1CHICAGOREVIEWAOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOlSATURDAY, DECEMBER 88:00 p.m. — Mandel Hall$5 Students/$8 Non-StudentsTickets on sale at Reynolds Club Box OfficeJ—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984The Student Activities OfficePresents:***** • •Take a Study BreakwithJAY LENO"The Funniest comedianworking today.." - David Letterman, NBC\\Emo Philips1The CLR staff would like to thank allthose who contributed poetry to theSecond Annual Poetry Contest. We re¬ceived over 150 entries, and a numberof very good poems could not be print¬ed due to space considerations. Thefirst prize award goes to Michael Don-aghy for "Interviews", and the second-prize to Mark Johnson for "The Astron¬omer Has His Palm Read". Inaddition, five poems received an Honorable Mention.We will sponsor a fiction contest inour winter issue, and welcome all contributions. The deadline is March 6,1985. The winner will receive S75 andS25 will go to the second place entry.The CLR staff will judge all entries,and request that writers use pseud¬onyms with an attached index cardwith author's real name, title of story,address and phone number.All contributions for the contest andthe regular issue can be dropped off inthe Maroon Office, Room 303, IdaNoyes Hall or mailed to the addressbelow.Editors: Leslie Rigby, David Sulli¬van.Staff: Anthony Berkely, Daniel Brownstein, Jim Dunn, Peter Himmelstein,Nell Lundy, Michael Mcloughlin,Christopher Pearson, Kurt Streib.Production: Peter Himmelstein, KarlaKarinen, Paula Lortie, Brian Mulligan,Leslie Rigby, David Sullivan.Advertising Manager: Lisa CypraThe Chicago Literary Review is pub¬lished quarterly by The ChicagoMaroon, the OFFICIAL student newspaper of the University of Chicago.Contributions, business or editorialquestions should be directed to thethird floor of Ida Noyes Hall, Room 303,1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois60637, or call: (312) 962-9555.Cover Graphics by Paula LortieThis issue Vol. 94 No. 24©1984 TCMgcj/CLR Interviews by Michael Donaghy, p.4First Place, CLR Poetry ContestThe Astronomer by Mark Johnson, p.5Second Place, CLR Poetry ContestTwo Poems by Mark Johnson, p. 5Poetry by Elizabeth Barnes-Clayton, Rick Doyle,Mary Therese Royal and Martha M. Vertreace, p. 6Honorable Mentions, CLR Poetry ContestMaking it New: Romantacism in Modernism, p. 8A Poem by Timothy Belton, p. 11Paradise? An Interview with Gerald Stern, p. 12Poetry by Daniel Brownstein,Larry Cohen and Jane Hoogestraat, p. 15Space Extended:Images of Exile in the Poetry of Joseph Brodskyby Edward Manouelian, p. 16A Poem by David Frankel, p. 18Books in Review, p. 21A Poem by Lofton Emenari, p. 24The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—3First Place, CLR Poetry ContestInterviewsYvette lets a dropOf red blot brilliantOn the white,Fresh bedsheet.1913. She looks upFrom painting her toenails.Marcel is ahead of his time,Yvette is still dressing.He finds a noteFrom Apollinaire"Knight toQueen's rook three"And checks the board.He looks at the little horse, snapsIt across the room,A distanceOf fifty yearsTo a studio in NevillyCassette wheels spinningThroughout the interviewAnd he thinks of bicycles.Q: Where does your anti-retinal attitude come from?A: From too great an importance given to the retina.1913. It's getting late.The sun obscuresAs it illuminatesGarden and gardenerWhose hedgeclippers snip..."Zip me."Yvette says over her shoulder,Stepping into her yellow pumps,The ones with the goldfish in the heels.Wait, I'll flipThe cassette to erase"Interview with Delta bluesmanSon House 1/5/68"Q: What about Willie, was he very good at making upverses?A: Yeh, he could make up verses pretty good. Yeh, 'causehe'd start on one thing he'd let near about every word be pertaining to what he pronounced what he was going to playabout. That's the difference in him and Charley and me, foo.Charley, he could start singing of the shoe there and wind upsinging about the banana. Marcel looks at the little horseAnd wonders whether"Nude Descending a Staircase"is the name of his entryin the armory showOr if "Nude Descending a Staircase"is his entryin the armory show.Within three yearsHis friends will drop in the trenchScreaming, chlorine searingTheir throats and noses raw.Apollinaire in the field hospital,Blood blotting gauze,Will imagine the random trajectoriesOf fragments, shrapnel, chessmen.A: Since Courbet, its been believed that painting is ad¬dressed to the retina. Before, painting had other functions: itcould be ...moral.Stop.I'd be playin' by myself sometime, nobody will be around mewhatever to hear it, and my mind will be settin' on somecrazy things — Scripture or jes names of songs, any oldthing. 'Fore I know anything tears'll be coming down and Iput that guitar away.Back from the Salon,Yvette removesHer yellow shoes.The gramophoneClears its throatFor Satie.Yvette, Yvette,So much to drink.From tonight on you'll be Rrose,Rrose Selavy.Later he'll undress her,Setting long gloveAnd stocking down at rightAngles. Here comesThe bride.Duchamp then producedA miniature machine for meTo photograph: watch partsclicking and skiddingAcross clear, flat glassToward two, gnat sized yellow shoes.But now they laugh in the dark.Lighting her cigarette,Marcel makes a world around them,A short, shining world.-Michael Donaghy4—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984Second Place, CLR Poetry ContestThe Astronomer Has His Palm ReadImagine how cautiously Iunfurled the map of my handsfor this fortune specialist. Sheknew all about my secret life, thestar-gazer I was, connecting stars like dots.She shows me my life line, thePlain of Mars, the planets of the fingers;the whole solar system printed within our grasp.She tells me that lines move over time,like the shadow of branchesshifting on a wall as the sun wheels. I tooam far-sighted, canpredict the galaxy's spiral200 billion years away. Ibelieve one thing: that Iam the Ram — what every husband whoworks nights should suspect.As a woman, she should understand, I said. Iam not guiltless, married my work. But theyare always there, something definite, landmarks in the sky.I have been lied to all my life;love may not keep a woman faithful,and the passionate eye of Jupiteris the iris of an uneven atmosphere.This woman was kind, told me all linesconverge at a distant, undiscoverable light.-Mark JohnsonThe Astronomer Watches BirdsIt's amazing that in this age of sciencea thing like this could happen. A man in Montanahas been struck by lightning seven times.Another man they say cheated the devil—nothing left of himbut a sweet smell and a shoe full of ashes.You never know. Maybe I'll spontaneouslycombust, and wind up hobbling in Hellwith one stocking foot: my justice to the exact degree.At any moment Skylab takes its inevitable descent,an artificial star sparking on the rooftops of its makers.I don't have that flairfor the dramatic, me, a voyeur of heavenly bodies.I have seen the moon defaced, but have never seen angels.I remember days I slept in the observatory,a tin clam on the desert's griddle,the only fan inches away,culling atoms of air.I retreated into night,snipped little pictures of the sky.Through my enormous glassmeasured a comet's effacement.Who says science has destroyed all chanceof miracles? Sparrows follow each otherthrough a seamless blue, certain of a destinationscientists can't explain...bits in my negativesnapped of the night sky, blackturned to white, all the stars fleeing.Dead ReckoningI still remember the Pacific,silver as a tuna. A metallic dawnturns into a rosy flame. A dull sheenglints the wings of the Enola Gay. Her four enginesbleat; great props rent a silk sky. My jobwas to hang in a glass bubble under heaven,shoot stars, not men. My calculationscompassed a world on paper, and Imapped out destinations that had no schools,no temples. At that altitude, visionis—has to be—obscured. To shorten the warthere has to be somebody, someoneto play the part of Judas. Hellis for the survivors.Count the minutes you go in what directionand that's where you're at.-Marie JohnsonThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7. 1984—5HONORABLE MENTIONSGod's EyesEven then my aunt was oldthough only later did age bringaimless tunes and fear of vaporsEven then she did her hairin nineteenth-century laceMaybe I was six or seven —at Sparrow's Beach a Sunday School outing —too leery of the world to risk the wavessquatting just where sea residueturns yellow sand damp brownMy aunt some thirty-odd years agoarms brittle as a starfishmade me her unburnt offering to the surfwhich leapt like flash firemuffling my screamsand my mother's everlasting furyjellyfish tearing at my bellyI crawled ashore awakenedfrom a saurian dreamknowing I could grow gills and shiny finsif ever I needed them.-Martha M. VertreaceLow On Stovewood, Between The LinesSince the dusty fall, since what turned out to beThe last of our greener days together?One more fall, no sooner come than gone.We're still as lazy as the day is long, here.But the days aren't very long.My grandfather rattles on like the one leaf leftThat doesn't want to drop or let itself be blown awayBy the wind that won't give it time to rest.He's telling about when mudtime comes,How you pick your trees and they're left to lie.Of how late frost opens radial cracksAnd leaves curled tight sap severed trunks and starve.Not unfolded still.A honeycomb of cold suns shuts out lightWhere stovewood's stacked against the window.That pane will be stuttering, loose in the sill,When the soft ice breaks up the and the river swells.If anything still speaks of loss, it speaks quietly,But the wind is never quiet.-Rick DoyleA Voice I UnderstandOut thereis a voice I understandplain to me as my ownRalph J. Mills, Jr.There's a man in this city who resembles me in his mind.He titles poems after mine before I have written them.He is married to a wife who takes pictures of himlooking like my old boyfriend with three children.He knows nothing of me but how my thoughts are formed,how I too embrace the winter elms, and reactsto night's orange glare by retreating into a phrase.He loves this city more than I can,hears gray breakers molding the sand,turning the wind's incoherence into a simple direction.I press old towels into loose windows that lookonto an alley populated with desperation,close the shades against everything that reaches outside,turn my sheets inside out looking for words.-Mary Therese Royal Photograph by Phil PollardAugust NightsThe heat sleeps between us.You don't know that I am dreaming of mouthsunfolding, heavy petalled.Your long hands, waiting,Web the light at your sides.In the street light your faceis golden as the moon tonight;too early for harvestthe heat and city air bend the lightinto bloom.You are too still to be sleeping.I do not know what images have tangledin your hands, or what use you will makeof what you have caught there.I don't remember where our conversation ended.I remember words, padding through the heat,words without sound, rubbing into the sheen of my skin.Even in this light your lipsare red and full, except where the cornersthin to contradiction. It is there in the cornerwhere the desire to kiss begins.In October, when we shake the heavy quilt across the bedand curtain the street light out with the wind,we will translate these nights into new words.-Elizabeth Bames-Clayton6—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984Over 100 selectionsfrom the biggest namesin classical music.Leonard Bernsteinand the New York Philharmonic.Eugene Ormandyand the Philadelphia Orchestra.David Oistrakh.Jean-Pierre Rampal.Leon Fleisher.Richard Tucker.Glenn Gould.And more."Odyssey are trademarks of CBS Incrr 32890 iLOOK FOR STICKER ON CBS RECORDS. ALSO AVAILABLE ON CASSETTESof ttEEBRtHix ,r.niy^Sia» hit albums'-mew war- ,.Olt H,WW ,1S to CHOOSt ’RtCWOSWOCA2SSU—1Th. Lo^Vo,"^4;THE ALL-TIME TOP 1001LL Circtit Prrfiirmanccs tRAVELBOLEROLA V&LSE ALBORADA DEL GRACI0S0DAPHNtS ET CHL0E SUITE NO 2RECORDS AND CASSETTES! BERNSTEINNEW YORK PNUttMWMGOBCHCTH «umOML« nufoThe library of CBS GreatPerformances is nowcomplete... and we’ve gotevery one!100 essential recordings ofthe basic classical repertoire!Conductors such asGeorge Szell! Leonard Bern¬stein! Eugene Ormandy!Soloists such as GlennGould! Isaac Stern! RudolphSerkin!Come in and pick a numberfrom 1 to 100!They’re all Great Perfor¬mances, and there’s neverbeen an easier, more eco¬nomical way of building anoutstanding classical musiclibrary!GREAT PERFORMANCESAT A GREAT PRICE!FROM CBS!$3®®.ach4 J»14°°CHS 9 a trademark nt C8S me MY 36714(<ircnt Ptrfiirmrtnrc5TCHAIKOVSKYi e t 2OVERTUREMAMCHI S4.AH MNNCOAMDJUUrroVCimmiBERNSTEINNEW YORKPtflLHARMOMC(•Trent FYrftirnmnrts^jPACK CANONBAROQUE FAVORITESJUlMONrS MACK) M0UMTS R0N0UUBACH'S AIR HANDELS SARABANDEVTVIUirS AUffiftO f IOO HMBOUi COMCfVTD OCA MOPEiiPPAfit) ERBUSN CNAMRER ORCHESTRAniicm u uum Eca* n u nmm w wturr MUHM wmosi m m w t onusMY 38482 Sale EndsDecember 24th, 1984Spin-It1444 E. 57th St.684-1505Spin-lt Now,Spin-It Later,but Spin-ItThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—7The Maximus PoemsCharles OlsonUniversity of California Press, 1984658 pages, $35.00by David SullivanModernism was an anti-linear move¬ment. Writers immediately before andafter the first World War had access toa retrospective look at all cultures thathad been unavailable before. This oc¬curred for two reasons; The first is thatthe industrial movement was shaping asociety in which new socio-economicpatterns were emerging, and the sec¬ond is that the arts had lost their role asguiders of the elite of the former soci¬ety. The privileged position of artistswas eliminated, and yet the number ofliterate people and machines that couldbe used for art's dissemination hadbeen markedly increased. Develop¬ments in etymology, the compiling ofthe first Oxford English Dictionary, thediscovery of miraculously well-devel¬oped cave paintings which T.S. Eliot vi¬sited early in the century, and the ques¬tioning of culture's basic structure andrecognition of its arbitrary nature, rad¬ically transformed writer's notions ofthemselves and their art. As they wit¬nessed the blind embracing of techno¬logy, industrialization, nationalism,and "progress", artists turned towardshistory, the recognition of the impor¬tance of every culture to the presentculture, to help reestablish the individ¬ual.The Modern writers, particularlyJames Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and EzraPound, saw their present culturescrambling towards a dangerously ill-defined future. But they recognized thepotential for a modern culture thatwould embody all previous cultures;one learns only by remembering. Afterthe War had drastically reshapedEurope these artists, many in self-imposed exile, began the psychic recon¬struction of their culture. Two strainsare predominate in their work, the reli¬ance on a modern view of history, par¬ticularly in the validation of their ownwork through references to oldermyths, and the precisely observed ren¬derings of the modern world they livedin. As if acknowledging their futureplace in history they allude to places,events, and people who existed, andcan, with effort, be tracked down.Concurrent with this movement tomythologize the present, to place theirculture against all other cultures andview it in a harsh, realistic, almost sci¬entifically objective light, is the unerringly personal nature of their work.Though each Modernist artist was heavily influenced by the distancing ofthemselves from their creation, (anidea that Joyce mocks at the end of1Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)in the end it is the uniqueness of theirvision, their individuality, that vali¬dates their work.The Modernist who resisted this ideamost strenuously was Ezra Pound. Inhis early work, later collected in Per¬sonae, he adopts voices and resurrectsdead poetry by reinventing its Ianguage, a technique that Eliot soonadopted. The artist slips behind veils,an elusive, chameleon-like artificer,and his work remains whole, separate.But in Pound's Cantos this supposed objectivity which lets old voices or preci¬sely rendered things stand for the ar¬tist's ideas, drops away. In an earlyversion of the first Cantatos Pound, asa modern day Odysseus, speaks direct¬ly to the reader. But as the Cantos wererevised this voice dropped further andfurther back — what held the assem¬blage together was Pound's mind, amind intent on clarifying modernusury, the unbalanced banker's capitalsystem, which he saw as the basis forthe degradation of the individual andthe rise of nationalism. Though Poundmay have considered his judgementsunbiased and objective they were a pe¬culiar and highly esoteric analysis ofthe world.The arc through time that the Cantostrace, like Joyce's in Ulysses, chroni¬cles the development of the artist'sthought as much as the progress of thework's narrative. By the very nature oftheir length they required a greatamount of time, and necessarily, con¬sciously, included the process of cre¬ation in their creation. The closed setbecomes the artist's life, the open set isthe artist's work. We are reminded ofthis in the opening out that alwayscomes at the end of Joyce's work; inThe Dead and Portrait, the speaker ison the point of departure, in Ulysses,Molly's monologue ends in a expandingchant, and Finnegans Wake has a lastsentence that turns us back to the first.Pounds' great work remains unfin¬ished, his own change was to great tocontinue to believe in what he hadbegun. To read these works is to beforced to reconstruct their world.Pound even informs us outright, "Ishall have to learn a little greek to keepup with this/ but so will you, drrattyou".Charles Olson endeavoured to learn,both the original myths, and their rein-vention. The three volumes of his grandwork, The Maximus Poems, have been finally brought together, and we cansee how he understood the individualthat Pound's Cantos created even asthey sought to eliminate him. I will firstexamine a small section in the Cantos,a section from the most personal andrevealing group that Pound wrotewhile confined to a small cage in anAmerican army compound near Pisa.Then I will turn to a short analysis ofThe Maximus Poems. Each evokes thetransformitive power of the writer toshape his life as he shapes his work.In Canto 82 Pound drops into anothervoice, the "barbaric yap" of Walt Whit¬man. But this is not the same type ofbringing to life that had occupied himearlier, he embodies Whitman as an ex¬pression of his deepest needs andwishes. From his cage he watchedbirds straddle the barbed wire that cir¬cled the camp, and imagined theirbodies forming musical patternsagainst the grid of the black lines. Hewrites in his one notebook:f fd9write the birds in their treblescaleTerreus! Terreus!there are no righteous warsThe Latin name is at once an evocation,a reproduction of the birds' song, and adistant echoing of the word truce thatcalls up the next line. His use of thebirds' song reminds him of Whitman,"exotic, still suspect/ four miles fromCamden/ "O troubled reflection/ "OThroat, O throbbing heart" he quotes.These lines are from Whitman's Out ofthe Cradle Endlessly Rocking, whichenacts a little boy's joy and growth ashe watches two birds mate. When thefemale dies he listens to the lamenta¬tion of the lone bird, and with the aid ofthe whispering waves discovers that indeath and the sorrow of the living greatsongs are born.The musical chanting of Whitman isnot Pound's, who writes "Wisdom liesnext thee,/ simply, past metaphor./Where I lie let the thyme rise/ and ba-silicum," with a clipped and specificdiction that evokes Leaves Of Grasswithout adopting its voice. Unsure hewill ever leave his cage alive he imagines what will come after him, as theAmerican bard imagined when hewrote, "look for me under your boot-soles," referring to the multi-layeredmeaning of the title, hinting at leav¬ings. Pound cannot find such optimismand states, "but I will come out of thisknowing no one/ neither they me."These lines, separated from the rest of the poem by their diction, show Poundseeing himself, his own fictions andadopted voices, truely.Pound again evokes Whitman's lineson the sea's "low and delicious" mes¬sage which "rustling up my feet,/Creeping thence steadily up to my earsand laving me softly all over" whis¬pered "death, death, death, death,"when he uses the Greek word for waterthat "o'erflowed me." But a sad oldman moves into the last lines:fluid...strong as the undertowof the wave recedingbut that a man should live in that fur¬ther terror, and livethe lonliness of death came uponme(at 3 P.M., for an instant)The contortion of that last sentence il¬lustrates his reluctance in acknowledg¬ing his terror, and "for an instant" isnot "for instance", it is a luminouspoint in time when despair overtookhim against all his efforts.In The Maximus Poems CharlesOlson adopts another voice too, that ofa mythic bird, kylix. Like Pound he at¬tempts to see clearly from above theworld he inhabits, but unlike the elderpoet his bird's-eye-view encompassesonly a single town, not the whole world.He adds fragments to create a whole,"what is mineral, what/ is curling hair,the string/ you carry in your nervousbeak, these/ make bulk, these, in theend, are/ the sum," he says on the firstpage. But he gives a name to this over¬seeing bird, this mythic character, andcalls many of the parts of this largepoem letters from Maximus of Glou-chester. This shifting, difficult narrator points to his own constructions, witha lucid voice of self-debasement thatPound rarely allows to surface. Hecommunicates by simple analogy.And now it is noonof a cloudy Sunday.And a bird singsloudlyAnd my daughter, nakedon the porch, singsas best she can, and loudly,backShe wears her own faceas we do not,until we cease to wearthe cloudsof all confusion,of all confuserswho wear the false faceHe never wore, Whoseis terrible. Isperfectioncontinued on page 11MAKE IT NEW*ROMANTICISM IN MODERNISMWonson Cave/ Glouster Massachusettst—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984OUR FAMOUS STUFFED PIZZA IN THE PANIS NOW AVAILABLE IN HYDE PARKOPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK11 AM T012 MIDNIGHTCocktails • Pleasant Dining • Pick-Up“Chicago’s best pizza!” — Chicago Magazine, March 1977“The ultimate in pizza!” — New York Times, January 19805311 S. Blackstone947-0200 It E A I iM P L A V SMisanthropeby MoliereEnglish Verse Translation by Richard W ilburLow-priced PreviewsNow-December 23Wed-Sat, 8:00pmSunday, 2:30&7:30pn Call753--H72Yisa/MC Am exUC students only $4 withStudent Rush! Call for details. (xr in in vmiThe I 'niversity of ChicagoSS4S South Elli> AvenueDON’TGET •LEFTOUTIN THECOLD!!!REGISTER NOWforWinter Aerobics ClassesTaught by Lisa Douglassat International HouseClasses Offered: Mon. Wed. & Fri.5:10 and 6:10 p.m.Starting Monday, January 7MEN AND WOMEN WELCOMEGeneral Registration: $45.00 fora Ten Week SessionFor More Information Contact:The Program OfficeInternational House1414 E. 59tl» Street753-2274 . ,r . ... -YOU’LLOVE the LOCKYou'll love the look of o HAIR PERFORMERS Perm and Hair Design It's alook that's healthy and easy to maintain It's a look created for youalone, making the most of your hair and your face$5.00 OFF- COMPLETE SHAPING AND STYLING50% OFF PERMSBeg. $30 • $60 NOW $15. S3QOtters good tor first tine clients with designated designers onlyThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—9Boys and girlsgrades 1-6 needed. for fun studies onartistic develop¬ment. Get paid fordrawing and look¬ing at pictures. Call962-7591. PREPARE FOR: jzz IATTEST MtWMnON WtOAlST* &MCC W34Call Days. Ev«s & WeekendsOUL-A-TEST HOTUNE (312) 508-0106ARLINGTON HEIGHTS 437-0*50CHICAGO CENTER 704-51SIHIGHLAND PARK 433-7410LA GRANGE CENTER 352-5*40- m— rk» >n U I U« 4 4MMout Slot M T suit CALI TOU HU I m J7S-1TUinNrvHyLSuir H Gpun t Onto ltd>; Schwon STABIIODON'T JUST HIGHLIGHT IT,BOSS" IT!Put STA&iXX BOSS to work andget attention. "BOSSING" ishighlighting atits bastMemos, computer printouts,books, graphs, maps. Tocolor<ode or emphasize,“BOSS" them all!Insist on the original.STABILO BOSS,transparent ink in8 fluorescentcolors. Sleek newSTABILO BOSS 2,with pocket clipand refills, 4fluorescent colors.Perfectfor the desk.Create a lasting impressionwith Schwan-STABILO. Schwan-STABILO USAPO. Box 2193. Peachtree City, GA 30269For nearest dealer call (BOO) 241-7803In Georgia dial (404) 4B7-SS12PRESENTS OF MIND■ecvrsvsj BOOKS k1301E. 57th STREET 684-1300MONDAY-THURSDAY 10:00 AM-10:00 PMFRIDAY & SATURDAY 10:00 AM-11:00 PMSUNDAY 10:00 AM-8:00 PMSEMINARYco-opBOOKSTORE5757 S. UNIVERSITY AVENUE 752-4381MONDAY-FRIDAY 8:30 AM-6:00 PMSATURDAY 10:00 AM-5:00 PMSUNDAY NOON-5:00 PM VHS VIDEO SPECIALSWhat a Gift!!!Any of the following titlesonly$24.95!MeatbalisPopeyeAmerican GigoloUncommon ValorFoul PlayJazz SingerTime BanditsBarbarella Charlette’s WebUp in SmokeStarTrek-The Motion PictureGreaseSaturday Night FeverAirplaneDragon SlayerAny of the following Classicsonly$19.95Flying DeucesThe Secret AgentIt’s A Wonderful LifeThe Scarlet PimpernelAmazing AdventureSanta Fe TrailGulliver’s TravelsThese foreign titles available:Brittania HospitalAllegro Non TroppoCarmenClosely Watched TrainsDivine NymphThe DresserFanny and AlexanderHeartlandLa TraviataLoves of a BlondeMontenegroMoonlightingMurri AffairReturn of Martin GuerreScenes from a MarriageShop on Main St.Summer in St. TropezThe Boat (Das Boot)An Evening at La CageBye Bye BrazilDona Flor and Her Two HusbandsHow I Won the WarLa Cage Aux FolliesMonty Python and the Holy GrailMonty Phthon’s Meaning of LifeMorganOnly$29.98In StockNowModel Camera Video1342 E. 55th St.493-670010—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984Richard Avedoncontinued from page 8The capitalization in the last line indi¬cates the religious layering of this pas¬sage; purity is a burden when it is com¬bined with self-consciousness. To hideand to court folly are ways in which wesurvive this world. In the line that is al¬most repeated, where confusionchanges to confusers, the poet recog¬nizes his attempt to center the masksoutside himself and accepts complicityin the self-effacing creative process.In a later section of the poem 3rd let¬ter to Georges', unwritten, the title it¬self informs us that we are in a voicepoking fun at its own artifice. It begins,"In this place is a oem which I have notbeen able/ to write — or a story to becalled the Eastern End of/ Georges,about a captain I knew about." Thisplace is literally the space in the poemenclosed by the brackets that mark offthis "letter". Olson intentionally showsus the unfinished nature of the wholepoem, this space will never be finishedwith the poem, only this letter about thepoem. But the wealth of details allow usto form a picture as well as any poemcould.What this narrator constructs is amythic figure whose skill at handlinghis ship is equal to Ulysses. Hewrites:—the point was to cut thecorner, if you were that good or thatcrazy, though hewas as good as they come, he even hadthe charts markedin different colored pencils and couldgo over thoserips and shoals dug out in a storm, driv¬ing a full-loaded vessel and down to her deckedge, across themas a wagon might salt licks or unshipher wheels andferry across — it is a vision or at leastan experienceI make off as though I have had, to ridewith a manlike that—Yet he does not pretend to have had theexperience here, though he informs usthat he has before. The vigor of the lan¬guage allows us to experience the cap¬tain's crazy daring while the place¬ment of its recounting in another voicemakes us aware of the compiler of such stories.Olson acknowledges his sources evenwhen they fail him, "and 1/ went toJames Connolly expecting to be able todepend/ upon him, but somehow hehasn't come across, or it's/ all to pret¬tied up." They gave him informationbut not the sense he wanted. The eldersailor comes through for him but doesnot "come across." This leaves Olsonconstructing what he imagined to havehappened even as he tells us that hecould not find out. The short passageends:but the roar of this guy goingthroughthe snow and bent to a north eas-ter and not taking anyround about way off the shoals tothe north but goingas he was up & down dale like ahorseman out of someEnglish novel makes it with me,and I want that sensehere, of this fellow going home.The writing sails on with little regardfor punctuation and sentence construc¬tion: the voice is that of a story teller.The last line frames the wild unhar¬nessed energy within the simplest urgeof us all, to go home. It is not love ofadventure that drives him on, or anywish to be seen as heroic, but the sim¬plest need.In this passage Olson is constructingfrom his most recent history, but trans¬forming it. He does not claim objecti¬vity, but embraces his biases. WhenHugh Kenner in The Pound Era writes,"Pound, aware that his interests areguided by temperament, neverthelessdelights more in their variety than inhis temperament's embodiment," hestresses Pound's accuracy and multi¬plicity of impressions. Though we haveseen how Pound often ended up com¬municating more of himself than he in¬tended, he believed in objectivity.Olson never does.What Olson lacks however, is thelyrical precision of Pound's voice.Olson has inherited the language ofWilliam Carlos Williams, but withoutthe rhythmic sense that Williams had.Even when Pound was simply describ¬ing straight facts his modulation ofvoice is impeccable.Blue dun; number 2 in mostriversfor dark days, when it is coldA starling's wing will give you thecolour or duck widgeon, if youtake the feather from under the Ezra PoundwingLet the body be of blue fox fur, ora water rat's or grey squirrel's.Take this with a portion of mo¬hairand a cock's hackle for legs.12th of March to 2nd of AprilHen pheasant's feather does for afly.That is a marvelous list, not poetisized,but modulated only by line breaks andword choice. What Olson does possessis an honest and self-mocking view ofhis creation that can rise it to the levelof mythical creation and then lower itto the direct expression of one man'sworld. He admits what Pound was atsuch great pains to avoid, the role ofthe individual in the creative process. It is this romantic notion as espousedby Wordsworth in The Prelude, com¬bined with the precise recording of thepresent, seen through all the past, thatis the root of present day Modernism.Olson ends the poem with a simplehumorous list that includes a person,an object, an abstraction, and himself.The general terms, corresponding tothings in his world which we will neverbe able to visualize or understand theway he does, shuts us out. Each person,each artist whose creation was a partof their life, no matter how honestlythey confront their own artifices, re¬mains alone.My wife my car mycolor and myselfThe String of Another Balloonrankled fans;hiding behind thetrees in the suburbs — (a subway tubeof lightfrom the deepof the tv.ownership of the air,the look of the leaves when they are quietly alone("I don't know whetherthe firetrucks cause thedreams or the dreams causethe fire trucks.")only doorbells free the spirit from that glanceants. Christmas morning — «, zhilltop. the ornaments are -,5sleuth. ’ what we make them —cookies; electric razor;ordinary instructions —the box: quiet space, stuffthings wait there, for someone, for you?fun; dictionary, and the laughter,and the wind that doesn't answer;pillows floating free.-Timothy BeltonThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—11*J£ves vyere sotransforKR: AniIvisiOi^jC'bur^oeljU vn thflSijfcty. Which inv or,t spring vmIWouldn't tW■fc poemslab<>.,■£ ., • I1^r WmvTis a lot of There's a poem in there where Diane/erence. I and %ail Jack Gilbert were out on theWalling" West cowl §nd we came across a tree,ansforms which I started writing about. Jack#U|13 hardly ever forgave me because ft wasp, If 1 can his territory. I didn't know what that>m an old poem was about, I was fust doingah, \fficam IMisce th f"WMaria, 1rk lyingwasfAv i S iortibfJpMMPCi^^ithlhgs aBbOtR^^^i^gs: i thfme thdnpWbfwere tike of everyonfe. |*a little roo far, I talk Jp4came into the airport this|his guy had a gun, bigger gun Jhanany^ t^jMBpgH^bimd and ifnorapf TasyfI saw the wood waver,wish it idea where $11 this dbJes f gcr ends' up, Roving moodyJu^rL? ba* t0 th£ *>*0c*or? vyitti tapdMfJfewsoft b v 1 °u sWfeez i rqM nsideso the exile remains a kind, acing do'Jhat fire arourfa rri\ ; f/OUo ireI wdrlir H12—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1934ting vjir’throominute* | .i^/lrig!fl | §Prrkmsewith altTT^mg^^^nsi^^P^epmg rrjy,secrets./ 1^lBSbjLP<^^d aga invitowas writing^tnl^W^hf called ChfrjKjmas Sticks) "GeTfmg ready for sito^RThere I was starting with \artgHU0rather than an idea Ifone beef sttmanyor evention. I didn't know what the!,was; or was going to be, whetothat poem. -.Jm,CLR: That seems similarjldmo tradition upon enterMoawhere they would leavralRfind a spot in the snow/^wgfisoKcf to come ftjL thertyjaMsymbOTHrlng ycrttfeeJWWryf^tM ■yjS* ' 1 fmou ' m, f or e vUifai i ng Hgfieve• in.-king the^&a of■nside thatfBitebe a self conscf^^iMbsc of them as sym 'o s tt. |kjfc,C«UK *rnRm& a sre i ess UtlfiBut l befnPwqnlv in the islandsso I will insist onJJtopJWmg the parking lottothe two beer trucks ancTTxaUiiig a table theret^ytoriftec i-ga r tree, for me andm^friends to eat atWe W».f) take d end by turningOh the HofttS end. tefemrijUiick.. In exhaustionnou<Jh,, vhpsr«ur fc$U0§|g<have cjuttetPycthat. ; ^GS; A I6t of these poem*heroic, but half true, at;tering an ordeaLjyCrLpretty l civilizpd‘%|«ktoPV^kerfHwalk dow^tCTn4Jhe coursemrough thoire|It'S cTn oriBfenhejmroWjCLRsymibndersiatf soflpts under tlI theJkne.vift iflto. wtheprivvoqstudyto talnper with lWitiso much ofjnttlfg it*aiitlr ? bollwanting him to spanting iWo beOaStoalus and Wer make thating ironist amothefiHstaves to ndftfantiy," and scnern bers^■ugl^heOf mejHto■ indFit's carryilotidfitoBiy]thoset expressions you take that memory andscape, of ela- change the physical world, it rethi know, like me of the Japanese Naiko, vnot that, that rather than being a precise descrbodies, that of things, always Involves a leaphat they have GS: They're commentaries, a pte qQhetabo- phical comrTtffTtary. Ambot. CLR * fn some of your poems a si•se birds, I'm kind of intensity and transfornof, a kind of takes place, tike here in Of Bir clumsiness, Name'.ip mere help- GS: i m talking about God, andwatching as the world Is. By dragging God Inrn for the sky erything it gave him the powmourner '» dreamMJ keed||fJhe world at pat ten the white goat and the black, betwee*ade with Sicily and the second palace, t>ave of the sea and the wave of the sky, fp of white paint, l am the prow of a shipthe timbers, I am the earthquake —he green catalpa Pind the li©iel|t»cKSdid voyage le, his ownfsad life aheadii..- hey tty ^^■powd»l m their —fRigJ r'ln 1,p o'* in-. r&/ so ne Lviii 1|jUsf rpbvB am Of' ■- efe again ^^Vsee me/ Isit- J SfwatoH1 woncfi Hg if hjI it's ''Bi fit ' in tJlmeJ j|P wa 11 o ws " JS^Pnean iirn, t*yl V foye htoose tJ|rd$, •< ypSjBvTheyw^H toch o^Bie hoye 1 inn aginatiw haiThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—13JNew and RebuiltTypewriters,Calculators,Dictators, AddersCasioHewlett PackardTexas Instrument REPAIRSPECIALISTSon IBM, SCM,Olympia, etc.FREE repairestimatesRENTALSavailable withU.ofC.I.D.The University of Chicago BookstoreOffice Machines & Photographic Dept.970 East 58th Street 2nd Floor962-7558 e 5-4364 (ON CAMPUS) ORIENTAL CARPETSFOR ADDRESS OR INFORMATIONCALL:288-0524yeara small group of Americans and Russianset out on the greatest adventure of them all...|jjj|i| see if there is life beyond the stars...• •••THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACTHYAMS ftinr.Yo dwyr-Vay®' presents a PEROY SCHEIDER6.W. OPTICIANS1519 E. 55thT*l. 947-9335Eyas txontimd and Contact lansas fitted byregistered Optometrists.Specialists in Qeaitty Eyewear atReasonable Prices.Lab on premises for fast service •frames replaced, lenses duplicatedand prescriptions filled.Student and SeniorCitizen Discounts Work/study or indepen¬dent research students:research assistants need¬ed for study on right/leftbrain differences in emo¬tional development inchildren. Creditavailable through Beh.Sci. or Child Psychiat. jCall 962-1548 forinformation. EAST PARKTOWERSCharming, vintage building inEast Hyde Park now has alimited selection of lake andpark view apartments. Situatednear the I.C., we offer studios,one and two bedroom unitswith heat included in rent. Askabout our student and facultydiscount.324-6100STARTS FRIDAY DECEMBER 7th AT THEATRES EVERYWHERE.PG GIMUNCf SUGBSrtB <a>\vm wM«At *u» mji m turraeu *om rmtm* :<S S' Jperv SO' PCbv APiHiipr c . A CLASSIC RESIDENCEIN ACLASSIC LOCATIONFIFTY TWO HUNDREDSOUTH BLACKSTONETHE BLACKWOODLuxury, high rise apartmentbuilding in the Hyde Park area nowoffering a limited selsction of oneand two bedroom apartments.Situated near the Illinois Central,University of Chicago, HarperCourt and only a short walk fromthe lake, our apartments feature cen¬tral air conditioning, individuallycontrolled heat, ceramic tile, securi¬ty intercom, new appliances andwall to wall carpeting. Onebedrooms from only $430, twobedrooms from *550. Ask about ourstudent and faculty discount.684-86663?MillJ ROCKEFELLER llMEMORIALCHAPELSunday, December 98:30 a.m.EcumenicalService of HolyCommunion11:00 a.m.UniversityReligious Service,Bernard O. Brown. Deanof the Chapel, Preaching12:15 p.m.Carillon recital andTower Tour4:00 p.m.Concert of Musicfor AdventRockefeller Choir per¬forming call 962-600214—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984Born: Wet rubber, cold steel, bucolic breath of a nun turned nurse. I wouldhave crawled back, up the tunnel to my cozy sling. Would have. They wanted tolaugh in my face, slap me down on the bloated breast of a woman who wouldn'tever hear me sing. Notes of joy on a pure open field not a tree in sight; notes ofother joys stranded on the floor of a crowded room stepped on forced to lickpebbles from soles. I have been chased by cars, bicycles, and mailmen, rundown and pressed into tar, into a long greasy stain north on route one; a truckbullying by catches the spray of my heart and deposits me on the wrong side ofthe river, in the trunk of a Mercedes now loaded for shipment to Japan.The scene: A muskrat crouches in any of the dark holes of a fallen clump oftrees in this small woods. Two boys peer from behind a rock armed with twokitchen knives—one meat, one milk—of a Kosher home. Who was more honest?The tall boy's audacious sprints almost to the edge of the clump, his spittingargument with the beast, full of invective and American folklore; the smallerboy, shy and squinting, face pale, then flushed, then pale again, clutched hisknife with two firm hands, and stalked firmly behind the rock, emitting half- *hearted cheeps of war more often found awkward in the lips of a non-sports fanwatching two teams as anonymous to him as the gas-man; danger. Or the mus-kat that might not even be there, cornered. The next day he tried to convert meto Jesus saying Christ would strengthen my resolve, and my body—I said no,believing that I was—and why not—alone. The day was Halloween: the officialtally had me with the least amount of candy of all the kids on the block, notincluding a spiked apple, (I have saved the blade in the event that one day thedoor is fully closed and locked,) and to top it off, I was forced to appear asRobin to my brother's Batman.The scene: Begins with a barber shop and ends with two teeth and a ski-cap onthe gymnasium floor, and sixty-three kids sternly admonished by a chucklingprincipal. In the white linoleum shop the cokes were fine and so were—afterdigging beneath the pile of Boy's Life and Archie comix—the Playboys and anearly glimpse of what tits looked like. But the scissors were sharp, poking a fewtimes, drawing blood from the corner of my ear, leaving me shorn of strengthat the same moment Samson pushed against pillars. I squirmed in my seateyed the door, bolted the second the bib was removed. Hiding in the coat closet,the teacher laughed and set the kids on to a game of exposure. My butchered'do' plastered safely beneath my ski-cap; me bursting down hallways, throughdoors, down stairs. Finally through a maze of volleyball nets, Martha VanVooren, husky and blonde and rumored not to have a mother, tackled me, spill¬ing my teeth, holding high the ski-cap like a scalp. The kids crowded aroundlike victory.The scene: On a rubble-strewn field of a deserted summer camp, they circledand pushed, kicks at my shins. I screamed like John Wayrie in an effort tobreak their ranks. Renard, stupid, but big, shook me until my senses left me:when we could talk more quietly. That night in a sleeping bag in a cabin moredraft than wood, I warmed myself with my farts, and marveled at my affinitywith the smell. Like cobwebs in empty rooms, gray strandson the beard of an aging Oriental despot,Spanish moss hangs from the live oaksin dark shades of green and graythat mask the approach to the housenamed for the flowers in the fieldof the dead, the field of spiritsand phantoms who had finished their work,the last place Odysseus visited.Set far back from the main road, overgrownand visible only after you have turned,two stone gateposts lead the way in,a road that disappears beyond the wooden bridge,winds for miles through oaks perenially green,dark, through to an older world.You drive slowly, wish for a sign,realize gradually there will be none,that whoever hauled the stone to builda plantation house here did not intendthe way to be accessible, did not parethe oaks to tear the moss away,or import more than one flower.Asphodel Photograph by Susanna Kiluk-MartinCharlie DemattaAction: I cringe at the dances of technology: machine ba I lei finds me a propswatted about like pinball. The punch-press wears tights; the line, a tutu. I amdressed like a tree crippled by chain-saws. The audience replete with Reaganmasks. All tranquilized, breathing shallowly. No more than a soft mist creepsup the windows, obscuring nothing. Then a violence like a limp handshake dominoes: the tide, then I am the beach: lovers pick shells like pimples andscabs; children build castles of snot: I'm standing still shaking while everyonesits: It is a Kaddish and only I mourn: they gaze benevolently past me, silentwith their security: the more articles of clothing, the happier they are: I weara loincloth, they call it a diaper: this is their building, doors open for all. Immi¬grant floods, then I am a Texan; a soldier bewildered by Lebanon's heat.There's a rat in the corner; it scurries the kitchen floor; I jumped into thebreadbox, no bigger than this room, and squashed a chalah and a loaf of rye. Iopened my eyes, and, peeking through my fingers, braced for the great swat oflightning. My room, built brick by brick, should last that eternity.The scene: Folded, then wadded, tucked into a crack of the old wall: a paper ofdisavowal. Surrounded by the thunder of blackened men locked in prayer, thelightning came as tears: the face of history moistened became a slip, a mortarI scraped with my fingernails, kneaded with my palms, and slipped betweenthe bricks of this room; my west wall is that tired wall, and I have outlined allof its crevices with a fat black magic marker. Running through dusty, Arabstrewn alleys, I retraced the steps of the scapegoat over until I was him, andwe didn't exist anymore. At the foot of a temple, a shopkeeper thrust a clayhookah, asking more for it than I had in my wallet. On the bench, footstepsburned into sand betrayed a Pushtak wealthier now by one social securitycard, and a clutch of folded leather. Against a hook on the wall of the hostelslammed the guy who called me a whore and declared all the girls that I knewto be fallen. He fell, spineless, into a hospital. I shivered on the roof overlookinga steel and glass hotel, and the wall—looking small in the distance.The scene: Up the spiral staircase and across the hall—they had been talkingabout me—'that asshole', they said and scribbled on my photograph. I've comea long way since that haircut—nine blocks, and five more links on the chain.The present: I refuse to wake up, nervously dreaming. The door is open still acrack: the begrudged light of storm clouds filters in and plays pcout on myprofile, maiming my features, yet attesting my existence. If I cojld choose myposition, I would be curled up and tucked in, and to accommodate this, I havebegun to build new, inner walls, a tight labyrinth: to move, snakelike through,Is to die; not to move, winged only in here but away from the sun, is to also die.Where is the cheese? The cheese is a trap. I twitch.-Larry Cohen Long after you have given up arrivingthe house appears, three gray columnssupporting a stone roof that must haveseemed ancient even new, and a wildnessof moss and oak that grows to the edgeof the walls, dense legacy, as thoughthe builder of this house knew menwould someday return from warsand want to live on the western edgein a world draped in gray, far awayfrom the ambitions they had lovedmore than themselves, each other.-Jane HoogestraatPoem of Depart ireIt is here, by losing the moment, that I first feel dint of it.As the night before leaving Italy, looking over via Cavour in the rain,I remember best of all the time I was there. As only hearing an echo.Outside my window the street wet with rain, shiny.Green wooden shutters peeling on the buildings across the street.Cars honking as they turned onto the street, splashed toward the piazza.It's what I remember best: the sense of the night passing,of the coming inevitability, as the cars, of leaving.A feeling of something like salvation being only in leaving,and yet an inability to bring myself to leave.So I leave you now.I watch cars about the lake and talk lightly.—Daniel BrownsteinThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—15TSPACE EXTENDEDIMAGES OF EXILE IN THEPOETRY OF JOSEPH BRODSKYby Edward ManouelianFate has often condemned the Rus¬sian intellectual to exile. Any art foundinconsistent with the aims of those inpower has merited its creators eitherbanishment to a remote area of thecountry or expulsion beyond itsborders. While Joseph Brodsky has en¬dured both, it is well to remember thathe began to refer to exile in his poetryeven before he himself underwent it.Brodsky writes not so much in order torender an account of personal experi¬ence but rather to express the anguishof participating in a literary cultureconstantly threatened with detach¬ment from the place where it languageis spoken. His works confront thereader with this disrupted sense ofplace through a variety of rhetoricaldevices. At certain points (e.g., in "ToLycomedes on Scvros"), the lyric per¬sona seems at pains to define the factof his removal in terms of spatial dis¬tance. Some of the poems (e.g., "Odys¬seus to Telemachus"), whether cast asmissives or only loosely apostrophic,are envisioned as a means for the poetto write his way back to his native landby maintaining contact with someonethere. Still other poems ("To the newTenant" and "I kissed thoseshoulders...") evoke the emotionalwreckage left in the wake of forcedseparations with minute, set piece-likeglimpses of the inanimate obiects ofthe lives of those who left. Though oth¬erwise varying in content and style, thepoems here discussed all echo atheme: that of Brodsky's poetic per¬sonae looking backward at the placesfrom which they have departed. Eachpoem imagines a situation which, how¬ever obliquely, stands for exile, so thatthe poet can continually re-examine,from different angles, what that formof separation means.In a sense, each of the seven poemsanalyzed opens a unique perspectivecn the theme of exile. This set ofshorter 'yric pieces was chosen fromthe larger body'of Brodsky's work inorder to provide a workable field ofstudy, a selection comprehensiveenough to encompass the varying atti¬tudes in his treatment of the subject,yet small enough to allow close textualexplication. One thus uncovers thetechniques, in prosody as well as in im¬agery, that Brodsky uses to expresshimself. One needs especially to try tomake out how Brodsky positions himself in relation to his lyric personae.Shifts in stance will be notable, so thatthe voice which seems to be speakingto the exile in a given poem will speakas the one banished in another. Takentogether, these diffuse perspectives illustrate Brodsky's vision of the inter¬twining of personal and cultural destinies in exile.The title of Brodsky's "You're com¬ing home" would suggest +hat what fol¬lows is to be addressed to the exile:You're coming home again. Whatdoes that mean?Can there be anyone here whostill needs you,who would still want to count youas his friend?You're home, you've boughtsweet wine to drink with sup¬per,and, staring out the window, bitby bityou come to see that you're theone who's guilty:the only one. That's fine. ThankGod for that.Or maybe one should say,'Thanks for small favors.'A generalized form of the second per¬son, applicable to anyone who might gothrough the experience of return, in¬cluding most obviously the poet him¬self, continues throughout the poem.By the last stanza one feels that thepoet speaks from the vantage point ofthe returnee. The tone carries a stronghint of internal monologue. The laststanza, in particular, has the flavor ofan unspoken insight when the poetsteps back and reflects on his words:It's fine to catch yourself, whilerushing home,mouthing a phrase that's some¬thing less than candid;you're suddenly aware that ourown soulis very slow to take in what hashappened. Brodsky develops this ambiguity inorder to suggest that the one whocomes back must talk to himself forlack of anyone else to talk to. His longabsence has severed the human ties heleft behind, thus rendering his returnempty of meaning.The anaphora which recurs almostas a refrain in three of the five stanzasfurther points up the irony of the speak¬er's position. Each time a phrase ap¬pears, its false optimism is rebutted bya reminder of the poet's alienation.Taut syntactic parallelism (the stanzacontains three subordinate clauses allintroduced by the particle cfo; therhyme scheme is grammatical) andrepeated negation give the stanza thequality of a logical argument. Onecould say that the stanza containsthree propositions, the first of whichwould seem innocuous if lifted out ofthe present context. In the same way,the second line of the stanza could ex¬press either independence or loneli¬ness. But the last remark is unambi¬guously negative:It's fine that there is no one else toblame,it's fine that you are free of allconnections,it's fine that in this world there isno onewho feels obliged to love you todistraction.Taken together, these three commentsexpress the totality of the speaker'sseparation: he has neither enemies(people to abuse) nor friends. The echoof the negative indefinite personal pro¬noun, metamorphosed by a change of grammatical case insists on the poet'sisolation.The rest of the poems shows thespeaker deprived of the symbois ofhuman relationships: in the fourthstanza, there is no one to meet him atthe train station. In the second stanza,the wine is delicious, and, in an ironictwist, the poet states that he has it all tohimself, when he would really prefersomeone with whom to share it. Orwould he? In the fifth stanza Brodskyleaves open the possibility of anotherinterpretation, which, without negat¬ing what was said earlier about thebarrenness the poet finds in h;s person¬al life, takes into account the fact thathe now feels free to express himselfhonestly. One recalls that Brodskybegan to write in the late fifties andearly sixties, a period known in the So¬viet Union as "the Thaw." Thus"You're coming home", which datesfrom 1961, was written at a time whencertain of the intellectuals purged dur¬ing the Stalin era were rehabilitatedand allowed to return from the laborcamps. Meanwhile the governmentsomewhat relaxed its control of art andliterature. The poem may thus havebeen written with the position of thosereturning from exile in mind. The isolation felt becomes part of the cost ofhaving kept one's conscience. Thus, ina sense, the anaphoric refrain of "It'sfine that..." can be taken literally.Brodsky envisages another return ofsorts in "I kissed those shoulders...".Here a coolly precise description of thefurnishings of a room is delivered fromthe perspective of an embrace. The incongruity of the situation and thepoet's reaction to it heightens a sense of alienation from former surround¬ings. The poem defamiliarizes the set¬ting by capturing it as if seen for thefirst time, when in reality the ghostmentioned at the end of the poem is aspecter of the speaker's earlier self.The blankness of the poet's tone in talk¬ing about the room expressed the factthat he can no longer find himself init.I kissed those shoulders and Isnatched a glanceat what lay half-revealed behindthat back,and saw the chair, moved out intothe room,merge with the illumination andthe wall.The suspense developed by the firstthree lines, where Brodsky immediate¬ly focuses the reader's attention on thescene and then holds back on what hesees for another line and a half, is un¬dercut by the blandly irrelevant obser¬vation that a pushed-out chair mixes inwith the wall. The same tone, de¬tached, yet curious and attentive tosmall detail, continues through the de¬scription of the quality of light in whichthe room is perceived:A raised, extended glare lurkedin the bulb,unwise for furnishings so wornand thready,which made the sofa in the cornershinefrom brown and chestnut leather,to bright yellow.The speaker seems almost to belaborthe visual exactness of his image.From the opening lines Brodsky makesclear that he will not so much narratethe action of a moment as paint a stilllife out of a momentary glance Oneeven catches an allusion to the laterterm, whose Russian equivalent, nat-jurmort, echoes the French naturemorte (literally, "dead nature") in thecomment in lines 11 and 12:The table empty, parquet floorablaze,the stove all dark, inside a dustyframea landscape froze, the sideboardstanding bareappeared to be the only livingthing...The special stress laid on the factthat at least something in the poet'sview seemed "animate" points up thestatic quality of all else in the poem.The remark comes after a long cata¬logue of inanimate objects: the textureof the language in which their description is rendered emphasizes their im¬mobility. Each object mentioned ispaired with a verb of state (as opposedto a transitive or motion verb). Thesyntax of the enumeration has a ratherplodding feel to it, due to the repetitionof the subject/verb (or verb/subject)sentence structure. This factor, alongwith the heavily stressed paeonicrhythms brought about by the almostregular alternation in syllabic iength,helps to reflect the still, heavy contrastbetween light shadow Brodsky por¬trays in the poem. In the same way, theuse of the word nedvizimost' (immov¬able property) in line thirteen rein¬forces the motionless aspect of theroom's furnishings.Against this stillness Brodsky intro¬duces a moth, whose flitting motion isnicely caught by a quickened rhythm:it moved my glance from franticimmobility.And if some ghost had ever set¬tled here,it soon forsook this dwelling,twice forsaken.Note also that the speaker's glancerises from the objects on which it rest¬ed. The symbolic implications of amoth coincide with those of the dust:they both suggest age, storage, and ahouse left behind by its owners. Withthe image of the ghost who is no longerthere, Brodsky resolves the issue of thepoem. The ghost stands as a way ofsaying that the foregoing descriptionwas a failed attempt to reconcile whathe remembers of former surroundingswith the reality he sees before him. Thevery existence of the ahost. whn repre¬sents the speaker's former self, Is16—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984dthetical manner. It is as if the poet,having determined that the place towhich he has returned has been aban¬doned by its inhabitants (of which hewas one), finds that time and absencehave wiped out the human memoriesthat made it significant.While "I kissed those shoulders..."implies the frailty of relationships byfocusing on the slight modifications inthe surroundings in which they tookplace, another poem, "To the New Ten-ant" explores how these surroundingshave an existence of their own outsideof the people in their midst. The firsteight lines of the poem show the arrivalof the newcomer from the perspectiveof the objects within the house:To the new tenant everythingseems strange.A hasty glance slides over all theobjects;their shadows suit the newcomerso illthat even they feel horribly tor¬mented.The house, however, hates thisemptiness,and so, perhaps because of lack ofcourage,a lock, which cannot recognize atall,alone resists the stranger in thedarkness.Brodsky personifies their shadows.They glance back at the speaker just ashe sizes them up. The shadows' auton¬omy is conveyed by the way the subor¬dinate clause of which they are the sub¬ject grows to dwarf the originalsentence. That the substantial shadowsof objects, rather than the things them¬selves, are endowed with conscious¬ness signals the intensity of their emp¬tiness. The house no longer wishes toremain "empty", the lock struggles"alone", and even the wariness overthe newcomer is expressed as a "lack"of courage.The awareness of open space definesthe poignancy of exile. In this poem,human absence is felt so keenly that itcauses a realization even on the part ofthe person's belongings of the voidcaused by his having gone away. Thegesture of the lock preserves and de¬fines the space within the house. Togive way, to let in a new occupant, issummed up elliptically by the verb uz-navat' (to discover). Thus objects arepersonified to such an extent that theymime the human caution of enteringinto a new relationship after old oneshave been severed.Yet the house serves as a link be¬tween two who have never met, itsformer and future occupants. Syntac¬tic parallels reflect the same connections that, Brodsky hints, exist be¬tween objects in a room and events in alife. The poet retains the same matterof face tone of voice when mentioningitems of furniture:They're quite unlike, this presentone and hewho brought these cupboards andthat table, thinkinghe'd never go outside those wallsagain.But he was forced to leave. Heleft, and perished.Here Brodsky the ironist comes to thefore. The lyric persona tries to distancehimself from the former owner in ex¬plaining the latter's intention never toleave the house. But he cannot escapethe fact of being bound to his predeces¬sor in having shared the same house.The existence of things, the paradoxi¬cal animateness of inanimate objectsties them together.The two foregoing poems imply ab¬sence, return, and the abandonment(temporary, in the case of the second)of a place of habitation. They envisageabstract situations involving the ef¬fects of exile without ever namingthem as such. Other of Brodsky'sworks deal more directly with thetheme of exile through variations onthe myths of classical antiquity. By ei¬ther casting the lyric persona as acharacter in the myth or by having himdescribe his position in terms of it nar¬rative structure, Brodsky sets twen¬tieth-century Russian emigre litera¬ture in the context of a largerexperience by suggesting the prece¬dents for such a culture detached, as ifwere, from its linguistic base. Viewed in this light, the following three poemson mythological subjects have an alle¬gorical resonance. Brodsky on onelevel re tells the timeless myths of thehuman condition. He does so, however,in order to work out the destiny of theliterary tradition in which he is a writ¬er. This awareness of a cultural mis¬sion is inherited from his forbears inthe Petersburg group of "Silver Age"(1890-1925) poets, in particular fromOsip Mandelstamm. The latter'spoems on Hellenic themes could betaken as an example of what Brodskywould describe as "prosody as a repo¬sitory of time." In the same way thatMandelstamm would occasionally useiambic hexameter to reproduce the ef¬fect of Greek prosody in Russian verse(as in "Insomnia.."), and so echo thosewhom he considers his cultural ante¬cedents, Brodsky incorporates the im¬agery of classical mythology so as toplace himself within the Western tradi¬tion.Brodsky examines the tenuous na¬ture of the link between the exile andthe community left behind in "Odys¬seus to Telemachus" written in 1972,the year in which he himself was final¬ly expelled from the Soviet Union. Thepoem takes the form of the letter thatOdysseus might have written Telema¬chus in the years when the gods werepreventing the former's return to Itha¬ca. To be cut off from one's homelandentails for Brodsky not only a state ofphysical removal but also a process ofcoming unmoored from one's past.Odysseus, having already lost track ofwhere he is and how long he has beenaway, now finds himself without anysense of how to distinguish his new sur¬rounding or to recall facts (his son'sage, the result of the war in which hefought) that should be planted firmly inhis memory. Brodsky conveys theemigre's lost mental bearings throughOdysseus' disjointed stream of con¬sciousness:While we were killing time there,old Poseidon,it almost seems, stretched andextended space.I don't know where I am or whatthis placecan be. It would appear somefilthy island,with bushes, buildings, and greatgrunting pigs.A garden choked with weeds;some queen or other.Grass and huge stones...Telma-chus, dear boy!The thread of an idea is abruptlydropped as another is picked up, untilfinally Odysseus admits his own inco¬herence. The verses cited contain anumber of phanopoetic devices whichcapture Odysseus' scattered frame ofmind. The enjambement produces aslight hesitation appropriate to onewhose thoughts wander (or, to be moreliterally exact, to one whose "brain al¬ready wanders." The Russian phrasehas the connotation of involuntarymental confusion, as opposed to simpleabsentmindedness.) The asyndeticsyntax of the passage reinforces thesame effect: a new sentence begins without any grammatical connectionto the oreceding one:The mind tripswhen it counts waves; eyes, stungby sea horizons,must weep, and flesh of waterstuffs one's ears.I can't remember how the warcame out;even how old you are — I can't re¬member.Brodsky purposely omits logical tran¬sitions throughout the poem. Twice heuses an ellipsis to signal a shift in Odys¬seus' thoughts. The latter interruptshimself in order to try to explain whatseems an incomprehensible gap between himself and his home. The para¬dox of "stretching space" vividly ex¬presses the intensity of the exile'sconsciousness of distance. Space be¬comes elastic in the hands of malevo¬lent gods, whereas mortals are unableto similarly catch hold of time.Brodsky emphasizes this point bymeans of the antithetical opposition ofthe verbs terjat' (to lose, waste; i.e., todiminish in quantity) and rastfanut'(to stretch, extend; i.e., to enlargen).As a result of his long wanderings,Odysseus can no longer locate himselfgeographically, either relative to hishome or to the area through which hepasses. Thus characteristics of thevarious way-stations on Odysseus'journey are enumerated at random, re¬flecting the way his disrupted sense ofplace has caused all settings to mergein his memory.The same representation of exilethrough images of extended physicaldistance taken frm a mythological set¬ting can be found in Brodsky's "Didoand Aeneas". The lyric persona shiftsfrom Dido's point of view to that ofAeneas and back again several timesthroughout the poem. Each change ofperspective reveals the difference intheir perception of spatial relations.The strength of Dido's emotion forAeneas takes the form of a near-sight¬ed willingness to block out the worldaround her except for the close-up ob¬jects that refer to her lover: Aeneas, onthe other hand, is repeatedly shownstaring into the distance. The abruptcontrast in the proportions with whichthey measure their surroundings re¬flects the uneveness in their relation¬ship: Dido is the more loving one. Thefirst six lines provide an example ofthis technique:The great man stared out throughthe open window;but her entire world ended at theborderof his broad Grecian tunic, whoseabundanceof folds had the fixed, frozen lookof seawaveslong since immobilized.And he still staredthrough the wide window with agaze so distantthat his lips seemed to freeze andform a seashell,one that concealed an inward,muted roar. Brodsky opens the poem with theimage of Aeneas glancing out the win¬dow, a gesture which suggests thelength of his vision. In the very nextline, however, the reader looks at histunic through Dido's eyes. The lyricpersona in effect interrupts himselfand moves the focus of the text to theforeground, and then proceeds to de¬scribe Aeneas' garment by means of asimile of Homeric dimensions, a com¬parison that takes on a life of its ownand stretches out for three lines. Inter¬estingly, Brodsky renders the object ofDido's foregrounded attention in termsof what Aeneas is simultaneouslywatching. Thus the folds of the tunicshe sees stands for the waves of theocean he sees. They both become ametaphor for the emotional distancewhich separates the two lovers. Thesame device is repeated later whenBrodsky talks about the "the horizon inthe goblet":The shimmering horizon in hisgobletwas motionless.But her vast love appearedto be only a fish, a fish whichyetmight plunge into the sea afterhis ship...Here, the merging of the rim of thegoblet with the horizon effectively col¬lapses the distance between the two inthe same way the discrepancy betweenthe vision of the two lovers brought thewaves of the sea and the folds of thetunic together.Just as "Odysseus to Telemachus"was a metaphor for the exile's attemptto maintain contact, however, tenuous,with his past by writing back to it,"Dido and Aeneas", concerns the ef¬fort of the one left behind to reach outto the one departing. Aeneas' thoughtswander elsewhere. By displacingAeneas' attention away from the pres¬ent scene, Brodsky suggests that theexile remains always mentally some¬where ei ~ In the context of Virgil'smyth, we an assume that Aeneas isdrawn away by a sense of destiny thatleads him to his final goal of his trav¬els. Brodsky pointedly shies away fromdetailing the causes of Aeneas' urge towander. Rather, Aeneas is limited to agesture which by itself evokes theexile's disrupted sense of place, theglance at the sea mentioned above. Theglance is, to use Eliot's term, an objec¬tive correlative, a formula, so to speak,representing the state of mind in whichpermanent detachment from one'shome (Aeneas cannot return to Troy; itno longer exists) forces one to castabout for another.The same oblique yet insistent refer¬ence to the psychological implicationsof exile informs one of Brodsky's otherpoems on mythological themes, "K Li-komedu, na Skiros". In this case thelyric persona strives to locate himselfwithin the physical environment inorder to spell out exactly the distancebetween himself and the place he left.The concern for spatial relations is anoutgrowth of a moral dilemma:throughout the poem the speaker suf¬fers a crisis of identity, never surewhether to consider himself the victimof a crime or the perpetrator of one.Brodsky builds this tension through hiscontinuously ambiguous allusion to theTheseus myth. The speaker identifieswith Theseus, who must weigh his guiltover having killed the minotaur. At thesame time, heseus is also a victim,since, according to legend, he wasthrown off a precipice by Lycomedes,his host and protector. These two an¬tithetical references cross in the per¬son of the lyric persona, whose preoc¬cupation with images of distance,departure, and return makes the poemanother example of how Brodsky usesthe vocabulary of classical antiquity toexpress the unmoored attitude of theexile.Brodsky achieves the above men¬tioned opposition between Theseus ascriminal and Theseus as victim by em¬ploying various elements of the mythwithout regard for their order in theoriginal narrative. In effect, he com¬presses several events into one tem¬poral plane. First of all, Theseus wentto Lycomedes after having beenoverthrown by Mnestheus. The titlemight suggest that on one level thepoem is a sort of letter from the otherside of the tomb directed at the treachcontinued on page 22Photograph by Phil PollardThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—17BRODSKYcontinued from page 21erous king who slew his famous exiledguest. Yet the poem opens by referringto an event much earlier in the life ofTheseus, i.e., after he had slain theMinotaur. A second departure is thenthe escape from the labyrinth.Towards the end of the poem Brodskyalludes to a moment still earlier in theTheseus myth: Theseus' return toAthens when he was met by his father,Aegeus, who recognizes his son by hisdoubled-edged sword. Brodsky furthermanipulates the mythic text by repre¬senting certain scenes in an ironiclight:This time, indeed, we go for good.Men canreturn to where they have doneevil deeds,but men do not return to wherethey've beenabased. On this point God's de¬sign and ourown feeling of abasement coincideso absolutely that we quit: thenight,the rotting beast, the exultantmob, our homes,our hearthfires, Bacchus in a va¬cant lotembracing Ariadne in the dark.But one day we must all go back.Back home.Back to our native hearth. Andmy own pathlies through this city's heart.A comment about Ariadne flirting withBacchus would seem to make Theseusa cuckold, when in the myth it is he wholeaves her. Thus the lyric persona triesto explain his position by imagining anambivalent Theseus, one overcome bymisgivings over the mora!*y of hishaving slain the Minotaur:When all is said and done, amurder isa murder. And we mortals have adutyto take up arms against all mon¬sters. Whomaintains that monsters are im¬mortal? Godin secret — lest we pridefully as¬sumeourselves to be distinct fromthose we've vanquished —subtracts all recompense at a re¬movefrom the exultant mob. And bidsus holdour tongues. And so we fadeaway.Yet, the passage can be read equallywell another way. It could also refer toTheseus' duty to rise against his ownmurderer, Lycomedes. The same op¬ position explains the distinction madefurther on between the place of the"crime" (the labyrinth) and the placeof "abasement" (the cliff at Scyros).The central issue of the poem, then,is whether one can go back to certainplaces in one's past. Brodsky superim¬poses images of Theseus at varioustimes when he was, in a way, in exile.There emerges a pointed contrast be¬tween the city and the wilderness. Thelyric persona wanders in the latterwhile attempting to figure out what hisproper relation should be to theformer. What gradually unfolds is therealization of exile's ability to estrangehim from his native land, or, in termsof ancient Greek politics, the city-state. From the very outset the speak¬er declarrs his intention to leave, andthen defines his going away as a kind ofpermanent exodus. Exile becomes aseries of endless departures (in thelines cited above one leaves not one butan unspecified and possibly infinitenumber of places), a state in which onenot only never returns, but never, inany real sense, arrives. Brodskyevokes the inner emptiness felt by theexile by twice usng the word "pustyr"(wasteland, empty lot) to describe thearea of his wanderings. He describesthe humiliation of banishment as akind of purgative experience. Brodskyunderlines the act of separation by re¬peating the phoneme "ot" four times(as a preposition it means "from", as averbal prefix it signals motion "awayfrom"). These verbal effects andweight to the pronoucement of the lastverse, which hints at the relationshipbetween exile and language. One goesaway as a result of having been or¬dered to keep silent. Yet, that hardlysolves the problem, since exile, in thatit entails being cut off from one's na¬tive community of speech, is itself ameans of silencing the poet.The lyric persona reverses himselfand admits the necessity of a returnhome. But only as a stranger:God grant that Ishall not have with me then a two-edged sword — sincecities start, for those who dwell inthem,with central squares and towers —for for the wandererapproaching —with their outskirts.The allusion to the double-edged swordis a way for the speaker to say that hehopes not to be recognized. The ellipticcontest on urban geography which con¬cludes the poem signifies that he has fi¬nally managed to position himself withregard to his native polis. By refusingto name the city, by having hinted fromthe beginning that the references toTheseus were made only by way ofcomparison, Brodsky insists on thegeneral significance of the lyric persona's dilemma. He thus uses the mythas a way of examining a situation withimplications which reach beyond thenarrative of classical antiquity. The speaker thus places himself on the out¬side looking in. Similarly the exiled li-terat remain at the periphery of a cul¬ture, but feel drawn to it despitewhatever it is which keeps them apartfrom the area where it originated.Brodsky expresses the same need forhis native land in a poem that intricate¬ly details the trappings of the classicalarchitecture for which his own city,Leningrad, is famous. In "Torso", themythical paraphernalia (fauns,nymphs, etc.) which decorate thebuildings and gardens of the Gareco-Roman tradition are described as ifthey were so pregnant with life as tocounterfeit the forms they image:If you suddenly wander into alawn turned into stone, and hav¬ing glanced at the marble, preferit to reality, if you notice fauns,having given themselves up tobustling with with nymphs, andboth are happier in bronze than indreams, then you can let downthe staff from your weariedhands: you are in the Empire,friend.The poet needs the touchstone of hear¬ing his language spoken, a sort of oralcultural sense of place, to penetratethis illusion. The exiled writer, robbedof a community, loses touch not onlywith a geographical entity, but also tosome extent an aesthetic guidepost.Brodsky alluded to this very danger inan autobiographical essay published in1977 in the New York Review of Books.He noted thatThe little I remember becomeseven more diminished by beingrecollected in English.Later in the same article, Brodskytalks about the surroundings of hischildhood in a way that echoes the im¬agery of "Torso":I must say that from these fa¬cades and poricoes — classical,modern, eclectic, with their col¬umns, pilasters, and plasteredheads of mythic animals or peo¬ple — from their ornaments andcaryatids holding the balconies,from the torsos in the niches oftheir entrances, I have learnedmore about the history of theworld then I subsequently havefrom any book.The enumeration in the earlier part ofthe sentence comes close to paraphras¬ing the line that opens the second stan¬za of "Torso":Air, fire, water, fauns, nymphs,naiads, lions, taken from natureor from imagination, — all that,which God forethought and themind tires of continuing, areturned into stone or into metal. Itis — the end of things, it is — atthe end of the path a mirror, withwhich to enter.Without trying to draw too specific a conclusion about the connection be¬tween the life and the work of the ar¬tist, one can assume that Peters¬burg/Leningrad was in the back ofBrodsky's mind as a setting for"Torso".The poem records how the passage oftime ravages the material representa¬tions of human myth by means of dustand vandalism. Centuries go by and astatuary turns to ruin, until all that re¬mains is a torso. Yet, it is only a name¬less form, for having survived the peo¬ple who endowed it with meaning, itnow lacks mythic significance. Thedamage time has wrought symbolizesthe withering of culture, the collectiveforgetting of the classical narrativeswhich inspired the creators of thesculpture. One realizes at this pointthat Brodsky considers illusion pre¬sented at the beginning of the poem tobe insidious: by preferring the plasticrepresentation of the myth to the thingitself, one loses touch with the source ofthe imagination.Brodsky suggests how the same losscan take place in exile. The lyric per¬sona addresses someone who has beenwandering. Brodsky's conceit consistsin putting the reader in the garb of theancient pastoral: the poet, implyingthat the one to whom he speaks hascome many miles on foot, beckons himto stop and put down his staff so as toview set piece-like images of mytho¬logy frozen into stillness. The oxy¬moron of the first two verses contain aplangent image of how action can becaught in a solid medium; voznja, aword whose closest English equivalentwould be "bustle", signals motion, butin the second line we learn that thescene is in bronze. In the second stan¬za, the long enumeration reinforces thestatic quality of the description.Brodsky juxtaposes synchronic anddiachronic realities: the reader at oncesees nymphs and fauns cavorting mo¬tionlessly in bronze or marble, whilewatching the gradual decaying effectof time unfold upon the same sculp¬ture. What is at issue for the exile is'thepossibility of ignoring the latter andbeing taken in by the former. Brodsky,possibly borrowing his imagery fromLewis Carroll, equates an end of"things" with the end of a path. A cul¬ture forced into exile, here symbolizedby the wandering shepherd, to whom,it is implied, the poem is addressed,will wither away, leaving remnants ofits existence in its place of origin. Themirror, followed by an exposure ofdecay in the next stanza, suggests theillusion of considering vivid what areactually the ossified forms of a cultureBrodsky fears may already be dying.The foregoing poems spell out thenegative aesthetic effects of exile.They assume that the writer derives acertain vitality from a linguistic senseof place, an area in which his languageis spoken and the literary traditionswithin which he works originated.Brodsky writes out of a need to main¬tain that connection even when, in a lit¬eral sense, it has already been severedby physical separation.WIIIIIRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRead Me the StreammmSBrn IWmR||■■ilk' ”mm I spend my nights beneath the sliding sky.I know by moonlight how the streams slide free.And whistle forest green as night slips by.These darkling rushes tickle running by.I stoop to wade, and saying streams agree.I spend my nights beneath the sliding sky.Moonlight strikes the streams that sing in my thigh.I listen close; they come from where I stay.And whistle forest green as night slips by.Soft stirring moves the light. Full like a sighThe moon is lovely rising over me!I spend my nights beneath the sliding sky.I'm laid to rest. When moonlight lips my eyeAnd celebrates my wildest dreams, I wander wonderfully.And whistle forest green as night slips by.I spend my long days working, or at least I try.And think in black and white and let it be.I spend my nights beneath the sliding sky,And whistle forest green as night slips by.David Frankel i'i•* .*||||lilli' •< Wifry/v'.■ i \=WmmMmm ■18—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984Here's How YouCan Save(Andfl;awaywith a FBlimp forjust $3.00!Mail in 2 empty boxes of Fiyi colorfilm and Fuji will mail back $3 in refunds.A $1 refund check to spend now. And two$1 coupons good for up to $1 each to savewith later.You can also order a 33" inflatable On Fuji Him.Mail to: Ftyi Fall Savings Event,P.O. Box 621, Young America, MN 55399Please send me:$1 check and twocoupons. Eachcoupon is good for*1.00 off 3 rolls of FiyiFilm or 50* off 2 rollsEnclosed are 2 emptyFigi Film boxes (15 expo¬sure minimum, Englishlanguage version only).Name. □ If you are applyingfor the refund described above andalso want the Ftyi Blimpcheck here and enelosecheck or money order for$3.00, payable to "FigiBlimp Offer.” □ The FujiBlimp only.Enclosed isone empty Fqji Film box(15 exposure minimum,English language versiononly)and my $3.00 checkor money order payableto“Fiyi Blimp Offer.”SendFuji Blimpfs) at $3.00each. Illinois residentsplease add applicablesales tax.mini version of the famous Fiyi Blimp forjust $3.00 with your refund order, or oneproof of purchase. It’s not available instores, and supplies are limited. Load upwith Ftyi Film today...and save! AddressCity State ZipAllow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Offer good only in USA Blimp offer may be withdrawn withoutprior notice. Proofs of purchase may not be mechanically reproduced Void where prohibitedOffer ends January 31,1985 Universityof ChicagoBookstorePhotographic Dept. 2nd970 East 58th St.962-7558IBX 5-4365 flISAO■and theDance Clubpresent aFREEInformal Studio ConcertMusical ChairsChoreographedbyDavid PuszczewiczFriday, December 7th6:30 p.m.Ida Noyes Dance Space Hillel ClassesTwo New Classes beginning WinterQuarterBasic Judaism: Thursdays - 5:00 p.m.Beginning Talmud: Wednesdays-Time to he arranged.Call Hillel at 752-1127 for moreinformation or to register.Exquisite Coffees atReasonable PricesDecaffeinated - water processColombian SupremoEspressoFrench RoastFlavored Coffees Price per pound6.306.306.30Cafe CinnamonDutch ChocolateJamoca AlmondEmerald CreamCoffee BlendsMocha Java BlendViennese BlendOther CoffeesEspressoFrench RoastColumbian SupremoBrazil SantosKenyaGuatemalan AntiqueRoyal Kona HawaiiCosto RicanPort Royal JamaicanEthiopian HarrarSumatra 4.953.955210 S. Harper (in Harper Court)Chicago, IL 60615*312-643-8080“Superior t offees xt Superior Prices " Can you pick outthe MBM from the MBA’s?By giving yourself the advantage of a Masters of Brand Management, you’re givingyourself a better opportunity than an MBA to get a job and quickly succeed at buildinga productive, lucrative career as a corporate product manager or account executive.If selected for admittance into the Masters of Brand Management program, you’llspend time in the classroom and spend time as a salaried intern with a major nationalcompany. Qualifying applicants may also be eligible for a $6,000 scholarship in the formof a tax tree stipend.Discover the difference one degree can make. Use the coupon below to contactus for details today. Or call Professor r red D Reynolds at (404) 542-2123.. Professor Fred D. ReynoldsI Brooks Hall| The L diversity of Georgia1 Athene. GA 30602•* Please send me information onJ NameAddressj School, Graduation Date 2 3the Masters of Brand Management ProgramThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—19He’s Only Two Once!The Better Image1344 East 55th Street 643-6262Portraiture Weddings Public Relations-*<$ s. I* it INTERIMSERVICESMkuuKEFRLER CHAPELSunday, December 16,23,30 and January 69:30 a.m. Ecumenical Service of Holy CommunionMonday, December24.4:00 p.m. Christmas EveService of Lessons and CarolTuesday, December25.9:30 a.m. Christmas DayEcumenical Service of Holy CommunionUniversity Religious Service and Carillonrecitals will resume on Sunday, January 13THE FLAMINGO APARTMENTS5500 South Shore DriveSTUDIOS & ONE BEDROOMS•Unfurnished and furnished•U. of C. Bus Stop•Free Pool Membership•Carpeting and Drapes Included•Secure Building - Emily's Dress Shop•University Subsidy for Students & Staff•Delicatessen •Beauty Shop•Barber Shop *T.J.'s Restaurant•Dentist •Valet ShopFREE PARKINGMr. Keller 752*3800The University of Chicago Bookstore Wishes You Happy Holidays!Come to see our wide selection of new books suitableeither for giving as gifts or simply for your own delight andpleasure.Our pre-Christmas book sale continues:While supplies last, we have publishers' remainders andmarkdowns at up to 80% of regular prices: art books,children's books, and fine literature.We have the best selection of fine calendars andengagement books in Hyde Park.A special offer:Until Christmas, if you buy $50.00 worth or more of booksand calendars, you will receive a free copy of Dreams inStone, a unique photographic essay on the architectureof the University, which was originally published at aprice of $35.00The University of Chicago BookstoreGeneral Book Department970 East 58th StreetTelephone 962-771220—The Chicago Literary Review, Fridav December 7. 1984Willingly'Tess GallagherGraywolf Press, 198492 pages, $6.00Willingly is Tess Gallagher's seventhbook of poems and is appropriately de¬dicated to the short story writer whoshe is currently seeing, RaymondCarver. Appropriately because manyof the poems in this new volume arewritten in the direct simple languagethat the other writer has made famousin his unique prose. Some recount inci¬dents that would make vivid Carvers-que stories, such as “Boat Ride," aboutan outsiders intrusion on a fishing tripshe took with her father, but often theadopted style impinges on their im¬pact. They provide a brief slice of lifewithout explication, but lack an emo¬tional resonance that would tell us whythese incidents were chosen, the titlesthemselves bear witness to this: “ISave Your Coat, But You Lose itLater," “You Talk on Your Telephone,I Talk on Mine," and "3 A.M. Kitchen:My Father Talking." Too often thesepoems lack a sense of occasion.The interesting poem that opens thebook is an example of both Tess Gal¬lagher's strengths and weaknesses."Sudden Journey" begins by recount¬ing a memory of young innocence:Maybe I'm seven in the openfield—the straw-grass so highonly the top of my head makes acurveof brown in the yellow. Rainthen.First a little, a few drops on mywrist, the right wrist.These odd details stated with absoluteassurance that they are crucial helpbuild up a character in our mind, and itis this technique that make RaymondCarver's characters so quirky and be-lieveable. Tess Gallagher uses thetechnique to establish a voice, straightforward, original, direct. She says:I open my face. Let the teethshow. Ipull my shirt down past the collar¬bones.I'm still a boy under my breastspots.Even the poetic line "I open my face"remains true to that voice, someonecould say it. But the metaphor she usesthe rain for at the end of the poem comefrom somewhere else:running, running in the hard, coldplenitudeof all those who reach earth byfalling.This clash of styles, the poetic andthe short story voice, run throughoutWillingly, but because of their wonder¬ful details many are still powerful. Per¬haps one should render the spirit, andnot the content, of an artist in anotherfield that one admires, or loves. —MMThe ShoreDavid St. JohnHoughton Mifflin Co., 198148 pages, $4.95In the title poem of The Shore, DavidSt. John's second book, the rader prac¬tically walks through the aging seasidefishing villages, along the washedbeaches and through the desolate bigcity alleys which figure throughout thiscollection: "...Walking/ The pier, youcan see the way/ the shore/ approxi¬mates the dream, how distances/ re¬peat their deaths..." St. John explores,in intimate and lyric language, wherehe has been, what he has felt, and whatis left for him to dream. Or, as in "BlueWave", he draws on "the balance of thepromise which lasts".With a subtle awareness, St. Johnwanders through villages, harbors,aging hotels and rundown cities. Hecarefully maps each location as thenexus of so many failed dreams. Theangular fragments of a relationship ap¬pear within these descriptions: theshore between two lovers; tides and Woodengraving by Wendy Norrisshadows which manipulate lives in an"equation of pleasure and light". Hisscenic description masterfully impartsthe poet's tangled response to placeand event, and his sense of solidarity,as well as remorse, with these beatenplaces.St. John does not seek pity, nor doeshe look to blame others, but rather herealizes that memory is "the arc of asong without forgiveness". He medi¬tates on the stolen anger of separation,the broken corners and shatteredpieces of the world, but his voice isstrong and fluid, taut but graceful.From "Until the Sea is Dead":Those white hummocks riseshagged...half a mile or soBefore they flatten at the seathere the shore cuts like a thinsickle at the fields of blackwaves.And looking from a window into themorning, the poet sees, in "Elegy":...the sun stands crossing tself inthe cut glass.How the jonquils and bare or¬chards fill each morningin mist. The branches in the dis¬tance stiffen,Again.A vague anger flows invisibly beneaththese poems, like water underground.At times the anger pools in hollows, asin "Song without Forgiveness", wherethe poet states: "Everything is left foryou.../ You will remember, days, youshould have known". And again, dis¬tinctly, in "Elegy": "...Leave no ad¬dress. Fold your clothes into a little/ Is¬land. Kiss the hinges good bye. Sandthe fire."St. John has the beautiful ability tobalance emotion, description, and alle¬gory. About his father, in "The OliveGrove", St. John writes "He was milkto everyone; the certain, pale mediumof desire". In the last poem of the col¬lection, "Until the Sea is Dead", St.John sacrifices nothing as he connectsthe poetic themes that mark his workthroughout:You'd see nothing. Only whatDissolves: dark to dawn, shoreto waveThe vague design that doesn'tcareFrom me, yet holds meTo it... -ABThe Doctor StoriesWilliam Carlos WilliamsNew Directions, 1984160 pages, $11.95 cloth, $4.95 Paper¬backAs its title suggests, The DoctorStories is William Carlos Williams' col¬lection of stories and poems on hisyears as a practicing doctor Thestories are on one level interesting an¬ecdotes, but, more importantly, theyare memories of the effect that his pa¬tients had on the poet.In "The girl with the Pimply Face"Williams makes a house call to treat asick infant. He succintly describes hisexamination and diagnosis of the child,and directs most of his interest towardthe rest of the family, and to a colorfulteenage tomboy in particular, he con¬tinues his examination of the familythrough conversations with his wifeend with other doctors, until the initialvisit grows into a deeper, less clinical,involvement.Williams thorough style is whaf onewould expect of a physician: his de¬scriptions of houses, bodies and facesare detailed and colorful and give thestories an overall sense of realism. Butthe absence of quotation marks empha¬sizes the fact that the reader is seeingall that the characters do and saythrough the far from objective eyes ofthe author.The six poems near the end of thebook are not among the best of Wil¬liams, but they nonetheless offer an interesting conclusion to a generally enjoyable book —KSThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—21Magazine WorkDiane ArbusAperture, 1984176pp., $35.00Diane Arbus, long before she becamefamous for her pictures of twins,dwarfs, transvestites, and other indi¬viduals whose proud separateness at¬tracted her, photographed for maga¬zines. Unlike most artists she madelittle distinction between her profes¬sional and her private concerns, andthough she found assignments some¬times limiting they also afforded heropportunities to experiment and shapeher work around a given theme, some¬times of her own devising, sometimesnot.No matter what her subject matterwas, however, whether photographingMae West, Blaze Starr, or Tokyo Rose,there is an indelible mark on them all.They are portraits, and in nearly allthe subject confronts the viewer withan earnest, though expressionlessgaze. She would usually travel to peo¬ple's homes, and would rarely work ina studio, yet it is not the objects thatattract our attention but the presenceof the individual. The suburban pas¬tiches or gaudy mansions point up thedifferences between the animate and the inanimate, and the frozen posesand inexpressive faces only serve toheighten this contrast. Arbus invests ,these people with a dumb eloquence, itis not the lives that they have lived thatinterest her, but the lives they picturedthemselves as having lived.Her respect for her subject's lives,and her intolerance of pretension andhyperbole is revealed in Norman Mail- ’er's comment, “giving a camera toDiane is like putting a live grenade inthe handsof a child." The major dis¬tinction in this book is between photographs of plain people whose individu¬ality comes out through their daring tolive out their dreams, and artists whohave too-serious a conception of them¬selves. Arbus knew what she was re-cordingy and if Norman Mailer is photographed as arrogant and conceitedshe intended it.Magazine Work attests to DianeArbus's ability to shape the recalci¬trant professional assignment to herown ends. Her compassion for individ¬uals as individuals, not oddities, wasexceptional, and in the brief introduction to one of her first published photo¬essays, "The Full Circle," she writes:These singular people who ap¬pear like metaphors somewherefurther out than we do, beckoned, we may wonder all over againwhat is veritable and inevitableand possible and what it is to be¬come whoever we may be.-DSThe Maximus PoemsWar All the TimeCharles BukowskiBlack Sparrow Press, 1984Just released three weeks ago wasCharles Bukowski's latest book, WarAll The Time, his collected poems of1981-1984, published by Black SparrowPress. Mr. Bukowski is extremely pro¬ficient, producing forty titles since 1960and sixteen in the past ten years. WarAll the Time is a great collection from amellowed and more pensive man, hisbest work since his highly acclaimedBurning in Water, Drowning in Flame(Black Sparrow, 1974). The language isclear, and defined by its colloquialismand strange mesh of grace and obscen¬ity. Even in the sixties, on the circum¬ference of Beat circles, Bukowski de¬fined for himself the role of the dirtyold man (cf. Notes of a Dirty Old Man,1969), the outcast voyeur, the drunkenpoet at the races. At sixty-two, he hasnever seemed more comfortable atwhat he is doing best. In his poem "Promenade", Bukows¬ki describes a walk past teenagers fix¬ing the engines of their car. One of thekids yells, "hey, old man!" followed bylaughs and another remark. The poetwrites,I don't mind at all! at the age of 62I can still kick their assordrink any of them under the• tableclose to the grave be damned, there'snot one of themI'd prefer to beit's a good afternoon.I hope they fix theirengine.Bukowski has developed his poet's per¬sona to influence the feelings of thereader, just by who he is. This is anachievement. Like Dryden or Plath,one is constantly aware of the personbehind the poem. Bukowskisimply is willing to tell the truth, some¬times satirically, taking a poke at him¬self.What I like best about War All TheTime is the elegance of the language,as in this eulogy to a lover long de¬ceased:some dogs who sleep at nightmust dream of bonesand I remember your bonesin fleshand bestin that dark green dressand those high-heeled brightblack shoesAs Bukowski wrote in Play the PianoDrunk like a Percussion InstrumentUntil the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit(1979) "it's so easy to be a poet/ and sohard to be/ a man." This attitude is es¬sential of his poetry, which he finds atthe racetrack, local bars, his car andkitchen. One may be skeptical, yet Bu¬kowski continues to pull it off, notmerely with language, but more withhis subject, confessional approach andthe romantic focus of his writing.War All The Time is full of poignantlysimple verse, curious metaphors formore complicated thoughts. Bukows¬ki's genius is apparent throughout thebook. -C.P.Selected PoemsDonald JusticeAtheneum Press, 1981137 pages, $10.95Photograph by Phil Pollard Donald Justice's latest book, Select¬ed Poems, is a self assessment of hiswork. It contains poems from previousbooks (The Summer Anniversaries,Night Light, and Departures), some ofwhich have been revised by the authorfor this edition. It also contains seven¬teen poems which have never ap¬peared in book form. This volume represents several decades of work; onepoem waas written as early as 1948, theremainder written throughout the fif¬ties, sixties, and seventies. Jus+ice ex¬amines his work, makes somechanges, and presents it to us in chro¬nological order. He says "One of thepleasures of working on this book lay intrying to improve poems I found it hardeither to abandon or to stand by."The poetry itself is thoroughly enjoy¬able. For the most part, it is character¬ized by a clear, powerful diction whichallows the reader to concentrate on thesubject of a poem almost immediately.Justice's subjects are colorful andvaried, drawing from sources such asBaudelaire, Catullus, Ingmar Berg¬man, a Wang Wei poem, riddles, chil¬dren's songs, even Sears and Roebuck.Many poems are based on memoriesand introspections, but there are alsoveriantson perennial themes like Leth¬argy, Luxury, Fury, and works of art.While these subjects are potentiallytrite, Justice's treatment is lively andnew; it is sometimes caustic, oftenamusing, and always strikes home.Even though the subject of a Justicepoem is initially, perhaps, its moststriking feature, the style also meritsattention. Usually spare and direct, itis part of what allows him to writepoems like "Ode to the Morning Light"without cloying. —NL22—The Chicago Litorary Review, Friday December 7, 1984from TheUniversity of ChicagoOffice ofContinuing Education5835 South Kimbark AvenueChicago, Illinois 60637962-1722 NNOUNCING!Instant gratification(or the closest thing to it atThe University of Chicago)Tired at the very thought of that stack of incompletes gather¬ing dust on the corner of your desk? Wondering if it’s possi¬ble to make progress on the proposal while buildingsnowmen on the quads? The Office of Continuing Educationcan help!To alleviate academic anxiety this winter, register for ournon-credit “Reading French for Graduate Students” course.In just fifteen weeks you can get the preparation you need tosuccessfully complete the Graduate Foreign Language Ex¬am in French, scheduled for the end of April.Our intensive French reading course is the only one co¬sponsored by the University’s Department of RomanceLanguages and Literatures. The instructor, Charles Krance,is an associate professor in the department. He has offeredthis course for many years and has provided many graduatestudents with the background needed to perform well on theUniversity’s French reading exam.READING FRENCH FOR GRADUATE STUDENTSMonday-Wednesday-Friday, 8:30-10:00 A.M.January 7-April 26, 1985(no meetings the week of March 25)Cost: $200 Registration deadline: December 10, 1984For full information and to register: 962-1722How many requirements can be finished off so easily?Hanukkah Candles and Menorahsfor SaleCandles $ .60 eachMenorah $1.00Dreidels $ .15Available at Hillel, 5715 S. WoodlawnBusch GardensThe Old CountryAmerica's European theme park is con¬ducting auditions for dancers, singers,musicians, variety artists, actors,technicians and supervisors. You couldbe part of the Buscn Gardens magic. Soget your act together and "Come toLife" at our 1985 Auditions.Audition Dates: CHICAGO, ILLINOISThe Palmer House Hotel17 East Monroe Street at State StreetWabash Parlor RoomTuesday, January 15,198512:00 - 6:00 p.m. - Open Auditions11:00 - a.m. - Stage Manager InterviewsST. LOUIS, MOMarriott Pavillion HotelOne Broadway at ChestnutPavillion Suites 1, 2, 3Sunday, January 13,198512:00 - 5:00 p.m. - Open Auditions11:00 a.m. - Stage Manager Interviews.BuschGardensm«!»!<•:■ JllLVW11 lAMSWJQu v*An Equal Employment Opporlumty/Affirmative Action Employer M/F/H German Achtimg! a.™..Achtung!Take April Wilson’sGerman Course This WinterClasses meet M, W, F11:00-12:00 pm beginningJanuary 14thCaH: 667-3038HYDE PARK’SNEWEST ADDRESSOFDISTINCTIONCORNELL PLACE5346 South CornellYou must see our tastefullyrenovated high-rise in EastHyde Park. This classicbuilding has the traditionalelegance of a distinguishedHyde Park residence, yet theclean, refreshed interior of anew building. Each spaciousapartment features amplecloset room, modem ap¬pliances, wall to wallcarpeting, ceramic tile, in¬dividually controlled heat andbeautiful views overlooking thelovely surroundings of the HydePark Community or the Lake.We offer studios and onebedroom units with varyingfloor plans starting at $325.Parking available. Ask aboutour student and facultydisount.667-8776 5254 S. Dorchester Ave.Walk to museums, parks, the lakeSTUDIO APARTMENTSFurnished and unfurnishedutilities includedLaundry roomSundeck • Secure buildingCampus bus at our doorCall 9-5 for appointment324-0200P0MERLEAU COMPUTINGSYSTEMSOffering 07ru/gSoriaMe GomfeutisigCome see the NEC8210ALap Computer $380Gather text or data anywhere,transmit it to YOURword processor or database.P0MERLEAU COMPUTINGSYSTEMSAuthorized Kayprodealer1352 E. 53rd Street Ph 667-2075THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOThe William Vaughn Moody Lecture CommitteepresentsA TalkbyCHRISTOPHERHAMPTON(British playwright' The Philanthropist, Savages, Total Eclipse)From The Misanthrope to The Philanthropist' 4:00 p.m.SUNDAY,DECEMBER 9th, 1984SWIFT LECTURE HALL1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637Admission is Free and Without TicketThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 7, 1984—23HONORABLE MENTIONTheBirth and Imprisonmentof a Man in South AfricaI am borna jackal.(Hush! It is the dark hour!)The underside of my tongueannointed with limpopo oil.Xhosa reverence of blue parturience.Women click their tonguesin pirouetted cadence of reborn continence.Moses; they don't have to split their riverspulsating sorrowless blood and images of majestic lords.Brave men are lonely amidst these named and gunpowdered portalsmanned by usurpers with plutonium tablets neath their eurocentriclips of palid burdenWhat incestuous catacombs must we trodto feign our cowardice?Will our mothers enslave their wombsunder the legacy of the smoking gun?I am borna locust.(Do not enflame the candle! It is curfew!)Hovering, penetratingsands of lost empires..Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Bantu, SothoI squat withprisoned menNumber 50penciled the back of my hand.Hardened breaths repleat the thin air, dankly.Grim, gangly blackmen howling silent murdermoribund spittle suspending from their mouthsin crystalline phalanx,their stilled gaze of eye sightlessOH! These beaten horrors!Haunch in turbulent malignance.Souls that meander the 4X8 infinityof bedulled steel and concrete.Their chicken wire handsache of the weight of identification cards.Icarus bound shoulders shrug aimlesslyin pissed stained duplicity where slowed feetapplaud the sweat soaked floor in rhythmic stuporand the after birth is scuttled into purpled jarsof dutch consecration.I am bornan elephant(Lower your heads! The search light appears!)Thieves have raped my mouthand I go hungry.Let my mother forget meand finger her womb in atrophied coldnessFor we will not enter nor walk asBoer's legions didso earnestly baptizing themselvesin boiling cauldrons of blood and bone.In whet of sun.Moonlight sprays obliquelyacross the limp sleeping bodiesof these men whose blackened skinsbleach against the blanketed darkness of their cells.Distant ebbs of Zambesi watersslumber from their steamy unshaven heads.Hills, grass,where they pray are not undertheir caloused feetcoal and diamond eaten.Bloodied knives are those that guard their rivers now.Down!Down!And unattainableare these hidden spears of freedom.The mountainous sledge of Robbin Islandthese black sheep roamHearded ancientlygnawing on pestilent earthseething with the pathetic swellings of discarded epidermiand fibre of spontaneous human combustions.Birds never chart these skiesOnly the vultured scythes of deaths harlequined smilelooms criminally above their headsbricked and heavy as daily toil on plantations.We will learn to sharpen our teethto patient drumbeatsBrilliant and forcasting stars will garnerour heavens like the mighty and swiftsons of cainpurgingin undignified pompin yoked splendor. Earthly resonanceshackles the feet of spiritsthat do not visit God's queenly South Africa.These men are without their cattleThese men are without their treesThese men are without their horizonsThese men are without their riversThese men are without their fruit,and the machinations ofAfrica's Dachaushift birthinto terminal abortive death.What poetry can we give in these daysof aparthied hoards?—Lofton A. Emenari III