dubious
relationship between the city and its native son.
For years, literary scholars have pointed to
Fitzgerald’s embattled childhood on Laurel and
Summit Avenues in St. Paul as feeding the fire that
would eventually grow into Fitzgerald’s obsession
with social class. This bitter social acuity stamped
virtually all of Fitzgerald’s writing. Indeed, aside
from setting a number of his stories in St. Paul,
Fitzgerald also wrote his first novel, This Side of
Paradise, there and pitched what would eventually
be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, while living
in St. Paul.
The St. Paul-Fitzgerald ties are innumerable. In
the introduction to The St. Paul Stories, Hampl lays
the framework for a fresh envisioning of Fitzgerald:
one in which St. Paul is more than just a setting or
backdrop—one in which St. Paul rises to the front
as the conflict, character, and driving force behind
each short story that is to come. At the heart of her
introduction, Hampl plays psychologist and historian to reexamine Fitzgerald’s life and writing in
context of St. Paul during the late 1800s and early
1900s. As Charles Baxter puts it, “Fitzgerald loved,
hated, and was obsessed by St. Paul and in her
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vehicle in which readers witness both the growth of
the Contags and the weight of their story. In this
passage, Ernest writes to his deceased wife before
he repatriates their children to Germany where
they must deny their Ecuadorian heritage: “Ernest
remembered lifting his hand instinctively to touch,
ever so gently, the pocket of his suit jacket where
he carried a small photograph of Elizabeth, whom
he called, adoringly, Isabel. Just then profound
sadness came over him unexpectedly, and he had
continued defiantly, ‘I never believed I would take
myself and the children from this valley, Isabel…I
take you with me in my heart, and I will come back
to be near you.’”
Through extensive historical research and
compassionate storytelling, the pains, hopes and
triumphs of one ordinary family bring to light the
extraordinary untold tales of the German Ecuadorian survivors.
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Review by Thomas Maltman
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Mary Sharrat’s second novel,
The Real Minerva, evokes the slow, familiar
rhythms of a small town in Minnesota in 1923.
Against these lulling rhythms, there is a darker
undercurrent of myth and family strife pulses
through the narrative.
Picture Penelope, our central character, amid
steaming irons, plucked chickens, and sweltering
kitchens. Now picture her grandfather trying to
drown her in a rain barrel when she was only a
child.
Her mother Barbara—an acid-tongued character who conceived Penelope after she was raped by
her own father—tends house for a man who recently lost his beloved wife. On summer afternoons, he sneaks into Barbara’s bedroom, seeking
healing through touch. Penelope finally gets fed up
with cleaning the stains they leave behind on the
sheets and runs away to live with the Van Den
Maagendenberg woman on a farm outside of town.
Leaving behind the town, with its dust and
gossip-ridden cafe, will change her. The
Maagendenberg woman, as we first know her, is an
archetypal character. She is woman that lives on
the edge of society, an unconventional figure who
leaves her husband to have her baby at home.
The period details—matinees with Rudolf
Valentino, moonlit sonatas playing on the phonograph, washtubs and searing laundry soap—ring
true.
All of this is interwoven with the mythic. We
recognize Penelope’s name from The Odyssey, a
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During the Second World War, a diplomatic
exchange took place between the United States, the
Axis countries, and cooperative Latin American
countries. “The consulate insists that the Americans want to exchange Latin American Germans,
Austrians, and Italians for Americans caught in the
Axis countries.” Families caught in this exchange
were blacklisted as aliens in their homeland.
Fifty years after the war, we now have the
stories of the men, women, and their children
removed from their homes, shipped to the Axis
countries, and forced to become soldiers and
laborers. Authors Kimberly E. Contag and James
A. Grabowska, share the story of German Ecuadorian Ernest Contag, Kimberly’s father, a widower
and father of four forced to move his family from
their home in the South American Andes to Nazi
Germany. The authors gathered research including
interviews, personal documents, photos, and
official documents in libraries and archives in
Ecuador, Germany, France, the United States,
Spain, and Portugal. This research is woven
throughout the narrative and works to enhance the
potency of the Contag’s historical journey.
The heart of this story is told through the eyes
of the Contag family, each member struggling to
come to terms with their identities, fears, and
commitments to one another. With honesty and
compassion, the authors create a strong intimacy
between the family and the reader that provides a
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Review by Kristina Lilleberg
The Real Minerva
By Mary Sharratt
Houghton Mifflin Company,
2004
Price (Hardcover) $24
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Where the Clouds Meet the
Water
By Kimberly E. Contag and
James A. Grabowska
Inkwater Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $25.95
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brilliant introduction to these stories, Patricia
Hampl shows us why.”
With her incisive examination of the volatile
relationship between St. Paul—past and present—
and Fitzgerald—both the legend and the writer—
Hampl, in effect, creates another character, one
not mentioned directly in any of the selected pieces
but constant in the reader’s mind throughout, the
character of Fitzgerald himself.
Hampl’s Fitzgerald is not only the iconic playboy of the Roaring Twenties, but also the often
unappreciated, often critically dismissed writer
during his own times who died believing himself a
failure, describing himself in his own words as “F.
Scott Fitzgerald; Hack Writer and Plagiarist; Saint
Paul, Minnesota.” It is this character, this conception of Fitzgerald and his story laid out in Hampl’s
introduction that leads to a new and deeper reading of The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 3
Page 4 Corresponder Spring 2005
Greed, Rage, and Love Gone
Wrong
By Bruce Rubenstein
Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 2004
Price (Hardcover) $22.95
Review by Nicole Lea Helget
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lines of discussion from becoming incoherent. He
mingles ideas from a strange, right-wing grammar
text with details of Reagan’s dealings with the U.S.
labor movement to explore power relations and
government’s involvement in commerce.
Throughout Shut Up Shut Down, Nowak uses
testimonial and straight reportage to tell his story.
At times, he alternates borrowed text laid out in
the form of a prose poem with his own sparse,
associative lines, melding disparate ideas in a final
mash of despair and confusion. Nowak’s own
language and line breaks are full of surprises.
The fourth section, entitled “Francine Michalek
Drives Bread,” is a haunting narrative poem split
into fifteen acts. The fifth section incorporates
more borrowed language, as well as some photographs, deployed skillfully for the purpose of
juxtaposing the coldness of corporate decisionmaking with the hard realities of those affected by
the closing of the Hoyt Lakes taconite plant on
Minnesota’s Iron Range.
Nowak’s work sometimes strays from what
might fit a strict definition of “poetry,” but if this
isn’t poetry maybe that distinction is unimportant,
a word that doesn’t apply to Nowak’s work. This
book is full of passion and allows the sad absurdities of post-industrial American life to expose
themselves for what they are.
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Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut
Down is an unusual book of poetry. Divided into five eclectic
sections, it deals with the human side of the
deindustrialization of America. The poems involve
conflicts between the haves and the have-nots over
the course of the last century. Ronald Reagan
becomes a prominent target, both for his anticommunist activities of the 1950s and for his
treatment of striking air traffic controllers in the
1980s. These poems contain music, but ideas
dominate, and their tone is as hard and cold as
their subject.
Nowak’s family history explains his interest in
those left behind when factories close. The plants
where his grandfathers and his father worked have
all closed during Nowak’s adulthood. Now active in
labor in Minnesota, he teaches in St. Paul, at the
College of St. Catherine. The poems in Shut Up
Shut Down are clearly literary activism, putting
poverty and insecurity on display in a sometimes
bewildering mix of materials.
In these poems, Nowak uses passages culled
from a variety of sources, each section includes its
own works cited page, one might not normally
associate with poetry. Many of the lines resemble
poetry only in their line breaks, such as the following, from “Capitalization,” part 12: “Capitalize
Devil, the Evil One, the Adversary / President
Reagan has said there would be / “no amnesty”
allowing a controller / to retain his job if, without a
valid reason / such as sickness, he had missed /
the deadline for returning to work.”
Such lines owe their impact more to ideas and
the associations between them than to sound.
Nowak weaves several sources into his poems, and
his use of boldface and italics keep the different
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Review by Jason Benesh
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Shut Up Shut Down
By Mark Nowak
Coffee House Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $15
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text mentioned in the story. Her mother Barbara is
named for St. Barbara, a woman tortured by her
own father for converting to Christianity. And then
there is the Maagendenberg woman, who holds
secrets of her own.
Along with these mythic undercurrents there
are familiar themes: maternal love, coming-of-age,
the individual against society.
It is a mark of Sharrat’s writing skill that the
complicated plot and conflict never overwhelms the
story. By the end, each one of these characters
becomes real and vivid in the reader’s mind. And
because we care so much, we keep reading, hoping
that even if this narrative has the darkness of a
fairy tale, that there will also be light.
Bruce Rubenstein exposes
some dirty little secrets about a few
infamous Minnesotans in his book, Greed, Rage,
and Love Gone Wrong. Rubenstein, an investigative
reporter, compiles 10 true crime stories that stirred
local communities in the past century and delivers
them with vivid detail, sharp images, and tough
language.
The trials, misdeeds, and private lives of mobsters, millionaires, hoodlums, and celebrities draw
the reader into the dark side of “Minnesota nice.”
Rubenstein spares no one. His research, reportage,
and authority hit hard and make for a rousing
read.
This excerpt from “Portrait of an Heiress,” a
chapter that unravels the intricacies of the 1977
Glensheen Mansion murders in which the killer
and accomplice were the victim’s own daughter
and son-in-law, proves Rubenstein’s unabashed
style:
“By that afternoon the news had gone out that
one of Minnesota’s most prominent citizens and
her nurse had been brutally murdered. A media
frenzy the likes of which Duluth had never seen
ensued. Marge and [Roger] Caldwell came to town
and set up headquarters at the Duluth Radisson
Hotel, where Marge quickly found herself at the
center of the furor…Marge confronted the accusations publicly. She bitched to reporters about the
way the police were treating her and Caldwell,
about their dire economic circumstances. She said
it was a scandal that an heiress such as herself
was virtually penniless.”
Rubenstein goes on to account other crimes
and possible murders committed by the Glensheen
heiress. He follows her life to and from Arizona, in
and out of courtrooms, and in and out of prisons.
Rubenstein describes the defense used by the
heiress’ lawyer, Ron Meshbesher, to get the heiress
acquitted of her mother’s murder. And while the
jury may have found Marge Caldwell not guilty, it
is clear that Rubenstein does not wish to leave the
reader with that impression. He uses a combination of sarcasm and irony to plant a seed of proverbial doubt. The chapter ends, “No one who is privy
to her [Marge’s] affairs was willing to discuss her
financial situation, but she will probably be just
fine. She’s an heiress.”
True crime books often run the risk of being
confusing and convoluted. Murders, arsons,
insurance claims, and disappearances can be
complicated matters. Rubenstein does a fair job of
managing the wealth of background information
that makes these stories tick. The only failing
Rubenstein exhibits is managing names. He often
interchanges last names, nick names, and first
names when referring to the same person.
Rubenstein seems to forget that although he’s been
studying and researching these people for years,
readers have not and aren’t as familiar with his
studies as he is. But despite this shortcoming, the
book works. And for all those interested in true
crime, Minnesota history, reportage writing, or
nail-biting, this book is for you.
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Since the 1970s, the sex industry has received
resistance from many feminist groups who see
pornography and prostitution as damaging tools to
women’s rights in our society. This fight continues
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Review by Marissa Hansen
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Not For Sale: Feminists
Resisting Prostitution and
Pornography
Edited by Christine Stark
and Rebecca Whisnant
Spinifex Press, 2004
Price (Paperback) $24.95
today. Books such as Not For Sale: Feminists
Resisting Prostitution and Pornography exist as a
call to action and an investigation of the sexual
exploitation of women.
Edited by Rebecca Whisnant and Christine
Stark (a recent graduate from Minnesota State
University’s MFA program), this collection acts as a
symbol of strength against the practice of trading
in sex.
Featuring 28 written works, this book spares
no detail and says exactly what is on every
feminist’s mind.
The selected articles are categorized into three
sections. The first section, “Understanding Systems
of Prostitution,” contains articles that explain how
the practice of sexual exploitation works, and how
it affects people of different races. An interview
between Stark and a former sex worker and an
article by Whisnant offer a basic understanding of
what pornography really is.
Part two, “Resisting the Sexual New World
Order,” explores a more personal and resistant
point of view. Similarities between capitalism and
prostitution are called to attention, as well as this
stop-and-pause observation: “. . . the Upper Midwest is also tied to trafficking in children (313)”—
the Upper Midwest, in this example, meaning
places as close as Bemidji and Moorehead.
An article written by Stark appears in this
section as well. Entitled “Girls to Boyz: Sex Radical
Women Promoting Pornography and Prostitution,”
Stark points out the difference between the view of
the feminist, who opposes the sex trade but
chooses not to blame the women involved in it, and
the view of the sex radical, who declares prostitution as just another form of sexuality. The sex
radical, as Stark explains, uses the words lesbian
and feminist interchangeably with sexuality and
freedom, while simultaneously pandering to the
mainstream ideals of what makes sex sell. “Sex
radical women do the pornographer’s dirty work by
promoting pornography and prostitution as work,
freedom, fun, and choice in both lesbian/bisexual
communities and mainstream society . . . . Sex
radicalism turns away from feminism, embracing a
captor/captive mentality as revolutionary.”
The final part of the book, “Surviving, Conceiving, Confronting,” explains the roles people play in
encouraging the continuation of prostitution and
pornography. In recognizing how women are
treated, portrayed, and viewed, society has the
responsibility of either hindering or promoting this
practice.
Scrutinizing an industry run by sexism and
corporate power, Not For Sale reveals the brutality
suffered by victims of the trade, but also the
courage and strength of those who stand up and
search for a better way for women everywhere.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 5
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Page 6 Corresponder Spring 2005
Farewell to the Starlight
in Whiskey
By Barton Sutter
BOA Editions, Ltd. 2004
Review by Hans Hetrick
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a brother and sister reunite in San Francisco and
lose a car but discover new roles as adult siblings.
This is a very hopeful story. “Veranda” follows love,
or the possibility of it, through the perspective of
an American woman teaching in India. Miner’s
characters hope to find and share happiness.
However, hope, as in life, is often imbedded in fear
and sadness in Abundant Light. Miner’s compelling
treatment of this injured hope keeps the reader
turning the page.
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Valerie Miner’s most recent
book, Abundant Light, contains seventeen hopeful
stories. Hope, in this case, has much to do with
broadening friendships, family, partnerships, and
brief meetings. These stories explore reason,
impulse, and natural tendencies that are often
overlooked or ignored in life.
Set in places ranging from India to Canada,
Miner’s stories confidently deal with culture and
humanity through characterization. Her characters
are often newcomers, visitors, or travelers. Bella,
an aging woman of Scottish descent, in “Greyhound,” rides a bus from Vancouver to San Francisco. En route, Bella meets strangers, talks to
them and contemplates her family and past: “They
were a different family now; it reminded her of
reknitting a sweater, adding room here and there
to accommodate the expansiveness of life lived.” In
each of these stories, character’s lives expand
through travel or intellectual introspection.
Miner takes simplistic plots and adds elements
such as discovery, sadness, love, kinship, and
rekindling. “The House with Nobody in It” unfolds
the story of Minnesotan neighbors and their noise
disagreement. “Back Home at The Driftwood
Lodge” follows adult sisters vacationing by the
Pacific Ocean in a place they used to frequent with
their family. Through vivid details, the narrator,
like many other characters in this book, revisits
childhood. “Mist and rain are so thick that I imagine we’re at sea, headed to that mythical island we
conjured as children, deep under the earth’s crust,
between here and China.” Miner’s memory-laden
characters in the everyday and simplistic situations (a bus ride, for example) make these stories
worthwhile and complicated.
In the title story, “Abundant Light,” a divorced
couple reunites after a number of years. Old
boundaries widen and expand as these oncesweethearts meet again and ponder rekindling
their relationship, a brief hopefulness. Yet they
choose not to engage in that one last romp, and
instead select friendship as a matter of fact and
“resolve of getting on with things.” This notion of
moving forward with pain is a resoundingly curious personality trait that Miner enjoys tapping into
and conveying.
Miner’s controlled rendering of smart and
conflicted characters is precise and truthful. They
are the sort of people a stranger might enjoy
talking to on a bus ride. Miner allows these characters plenty of desires and hopes. In “Playing Catch”
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Reviewed by Kassie Duthie
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Abundant Light
By Valerie Miner
Michigan State University
Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $16.95
Have you ever had a friend
who can’t help but be genuine?
Each poem in Barton Sutter’s Farewell to the
Starlight in Whiskey is an afternoon of fishing with
that friend. Mr. Sutter writes simple and lucid
sentences. Their musical beauty sneaks up on you,
and you’re hearing flowers before you know it.
Consider these lines from “Buddha’s Fool:” “Read
the horizon. Look sharp. See / How the raggedy
treeline sinks? / The portage is probably back in
the bay.”
Sutter’s accessible language lets his metaphors
and poetic devices ring loud. His comfort with his
own poetic language and song give him a vast
freedom to take risks. “The Daughter of the Mother
of Invention” consists only of questions. “Inverse
Letter to John Engram” is a powerful elegy in the
form of a letter written backwards.
Sutter writes a bitter indictment of the Bush
administration in the form of a prayer with “The
President’s Prayer.” There are lyrics, narratives,
sonnets, villanelles, poems with choruses; Sutter is
always inventing and surprising the reader. He is
not afraid of anything. “Chickadee” is a poem full
of hard end rhymes which, amazingly, doesn’t
come off as corny. A lot of the poems sound hokey
when described, but Sutter’s conviction and acumen for language and surprise overwhelm the
reader before the end of the first line.
Pulitzer Prize winner, Stephen Dunn, calls
Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey, “a healthy
sampling of what we see little of these days: the
affirmative poem.” Most poems in this collection
end in calm affirmation, but there is a rumbling of
trouble in their past.
Whether it’s his fondness for alcohol in the title
poem, the loving struggles of family life, the futility
of standing up against the government, Sutter is a
man at peace with the turbulence the world haphazardly throws his way. May all our lives come to
such an understanding.
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An interview with Barton Sutter
The past of a lot of poems in Farewell to
the Starlight in Whiskey seem to be
brewing with trouble, and there is an air
of calm and authority in the present.
I’m thinking of “The Necklace” (Ten
tough years and you are still / the one I
want) and “Sunflowers” (All my life I
was lonely) and the last three sentences
of the last poem of the collection “Pike
Lake Lullaby” (Hush now. Quiet. /
Nothing is wrong.). There is a distance
between the two and they are both
recognized in these poems. How do you
preserve the visceral impact of a poem
when writing at such a distance? Could
a poem be written inside the brewing
trouble?
A
What an interesting observation.
Starlight is a midlife book. At forty I fell in
love, saw therapists, went through a divorce, quit drinking, headed toward a new
marriage with stepkids—the full catastrophe, as Zorba would say. Everything looked
different after that. If there’s an air of calm
in the “present” of the poems, believe me, it
was hardwon. But you’d expect a “retrospective” attitude in many poems by someone over forty, wouldn’t you?
“Could a poem be written inside the
brewing trouble?” Of course, of course.
“Consider the Lilies,” for example, arrived
as a kind of vision in the early delirium of a
love affair. That poem was a gamble, a
wish, a prophecy, and I felt half nuts while
writing it, but, lucky for me, life imitated art,
the poem came true, the relationship held,
my beloved turned out to be an excellent
paddler, we’ve taken many canoe trips, and
we often drift among lilies, though we
hadn’t yet when I wrote the poem. “How
the True Work of True Love Truly Begins”
was written just a day or two after an
awful fight with my wife.
So, yes, it’s possible to write “inside
the trouble.” In fact, it’s possible to write
yourself out of trouble, to clarify things, to
make things right; that’s a major motive for
writing poems, in my view. But these poems
written at white heat, in the midst of psychic storm, are not to be trusted. Often they
turn out to be “merely” personal, their
meaning too private, their linguistic interest
too low. The cycle of love poems in Starlight
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was distilled from a manuscript three times
as long; two thirds of them weren’t strong
enough to make the cut.
Wordsworth, of course, made the
classic statement on this topic: “emotion
recollected in tranquillity.” Some subjects
take years, even decades, to emerge; or
maybe it takes you that long to be able to
handle them. I recently finished a poem
called “The Plaster” about two boys I
played with when we were five and six
years old, two little brothers and their dad.
They lived on a hardscrabble farm up on
the Canadian border, and their poverty has
haunted me all of my life. I’m older, now,
than their father was when this incident
took place. These lines occur near the end
of the poem:
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Fifty years have shown me how
A gentleness can sometimes linger:
I see his trembling, farm-thick fingers
Plastering his young son’s brow
With a dripping lump of cool blue clay
To take the hornet’s sting away.
Q
There are many poems written in form:
sonnets, villanelles, hard rhyme, and
poems with recurring choruses. Do the
forms come about naturally or do you
set out to write in a form?
A
In order to write a sonnet, you first have
to be WILLING to write a sonnet, to be
INTERESTED in writing a sonnet. I grew up
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You asked how to preserve the visceral
impact when writing at such a distance.
The answer, I think, is in specific, imagistic
language. That picture had stayed with me
for half a century; it seemed safe to bet the
image might touch others also.
So I’ll reach way back to childhood
sometimes, in which case you tend to get a
lot of “now-and-then” tension in the poem.
Or I’ll write a few years after the fact. Or a
few months or days. The distance varies.
For me, the most “present tense” writing
tends to occur when I’m out in the woods
alone. I might be paddling along, and the
language starts to come “as it happens,”
whatever “it” might be. That’s very exciting.
A lot of nature poems come that way.
“Blowdown” would be one example.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 7
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Over time, you develop a sense of
what form would likely work best for which
impulse. If you’ve got something short—
three clusters of images and a parting shot,
for example—a sonnet might be right. If
you’ve got characters, dialogue, and a
story, you’re aware that ballad forms have
worked well with that sort of thing for
centuries. If you’ve got someone trying to
talk herself into doing something awful, a
villanelle, with those repeating lines, could
be perfect. I picked up the use of refrains—
especially refrains that keep changing a bit
as they repeat—from the old Scottish border
ballads. My brother Ross is a professional
singer, and those are some of his favorite
songs. That music has gone bone-deep with
me and colored my poetry. I’ll never give up
free verse, but I’m more and more fascinated with the old forms.
Page 8 Corresponder Spring 2005
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How has poetry changed since you
began writing, and where can poetry
find a place in our multi-media, information storm culture?
A
It’s no longer a crime to write in fixed
forms, for one thing. In the seventies, you
might be accused of being a fascist—a
preposterous claim, since the ballad, for
example, has always been the natural form
for “folk” poetry, the poetry of “the people.”
The influence of the modernists has waned;
Eliot was still pope when I was in college.
Contemporary poetry is all over the map;
anything is possible—from verse novels to
one-word concrete
poems. The range is remarkable and good
for the art, though rather baffling for readers, I’m afraid.
When I was a kid, poets were exotic
creatures. Most of them, it seemed to me,
were either dead or living in New York. In
high school, I could claim to be the best poet
in all of Worth County, Iowa, because I was
the ONLY poet in Worth County, Iowa. Louis
Jenkins and I joke about this—how we took
up poetry when we were young because no
one else was doing it. That’s changed.
Every little town seems to have a couple
poets scribbling away.
I have never been so optimistic about
American poetry. Pound and Eliot, terrible
snobs, gave the finger to the common
reader. Their revolution may have been
necessary, but it nearly destroyed the
audience for poetry. With the success of The
Waste Land, William Carlos Williams
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on the Beats; free verse was the atmosphere I
breathed. My interest in traditional forms was
near zero. I associated meter and rhyme with
Hallmark cards, occasional verse, stuffy old
English poems crammed with references to
Roman gods. My affection for Robert Frost and
Edna St. Vincent Millay, however, saved me
from dismissing traditional forms altogether.
And, to make a long story short, I got a good
education and discovered contemporary Irish
and English
poets, steeped in their traditions, who stayed
in touch with the old forms and proved you
could use them to write new poems with
plenty of zing.
After grad school, I was living in Minneapolis, working as a swing-shift typesetter
and writing mornings. I noticed my poems
were picking up more and more sound effects—lots of alliteration, loads of internal
rhyme. I looked at all that internal rhyme and
said to myself, “What’s the matter? You
chicken? Afraid they’ll think you’re old-fashioned?” So I tried, I DARED moving those
rhymes out to the ends of the lines. I did a
small tribute to Meridel LeSueur that came out
as a rough kind of sonnet. I did a couple of
memory poems out of my early boyhood in
quatrains. And then—I’ll never forget it—one
morning I wrote a poem in couplets with a
four-beat line and heavy alliteration. I was
completely absorbed by this poem, and when I
was done, I sat back and said, “You know
what? That’s better than you know how to
write.” After that, of course, I was hooked. I’d
had the great experience, I’d lived the secret
known to all those who employ the old forms:
The form is no strait-jacket. You don’t stuff
language in the form like ground meat in a
sausage casing. Not at all. After some practice,
the form helps you write the poem; meter and
rhyme engage your unconscious; they trigger
diction your pea-brain, conscious efforts could
never call to mind.
So you read and study and slowly waken
to the possibilities, and one day you draft a
poem that’s thirteen lines long, and it’s got
several rhymes and a kind of loop-de-loop
halfway through. And you read this
whatchemcallit over and say, “It looks like this
thing wants to be a sonnet!” So you give it a
nudge, try this and that, and lo and behold.
Next time maybe the sonnet comes more
naturally. So that’s it. It’s a kind of listening.
Above all, you stay alive to the possibilities
and keep asking, What does this poem want
to be? How does it want to say itself?
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Interview cont’d.
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sub-sub specialties is a disaster and disgusting, but there are some good souls in
universities; we need to coax them out into
the public sphere and encourage them. We
need inspired amateurs. We need everything: newspaper reviews that go beyond
one-paragraph puffs; newspaper reviews of
readings; more reviews and articles in
literary magazines; lively books about
contemporary poets;
poetry talk radio with heated arguments;
TV shows where critics lay it on the line;
conferences including movies, music, and
critical catfights; festivals that honor our
poetic pioneers.
These things need to happen nationwide, but let’s look at Minnesota. Studies
have shown we’re one of the best-read
states in the nation. So where is our
monthly magazine of general culture with a
northern sensibility? Every several years
someone tries and flops. Our literary magazines are practically invisible. I was
stunned to notice that The Corresponder
has been around for thirty years. We never
see it in Duluth. Why is that? It’s gotten
really good, and I’m glad you’ve gone online, but why don’t you appear in every
bookstore in the state? Why doesn’t it come
out four times a year? With a boost in
circulation, I’m sure that publishers would
be pleased to advertise. Hell, you might
even make money! And when are you going
to drop that “fan letter” subhead? Thirty
years ago, that made sense, but Minnesota
literature has come of age since then, and
it’s way past time to go beyond boosterism;
most of your reviews already do.
Poetry in Minnesota is in very good
shape. This past year saw the publication
of full-length books by Philip Dacey, Leo
Dangel, Bill Holm, Louis Jenkins, and Joyce
Sutphen—just to name a few that I admire.
But there is very much, too much, to do.
Poets tend to be big babies by nature,
terribly self-absorbed, whining about our
precious little careers, which usually don’t
amount to much anyway. My father was a
country preacher who raised eight kids on
diddly-squat, and yet he gave ten percent of
his desperately needed income to the
church each year every year of his life. If all
the poets in Minnesota kept a vow to transform 10% of our sulking into service to the
public life of poetry, amazing things would
happen here.
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moaned that it would take American poetry a
hundred years to recover. He had it just about
right. But good poets have been writing accessible poems for many decades now, and I
think we’re on the verge of winning back our
readers. Poets-in-the-Schools programs have
helped. Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac has been a
wonderful gift. MFA programs have helped.
National Poetry Month has been a boon. Many
of the Poets Laureate have made smart moves;
Ted Kooser has a fabulous project underway
to get poetry back in the nation’s newspapers.
The amount of activity in Duluth alone
right now is just amazing. The Spirit Lake
Poetry Series has been running for nearly ten
years, and we often draw 200 people. Lake
Superior College started a Minnesota Writers’
Series this year. The twenty-somethings are
running the Foghorn Poetry Series at the
Norshor Theatre. There’s a Lunch Poems series
at St. Scholastica. There are readings in
libraries, bookstores, coffeehouses, bars. Mara
Hart started the Lake Superior Writers group
with four people, and they zoomed to 200
members inside four years. Joe Maiolo runs a
summer workshop at University of Minnesota
Duluth. Poets have collaborated with the
Duluth Symphony, with the Lake Superior
Chamber Orchestra, with jazz combos and folk
singers, with printmakers and photographers.
Holy Cow! Press publishes here, and Jim
Johnson is starting a new imprint. Young
people publish their own chapbooks and sell
out, actually make money! Though I love to
whine and grumble, when I take stock I have
to admit there’s one hell of a lot of poetry going
on for a city of under 100,000. Am I wrong to
assume this sort of thing is happening elsewhere? I don’t think so.
Quantity, of course, is not to be confused
with quality, and here is the area where we’ve
failed, where the most work remains to be
done. More poetry is being published and read
aloud than ever before, but most of it, naturally, is bad to mediocre. This alienates many
readers who otherwise might be enthusiastic.
If poetry is ever going to win the audience that
it deserves, distinctions must be made; attention must be drawn to the good, the better, and
the best. We’re in desperate need of honest,
intelligent, plain-spoken criticism that can
reach the common reader. Review space in
newspapers has contracted radically in the
past twenty years; we need to fight for it. The
retreat of literature profs into theory and sub-
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Interview cont’d.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 9
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In Bart Schneider’s 2001 novel
Secret Love, Jake Roseman
mourns the death of his wife,
symphony violinist Inez Roseman. His new novel,
Beautiful Inez, focuses on Inez before her suicide.
Like Secret Love, Beautiful Inez is set in 1960s San
Francisco.
In Beautiful Inez, Schneider once again lures
readers into a complex network of relationships. A
young woman named Sylvia Bran becomes obsessed with Inez, pretends to be a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle, and arranges to interview
the violinist. Within weeks, the two women are
involved in a sexual relationship. The affair enlivens Inez in a way her 20-year relationship with her
husband has never done, but it is also the last
pleasure she will ever know. Inez suffers from
severe post-partum depression that she is unable
to transcend.
One of Schneider’s greatest strengths in this
novel is his ability to create strong, believable
characters. Inez’s lover, “voyant” Sylvia Bran, is a
liar, pseudo-journalist, waitress, music store
musician and habitual etymologist. In addition,
she is still working through complex emotions that
remain as the result of her mother’s suicide.
Inez, a Swedish beauty, is a victim of both her
upbringing and her failed marriage. The child of a
picture framer, she spent her early years practicing
the violin, to the exclusion of everything else. After
sacrificing her childhood in pursuit of her art, she
fails to become a solo performer and joins the San
Francisco Symphony. She is a remote, complicated
woman, and the affair with Sylvia Bran is a last
ditch effort to find meaning in her otherwise unhappy existence.
Secondary characters (especially Hyman
Myerson, Sylvia’s boss, and Bibi, Inez’s older sister)
are vividly drawn and add depth and texture to the
novel. Schneider draws readers into the lives of his
characters and into the very soul of music and
musical performance with lyrical, stunning detail.
“Sylvia is amazed at how slowly Inez can draw the
bow across her violin and still achieve force, how
the shift from up bow to down is not a shift at all
but as even and immaculate a gesture as a single
breath.” Passages such as this—and there are
many more that are equally lovely—make the book
well worth reading.
Schneider edited the Hungry Mind Review from
1986 through 2000. He currently edits Speakeasy,
the publication of The Loft Literary Center in
Minneapolis. His first novel was Blue Bossa.
Page 10 Corresponder Spring 2005
Reviewed by Ryan Havely
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Review by Cheryl Massé
American Compass
By Bill Meissner
University of Notre Dame
Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $15
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Beautiful Inez
By Bart Schneider
Shaye Areheart Books, 2005
Price (Hardcover) $24
Bill Meissner’s most recently
published collection of poetry,
American Compass, is a guided tour through not
only the writer’s childhood—specifically his relationship to his father, who receives the dedication,
“…Leonard Meissner, who followed his dashboard
compass.”
Divided into four sections: “First Corners,”
“Braking Dreams,” “Taking the Curve,” and “Soul
Highway,” American Compass takes the reader on
a circular journey. Meissner begins in the home of
a young man learning to tie a tie from his father.
He moves through adolescence and high school,
addresses becoming, however reluctantly, an adult,
and ends with a father teaching a son to fish.
Readers wind up not far from where they began.
The poems “First Ties: The Father in the Mirror” and “Kiwi” are written in conversational, prosy
free-verse. A young man idolizes his father, learning about life in the process. In being taught to
knot a tie, the speaker learns, “being an adult
meant/ you looked a little older, but you couldn’t
breathe.” “Kiwi” is a series of memories involving
family vacations and a father’s pungent shoe
polish. The young man feels safe in situations in
which the father is in control and gains comfort
knowing, at least while his father is driving, danger
lies outside of the car.
Subsequent sections fall away from the confessional poems about growing up in the void of
central Iowa and fly off into the land of the free.
“Braking Dreams” is, for the most part, a series of
elegies or letters written about and to a few key
American names. Thomas Edison earns first
mention, followed by Joe DiMaggio. James Dean is
awarded double duty, seen both walking the New
York streets and rising from the ashes of the crash
that took his life. A weakness of the section, unfortunately, is that these specific poems immortalizing
American heroes are surrounded by generality. A
poem about a ventriloquist, another about a man
“Who Wrestled the Lawn,” and odes to both cows
and Chevy Novas, although strongly American, are
out of place and nearly stop the forward momentum of this collection altogether.
By far the most unified section, “Taking
Curves” is made up of thirteen poems all somehow
centered around baseball. From a child catching
fly balls with his father in the wake of a lost job to
a couple saving their marriage by relieving stress
in a batting cage, this section branches out to
cover nearly all of America’s bases before heading
back to Iowa for the father’s funeral. Marked by a
Elfrieda’s Cat: Notes of a
High School Literature
Teacher
By George Roberts
Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2003
Price (Softcover) $16.95
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them as the Chinese poet Li Po sent his down the
Yangtze. The chances of them being read this way
are greater than by publication he says. We are
lucky recipients of Jenkins’ Sea Smoke, not having
had to wait for his poems to arrive by water. They
arrive in their present form just as mysteriously.
Reviewed by Melody Gersonde
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Louis Jenkins’ prose poems
build an intimate kinship between
poet and reader. These are poems that welcome us.
There is genuine modesty here, and Jenkins
prefers it that way. His humor is wrought naturally
and skillfully. A lucid elegance and a refined spirit
belies his modesty and makes Sea Smoke a work of
true craftsmanship.
The first poem, “Imaginary Reader” asks, “And
who is the reader for whom you write?” Jenkins
conjures up a beautiful woman reading in bed,
never setting the book down, the poet’s dream
audience. Even so, the poet, he says, must write
faster to keep the book from slipping from the tired
woman’s hands. This isn’t a task to take lightly.
Relationship with some familiar corner of the world
is at stake.
In these prose poems, we are not tricked
through line breaks. The reader does
not require them since intimacy is achieved immediately. The combined looseness of prose and the
tight structure of poetry make the prose poem one
of the most accessible forms to general readers.
For Jenkins, this form allows the most authentic
voice.
The opening section is full of youthful desire,
naïve fantasy, and loneliness. Throughout youth,
middle age, and old age, Jenkins rewards us with
humble wisdom, anecdote, and surprise. In “Canadian Wilderness,” he captures the horrific realization of one’s domestication by the discovery alone
in the wilderness of a mattress label attached to
his back. In “Body and Soul,” he finds the temple
to be an inadequate metaphor for the body and
sets out to bravely compare the soul to a bad driver
in a motor home.
In “Where Go the Boats,” Jenkins advises the
young poet to make new poems into boats and sail
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Review by Anna Larson
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Sea Smoke
By Louis Jenkins
Holy Cow! Press, 2004
Price (Hardcover) $13.95
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heartening tone and caring, lamenting language,
the last section forces us to face the inevitability of
life while enjoying the benefits of becoming a fully
functional, family-oriented adult.
As a continuous journey, American Compass
points readers in the right directions and does a
good job leading them through the lives of a few
classic American characters. Though the collection
lacks in unity at times, and some of the poems are
hard to follow. These are small setbacks to an
overall uplifting and level-headed collection of
American poems. This book belongs in the hands
of anyone interested in the heart of this country, or
anyone wanting to learn a little bit more about the
lives of those who live there.
“Each morning before the bells begin rattle
through the halls, I unlock my classroom door and
enter, / An ancient shopkeeper whose rituals have
become the currency of neighborhood conversation.” From the first line of George Robert’s first
poem “Opening Up,” Elfriede’s Cat gives us insight
into the classroom unlike anything else short of
being a teacher yourself. He reveals the inner
working of teaching that go beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic.
George Roberts taught literature and writing for
thirty-two years in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Each morning, he rose early and wrote poetry for a
couple of hours before beginning his day. He
retired from teaching in 2001 and now looks after
Homespace Studios, a corner store in their neighborhood he and his wife remolded. It has five
artist’s studios and a small gallery where local
artists can show their work.
Robert’s poetry is a clear look into the hearts
and thoughts of those who have taught us, our
parents, and our children. In the poem “Two
Unbearable Lists,” “A teacher begins listing reasons her students cannot learn, speaking them
quietly into the air like prayers…” Roberts then
implicates both students and parents for poor
educations “… They have forgotten their manners
… What is wrong with their families? Don’t they
know first things learned are the hardest to forget?” Roberts, throughout this collection, is honest
about triumphs and insecurities of teaching and
the difficulties of being a student.
Elfriede’s Cat is a refreshing look at the
teacher. The author describes the necessity and
rewards of teaching in “Correspondents:” “And no
matter how heavily we burden them, our children
continue to believe they can fly, America remains
to be discovered and the earth turns and turns,
eager for the ravishing light of the imagination.”
George Roberts poetry is alive and vivid and worth
the read.
Through extensive historical research and
compassionate storytelling, the pains, hopes and
triumphs of one ordinary family bring to light the
extraordinary untold tales of the German Ecuadorian survivors.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 11
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Page 12 Corresponder Spring 2005
Earthling
By Steve Healey
Coffee House Press, 2005
Price (Softcover) $14
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up-and-comers from the ritzy side of the pond. It is
here that he meets Dana McGuire, a startling
beauty, ringleader and temptress of this depraved
underworld. He instantly falls head over heels for
her and is determined to do anything to keep Dana
all to himself. The drugs, booze, and raunchy sex
flow freely for a while, and Keith feels confident
that Dana loves him and soon they will leave and
start their own life together. When Dana turns on
him (think orgy and blindfolds and videotape), he
snaps and sees red. The following day when Keith
comes to, Dana is dead and Milwaukee’s elite are
hunting for his head. This is when things start to
get crazy.
Sparrow is a writer who isn’t afraid to take
chances with his story. There are no good guys or
bad guys here, and Keith is certainly not the
average tortured hero. Sparrow lets his characters
run wild and take the reader on a fast paced ride.
Northwoods Standoff feels like classic crime noir
with the insanity of a mental ward tossed in for
extra kick.
Review by Eric Hoffheiser
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Thomas Sparrow’s, Northwoods
Standoff, centers around Keith Waverly, a con-man
and drug fiend on the run from gangsters he
robbed in his old home state of Florida. Waking up
in a posh hotel in downtown Milwaukee with
$500,000 of stolen money crammed in a gym bag
by his feet, Keith decides to do the most logical
thing; he finds the most despicable people the city
has to offer and blends right in with them.
He doesn’t have to look very far. His first night
out on the town, he slithers his way into a private
party that ends up as an orgy for blue-bloods and
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Review by Philip N.
MacKenzie
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Northwoods Standoff
By Thomas Sparrow
Blue Stone Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $12.95
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In The Egg Lady and Other
Neighbors, a collection of stories
with unique views of country life, Iowan author
Tricia Currans-Sheehan successfully gives voice to
several new female voices from the Midwest.
Her life with nine siblings on a 280-acre farm
near the Des Moines River provided more than
enough experiences to inspire the stories found in
The Egg Lady. Farming communities are the
setting for several pieces, like “The Raffle, “And
Now’s He’s Gone and Now You’re Back,” and “The
Secrets that Men Have.” Sheehan avoids the rural
landscape and forces readers to focus on more
immediate environments—a church, a kitchen, a
basement—as characters discover new strengths or
flaws within themselves.
The influences of the rural life and the church
provide an extra layer of intrigue. What does the
girl in “Margaret” witness her father doing to their
hogs? Why does the woman in “Called for Action”
stay devoted to Catholicism if women are so restricted?
The author succeeds with her creations of
several unique narrators. Eight of the eleven pieces
in the collection are told in first person, but each is
distinguishable from the next. A child narrates
“The Last Trapshoot,” a convict in “The Many
Stages of Their Making,” and a housewife in “The
Men with the Leopard Wallpaper.” These and the
other stories in The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors
entertain, delight, and disturb.
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Review by Sara Hein
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The Egg Lady and Other
Neighbors
By Tricia Currans-Sheehan
New Rivers Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $14.95
Earthling, Steve Healey’s collection of poems, at first, seems
dissonant. Healey doesn’t often
make direct statements. Images seem detached,
but this adds to the sensation that parts of our
world hang like crooked pictures.
What may first seem like an abstraction in a
poem turns out to be Healey’s unique sense of
awareness of the world around him and the complex interplay between the people in it.
“Why We Continue” depicts a suburbia wilder
than the surrounding wilderness toward which it
crawls, a place where “years inhale property tax /
attics fill with bat excrement till homeowners sell it
as fertilizer.” Comic cynicisms such as these shine
throughout the book. “I Live Two Doors Down from
the Powerball Winner” takes a humorous, off-kilter
look at what it means to have money and media
exposure in America.
Healey’s world is one where we are all tuned in,
all part of the same mass media circulatory system, but where meaningful human contact is
becoming a thing of the past century.
He writes that “waking is where all the best
roads / meet the water on my face, and lying there
/ feels so new it’s not possible to talk.” Perhaps, as
earthlings, we all need to wake up. These are
poems many readers will struggle with, only to be
rewarded in the end. His work stays dissonant
still, but it is also a poignant reflection of our time.
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The View from Delphi
By Jonathon Odell
MacAdam/Cage, 2004
Price (Hardcover) $24.00
Review by Trisha Shaskan
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Jonathan Odell’s first novel,
The View From Delphi, gives
readers an equitable view of preCivil Rights Delphi, Mississippi. The story contains
suffering and loss, redemption and hope.
Delphi’s corrupt sheriff pays his dues by
getting caught up in a scandal. Slaves pick cotton
at the plantations in the day, but socialize and
drink at One Wing Hannah’s at night. Members of
The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Trois
Arts League gossip about, wave handkerchiefs at,
and snub those of lower social rank but get duped
by them.
In the midst of it all, a wealthy, white woman,
Hazel, and a poor, black maid, Vida, gain each
other’s a friendship. Their friendship crosses the
racial divide and brings equilibrium to their lives
despite their segregated community.
When Vida becomes Hazel’s maid they loathe
each other until they discover they have both lost a
son. Vida’s social status has plummeted from
Reverend’s daughter to maid, and Hazel has
become an alcoholic. With no one else to turn to,
the two women turn to each other. Odell writes,
“With no place to go, Vida laid her head on Hazel’s
lap and at last began to cry. As she gently stroked
Vida’s hair, Hazel wept also. Loss filled the
roomæfathers and mothers and husbands and
sons, dead and forfeited and snatched away. Vida
looked up to see the other woman’s tears. She
rubbed her cheek against Hazel’s hand. In their
private grieving, each tried to comfort the other.”
Although Jonathan Odell resides in Minnesota,
he was born and raised in Mississippi. Odell takes
his readers to his home state through his ability to
capture southern dialects, interesting characters,
and social critique. Vida’s father, Reverend Levi
Snow imparts words of wisdom such as, “I reckon
that’s got to be the hardest thing about
loving…Calling out in the dark. Pleading with love
to show its face again.” When Vida meets a woman
called Sweat Pea, Sweat Pea introduces her to the
concept of sleeping with white men for pay by
giving this advice: “You tell me which sounds
smarter. Pickin the white man’s cotton for two
dollars a day or layin on im for five? I didn’t pass
through eighth grade for nothin. I got that deal
figgered.”
Some readers might find Odell’s view of the
segregated south to be improbable: the senator has
run the KKK out of Delphi, lynching can be
avoided, and a white woman drives around with
three black maids delivering pamphlets on how to
vote under the guise of charity. But all the while,
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“That sandbar, the first time
we fished the Blue, was the
Promised Land. Maybe we’d met
somebody who told us that was where the fish
were, maybe we even saw a fisherman—a native—
carrying a big stringer of catfish back across;
anyway that was where I, at seven or eight, had to
go or die.” This childish delight of Ed Moses is
evident throughout his fishing memoir, Pilgrimage
with Fish, a tightly written narrative of his experiences fishing as a child and as an adult, primarily
with his son, Jeremy, blended with a sensible
philosophy of human bonding and shared wonderment on the lakes and rivers of Pennsylvania,
Kansas, Minnesota, and Ontario.
Moses spends much of this memoir detailing
his familiarity with catch-and-release fishing, the
only kind his son will participate in. He ponders
the differences between sport fishing and survival
fishing, enjoyment and boasting. Punches are only
slightly held back as Moses comes down on those
who pull multitudes of fish from the rivers and
lakes, especially those who eat only a portion of
what they catch or none at all. While Moses may be
a naturalist as heart, he is a friend of the everyday
angler and the fishing families who make the
connections between human life and the natural
world.
Despite what readers might expect from a book
about fishing, Moses turns away from the mythic
fishing tales of the perfect place to sink your lures;
instead, he attempts to debunk them. “At fishing
resorts, time collapses.” he writes, “The proprietor
will tell you fifty fish stories in an hour, every one
of them true. They sound like they all happened
last week, instead of during the twenty-four years
he’s owned the place, but what is the truth?”
For readers not interested in fishing, this
probably is not the best book for you. Moses knows
his stuff, and lets us know through his fishing
jargon and explanations of fishing scenarios that
sent this reader reeling.
At times poetic, others conversational, Pilgrimage with Fish is a gentle and generous book. Moses
meditates on life, but mostly shows us the joy he
finds in fishing and spending time with his family
on the water, even as the days come to an end,
“Nothing and nothing again—we’ve caught what
we’re going to. Which in a sense makes the honor
of throwing the last cast into the bridge hole an
empty one, but still. I lean the rod tip back over my
shoulder….”
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Review by Brian Baumgart
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Pilgrimage with Fish
By Ed Moses
New Rivers Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $14.95
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 13
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freshingly humble. He writes about the “Argento
curse,” whereby strange accidents befall him
during public moments. During the premier of one
of his works, he was invited to come up on stage,
but opened the wrong door, wandered through a
maze of hallways, and found himself out on the
street, locked out. There are many such narratives
in this book, a fine model for future musical memoirists.
The Full Matilda
By David Haynes
Harlem Moon Broadway, New
York, 2004
Price (Softcover) $14
Page 14 Corresponder Spring 2005
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Review by Michael O’Hearn
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Dominick Argento, Minnesota’s most renowned
classical composer, has assembled a memoir
structured around his memory of performances of
his compositions, which range from church anthems to full-blown operas. Over the past five
decades, the arc of his career parallels that of
Minnesota culture in general. This book is not just
for classical music lovers. His account of his
collaboration with Tyrone Guthrie—for whose
dramatic productions he often wrote incidental
music—is especially worth reading. Argento has an
eye and ear for the absurd. When the GuthrieArgento version of The House of Atreus played on
Broadway, with its pre-recorded musical interludes, union rules required that a stand-by orchestra of twenty-nine musicians be hired, who did not
play their instruments but “played poker … in the
theater’s basement while overhead Clytemnestra
murdered Agamemnon in his bath and Orestes
and Electra plotted to even the score.”
As should be evident from the above quoted
passage, Argento is a skilled writer. Though highly
cultured and trained in music theory, he tells his
story in such a way that the layperson can enjoy it,
highlighting not just the shape of his compositions,
but also the context in which they came to life,
with especially good anecdotes about fellow musicians and composers—the best example of which is
how Argento’s conservatory teacher Nicholas
Nabakov (cousin of Vladimir) served America
during the height of the blacklisting era by sniffing
out Communist motifs in seemingly innocent
melodies.
I most deeply appreciate Argento’s sensitivity to
literature, as expressed in his adaptations of such
works as The Aspern Papers and The Diaries of
Virginia Woolf, and also in his description of craft
which seems parallel to the craft of writing, especially poetry. “I have found… that by not concerning myself with what note comes next, my imagination is completely unhampered and I feel free to
give my full attention to … shape, texture, and
mood.” While proud of his accomplishments,
especially his Pulitzer Prize, Argento is also re-
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Reviewed by Roger Sheffer
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Catalogue Raisonne As
Memoir
Dominick Argento
University of Minnesota
Press, 2004
Price (Hardcover) $22.95
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Odell gives voices to a large range of realistic
characters from different socio-economic backgrounds that make a lasting impression in this
heartfelt, optimistic account of a town on the verge
of change.
In the Full Matilda, David
Haynes follows the rise of the Housewright family
over nearly a century, beginning with Matilda, her
brother Martin, and their father Jacob, who heads
the service staff in a wealthy senator’s home in
Washington, D.C.
Living under the senator’s roof and the strict
hand of their father, Matilda and Martin come to
understand the complex, unstated rules of service,
power, and race.
“The truth about men of prominence is that
they are just like you and me. When you grow up
as part of the household of someone like the
senator, you live behind the curtain, as it were.
Out front, in places where these people put themselves on display, everything is designed to make
them look grand and important and larger than
life,” Haynes writes.
After their father’s death in 1947, Matilda
moves into the family home, which she and her
father sacrificed to acquire, while Martin marries
and starts a catering business. Matilda rarely
leaves the house after that, but through a succession of relationships, passes down the Housewright
family knowledge to Martin’s children and grandchildren, with each new generation building the
family business until it is a multimillion dollar food
service corporation.
Haynes is skilled in dealing with race, being
both honest and fair, and relegating it to only part
of the story. In the end, it is Matilda’s greatnephew Jake, who must struggle most with race,
as he is born to a white mother and black father,
and finds it difficult to fit in on either side of the
fence.
The stories of the Housewright progeny and the
Housewrights’ time in the senator’s home, are
skillfully interwoven, showing how each time
period reflects on the other, and how the values
Matilda learned from her father Jacob work in any
era.
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September 8
Diana Joseph (Fiction)
Richard Robbins (Poetry)
Roger Sheffer (Fiction)
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September 29
Steve Gehrke (Poetry)
Nicole Helget (Nonfiction)
Mike Magnuson (Fiction/Nonfiction)
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November 10
Charles Baxter (Fiction)
December 8
Stuart Dybek (Fiction)
NEWS AND NOTES
The Corresponder is a biannual
publication that features Minnesota
writers.
Direct all correspondence and review
copies to:
The Corresponder
Department of English
Minnesota State University,
Mankato
230 Armstrong Hall
Mankato, MN 56001
Or E-mail inquiries to:
hans.hetrick@mnsu.edu
Now On-line at:
www.english.mnsu.edu/cwpubs/
corresponder/corresponder.htm
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October 20
Ed Bok Lee (Poetry)
Juliana Pegues (Poetry)
Thien-Bao Thuc Phi (Poetry)
The Corresponder is edited by Nick
Healy and Hans Hetrick. The editors
would like to thank all reviewers for
their great work.
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Sarah Stonich, a St. Paul
resident and author of the novel These Granite
Islands, sets her second book, The Ice Chorus in
Mexico, Canada, and Ireland. The multiplicity of
locations gives Lise, the protagonist, the distance
necessary to reconnect with herself and discover
some truths about her supporting characters.
Stonich uses Lise’s career as a burgeoning
documentary filmmaker as a vehicle for introspection. The camera lens is a springboard into Lise’s
struggle to reconcile with her father, her lover, and
her son.
Lise, fifty-ish and unhappily married, accompanies her absentee husband, Stephen, on his archeology research in Mexico, while their teenage son
Adam remains behind in Toronto. She finds herself
alone in the villa, drawn to and distracted by
Charlie, a stereotypical brooding artist. The relationship with Charlie produces some of Stonich’s
strongest writing. Charlie’s paintings create the
clearest view of Lise. It is as if the writer is holding
the paintbrush. And in viewing those same works
of art, Lise is able to see herself.
Lise’s affair with Charlie, her subsequent
divorce from Stephen, and her own father’s infidelity haunt her in the secluded cottage in Ireland
where she has sought refuge. However, Lise
emerges from her seclusion renewed. Armed with
her camera, Lise draws out the stories of Siobhan,
Remy, and Margaret for her documentary, and at
the same time, opens her life to the reader.
Stonich’s writing flows seamlessly between
present day and remembrances of the past. The
lens of the camera quietly capturing a memory, the
paintbrush stroking the canvas, and the secrets
brought to the surface blend many tales into one.
This multifaceted love story of a despondent
woman becomes a neatly wrapped gift
FALL 2005 GOOD THUNDER
READING SERIES EVENTS
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Review by Colleen Arey
Timimi
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The Ice Chorus
By Sarah Stonich
Little, Brown and Company,
2005
Price (Hardcover) $24.95
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David Haynes’s other novels include All American Dream Dolls, Live at Five, and Somebody Else’s
Momma. He teaches creative writing at Southern
Methodist University and in the Warren Wilson
MFA Program for Writers.
Corresponder Spring 2005
Page 15
*210011*
The Corresponder
Department of English
Minnesota State University, Mankato
230 Armstrong Hall
Mankato, MN 56001
A member of the Minnesota State
Colleges and Universities System.
The Corresponder
MSU is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity University.
A Fan Letter on Minnesota Writers
This document is available in alternative format to individuals
with disabilities by calling the Department of English at
507-389-2117 (V), 800-627-3529 or 711 (MRS/TTY).
Are you a local author or publishing company in Minnesota
with a recent work for review? For review consideration in
an upcoming issue of The Corresponder, please send your
book, along with a short biographical sketch to:
The Corresponder
Department of English
Minnesota State University, Mankato
230 Armstrong Hall
Mankato, MN 56001
Page 16 Corresponder Spring 2005