New England Review

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Lexa de Courval on Carl Phillips

NER 35.2 (2014)

Former Office Manager Lexa de Courval considers the persistent questions and mysteries found in “Beautiful Dreamer,” an essay by Carl Phillips, from NER 35.2 (2014).

“Beautiful Dreamer” demands your attention in the very first paragraph. I admire how Carl Phillips chooses here to write about what is difficult and also very real, and in doing so he creates images we will respond to differently—we might feel uncomfortable, or charmed, perhaps even angry. Regardless, I find myself contemplating the Blue King, and mesmerized by the beauty of his descriptions.

Of the many treasured pieces we published during my years at NER, I am still drawn to this work because I feel that it is courageous, and it came to me at a time when I was questioning the world around me on a deeper level. Our lives are filled with experiences that require us to rely on our instincts while sorting through truth and myth. Recently I have reflected on what it means to be human today, and how social media has created another layer to living behind a mask. We are not always how we envision ourselves, and at times are warriors within our own lives trying to heal and find our inner beauty. Asking probing questions and taking risks can be like being on a battlefield, particularly with the unsettling challenges in our current world.

For decades I have adored poetry, spending hours rereading intriguing lines to ask myself: Have I missed the point? How do I know this isn’t my selfish interpretation of something I need to happen in this work? Phillips comforts me in this as he writes about his own poem “Beautiful Dreamer,” and in response to poetry.

For months after having written the poem, I in fact found it difficult to know with any certainty, if not the poem’s meaning, then at least the meaning to which the poem might be gesturing. Many poets write toward a chosen subject, but I’ve always been the kind who writes from a supposedly clear space into a space of surprise, that is, where I find myself surprised—and not so pleasantly surprised, more often than not, surprised instead into a heightened awareness of something troubling.

We are often troubled by the page and how real it can be; we know what our hearts feel, yet we sometimes question our innate being. Poetry can take us down a dark alley, but we are compelled to know what we will find there. Is it real or is it a dream? Are we hiding behind a disguise of what we imagine? This essay will challenge you to face your dreams and desires.

Was it Dante’s Inferno or The Iliad of Homer that first brought forth the expression to eat one’s heart out, which appears here in Stephen Crane’s rather bestial stanza of a creature eating his own heart? Is it power we seek when we punish or are punished—to claim one’s glory and revel in someone else’s doom?

I enjoyed Phillips’s selections from Shelley and Crane reflecting on power, and on how for some, punishment can often become as addictive as pleasure. “We can never really know another’s heart,” he writes. But if it is our own heart, we are compassionate, and “it’s better to eat of what we know.” He quotes from Crane’s Black Rider series: 

“But I like it
Because it is bitter
And because it is my heart.”

Phillips brilliantly describes how a poem is an “interior dialogue we have with our other selves,” how we “write in response to being human.” “The poem is a form of negotiation with what haunts us,” he writes, “. . . insofar as what haunts us is, in part, who we are.”

 I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

One might have chosen to skirt the encounter in the park with which Phillips opens this essay, yet he chose to look it in the eye and be mystified, and to attempt to clarify for himself what he really saw. Phillips challenges us to seek understanding in the world around us and be surprised. He continues with the subject of loss in “Untitled,” a poem by Lorine Niedecker. We feel emotion for the subject that is difficult to put into words—Paul / when the leaves fall. Is there beauty in mourning?  We do not want to live our lives alone, but sometimes to be human is to feel very alone as we face death and hardships.

Phillips invites us into the work of these other writers, and into their stories, as he brings them into his own exquisite writing. Writers are compelled to record these times, and we relive each day through the histories of others as we create our own moving pictures. What is real and what is a dream, history or imagined, heroic or heartbreaking? Phillips encourages us to write, to seek meaning and confront the challenges in our everyday lives.

Having worked at NER and Bread Loaf for many years I have been continually inspired by authors like Carl Phillips and by their presence in my own life. I remember seeing John Ashbery, whose passages Phillips describes in his final page, surrounded by young scholars in a crowded room. I remember reading Seamus Heaney from a hefty Norton Anthology in college and then what an honor it was to meet him in person and receive his poem, “Du Bellay in Rome” for NER’s 34.2. I cherish the sound of Julia Alvarez lecturing on little children saving the world through medicine. People and place are life and these surroundings make up who we are and how we live.

Phillips leaves us with provocative questions: Are we living, dreaming, or haunted by the moment? What is beauty and how do we make peace with our own inner demons? Admittedly, I cannot know Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or the Blue King of “Beautiful Dreamer,” though I can come to know them through Phillips. While pondering these alluring pages ahead, I hope you will keep dreaming and be enchanted.  And, are we not most beautiful while we sleep?

 

“Beautiful Dreamer” by Carl Phillips

BUY the BACK ISSUE (35.2)

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Lexa de Courval was Editorial Assistant and then Office Manager at New England Review from 2009 to 2016. She is currently the Academic Coordinator at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College. She previously worked in local museum education programs at both Shelburne Museum and Henry Sheldon Museum, and for the Bread Loaf School of English.

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

T. R. Hummer on Robert Olen Butler

Former Editor T. R. Hummer introduces “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” by Robert Olen Butler, from NER 13.3-4 (1991).

NER 13.3-4 (1991)

The labor of editing—the hard work, even the drudgery—is easy to document. Fifty-plus submissions a day: the phrase speaks clearly for itself, but when placed in the context within which most literary journal editors work (most are part-time, and have too small, or no, staff), it becomes even more acute.

I edited journals for fifteen years; four of those years were at New England Review, and the labor hardly changed. Neither did what is far harder to quantify: the joy of it, which comes from the moment of discovery, a sort of gnosis whereby the editor knows she or he has been given a great gift.

I could relate many instances of that joy, but for present purposes will limit myself to one.

On a mid-week day in the middle of some season or other in the middle of my life (I was in my forties then) as I sat in the NER office opening yet another envelope, the telephone rang. That was unusual: phone calls were rare, and when they came, they were generally complaints of some kind, usually beginning with some version of I sent my manuscript two weeks ago and haven’t heard from you yet. I answered with some trepidation, then, but this call was different.

“Is this T. R. Hummer? Someone told me to get in touch with you. I have some work I’d like to send for your consideration.”

I thought little of it, except to reflect on the unusualness of the circumstance. Writers didn’t call me to say they were sending something. Why would they? The envelopes arrived; that was mostly what we editors noticed. I replied with some version of “Yes, please do.” I don’t remember anything else about the conversation, but when the envelope arrived, containing two lengthy short stories, I remembered the author’s name from the phone call.

I read the stories and liked them. Each centered on Vietnamese characters in the US, post-Vietnam-war. Both were well-crafted, and I could easily and happily have published either or both. But—and here the moment of gnosis began to reveal itself—something stirred far down in my medulla oblongata, and I did something rare for me: I picked up the telephone.

The author answered right away. “These stories are very good,” I said to him, “but I think you have something better. Send me the best story you have.”

A week later, another envelope arrived. I opened it right away, and read the first sentence of the story inside: “Ho Chi Minh came to me again last night, his hands covered in confectioner’s sugar.” That was all it took: the miracle of discovery arrived.

When, a year or so later, Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, I was gratified to have published the title story in New England Review. But really, what I retained was the discovery of that opening sentence, which I have effortlessly quoted from memory here over twenty-five years later.

 

“A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” by Robert Olen Butler

BUY the BACK ISSUE (13.3-4)

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T. R. Hummer served as Guest Editor, Senior Editor, then Editor of New England Review from 1988 to 1995. He has also worked as Editor for Kenyon Review and Georgia Review, and has published ten books of poetry. His most recent collections are After the Afterlife (2018) and the three linked volumes Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon (Louisiana State University Press). In addition to poetry, Hummer has published two books of criticism, The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic (2006) and Available Surfaces (2012). With Bruce Weigl, he co-edited The Imagination of Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey (1984).  A native of Mississippi and longtime devotee and practitioner of jazz, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

 

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

C. Dale Young on Brigit Pegeen Kelly

NER 23.2 (2002)

Former Poetry Editor C. Dale Young recalls first reading “The Dragon” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, published in NER 23.2 (2002), reprinted in 35.3 (2014).

Having moved to San Francisco to complete my residency at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, I spent day after day caring for patients with cancer and very little time reading or writing poetry. This was to be a glimpse of the life I had ahead of me. In those early years in San Francisco, my only connection to poetry were the poems I considered for the pages of NER. On the most ordinary of Thursday evenings, I rode the N-Judah home from the hospital, stopped in the lobby of my apartment building, and opened my mailbox. Inside was a letter with the return address of B. Kelly. I knew it was not a regular letter to me because below my name was “Poetry Editor, New England Review.” I opened the envelope and found “The Dragon.” It was accompanied by a two-sentence letter: “You see, I have not forgotten you. I hope you can use this.” I read the poem immediately. I stood in the lobby and read the poem several times. To say I was mesmerized would be an understatement. And I am fully aware of the full meaning of that word. Standing there, reading this poem shocked me. It snapped me out of the daily repetitiveness of my life then. I marched myself up the stairs and stood in my living room and read it again, still standing. I sat down only to compose a note to thank Brigit and to write up a sheet to forward it to the magazine’s offices in Middlebury.

Brigit was a slow and methodical poet. It was rare to receive poems for consideration from her. I have never forgotten this poem. And even now, when I feel disconnected from poetry, when I feel I am slipping away from it, I read this poem. It has become a kind of lifeline for me. I am sure I will carry it with me to the grave.

 

“The Dragon” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

BUY the BACK ISSUE (23.2 or 35.3)

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C. Dale Young served as Poetry Consultant, Associate Editor, and then Poetry Editor of New England Review from 1995 to 2014. He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four collections of poetry—The Day Underneath the Day (2001), The Second Person (2007), Torn (2011), and The Halo (2016)—and a work of fiction, Affliction: A Novel in Stories (2018). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in San Francisco with the biologist and composer, Jacob Bertrand, his spouse.

 

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Ernest McLeod on Lori Ostlund

NER 30.3 (2009)

Ernest McLeod, longtime Reader and Editorial Panel member for fiction, introduces “Domestic Interiors of the Midwest: ‘All Boy‘ and “Talking Fowl with My Father‘” by Lori Ostlund, from NER 30.3 (2009).

Words matter in any writer’s work, but in these two stories by Lori Ostlund they matter not only to the stories themselves but to the protagonists who inhabit them. These protagonists (Harold in “All Boy”; the first-person narrator of “Talking Fowl with My Father”) are extremely sensitive to the nuances of language, holding them dear, tending them with care and caution. Language itself, however, isn’t sensitive; it can be employed carelessly, brutally even. Much of the tension in Ostlund’s fiction arises not from plot but rather in the divide between these protagonists’ meticulous inner conception of language and the sloppy outer-world miscommunications, omissions, and evasions that seek to sully the precious order.

This is what first tickled me (almost literally) about these stories, the way such seemingly innocuous words as “broasted” and “voracious” can, in Ostlund’s hands, reveal a character’s essence. At the same time, I detected a spark of mischief in the choice of emphasized words, a sly artistic transgression in shining such a strong light on a word as outwardly comical as “broasted.” Eleven-year-old Harold in “All Boy” even keeps lists of words he likes or dislikes the sound of; he knows how to properly use “may” and “can” and cares “deeply about grammar.” Yet, when the word “fag” is tossed like a grenade into an awkward play date, Harold’s armor of precocity fails him in a way that the reader understands and Harold doesn’t quite—yet. The poignancy lies in the reader’s knowledge that despite all the effort Harold puts into establishing his language safety zone, it—like the safety zone of the dark closet at the center of the story—will ultimately not protect him.

These are queer stories, in various senses of that word. One certainly needn’t be a queer reader to appreciate them, but if—like this reader—you grew up with a secret you couldn’t share with anyone, including your own family members, the literal and figurative closet of “All Boy” will especially resonate. Ostlund’s stories are also queer cousins to the wonderfully odd stories of Jane Bowles (if Bowles had landed unexpectedly in a stoical Midwest), where the characters’ eccentricities are a given, as natural to them as breathing. Of course Harold calms himself by slipping into a kimono! Of course Mrs. Norman, the fired babysitter in “All Boy,” thinks nothing of wearing her employer’s socks! Of course the parents in “Talking Fowl with My Father” see urine-colored shag carpeting as the solution to basement dampness issues! As in Bowles’s work, the queer eccentricities of language and character can be very funny. (As a longtime reader of NER submissions, it continually surprises me how underused humor is in serious fiction.) Ostlund’s humor, like Bowles’s, is undoubtedly deliberate yet unsettling enough to seem unintentional. You laugh, but nervously and quietly, as if you’re stationed under the characters’ beds, wrongly privy to intimacies caught between heartbreak and hilarity.

I can’t take credit for discovering these two stories (alas), but when I first read them in NER I was grateful to the reader(s) who did.  

 

“Domestic Interiors of the Midwest: ‘All Boy’ and ‘Talking Fowl with My Father’” by Lori Ostlund

BUY the BACK ISSUE 30.3

 

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Ernest McLeod has served as a Reader and Editorial Panelist for NER off and on since 1998, reading hundreds of fiction submissions every year. A writer and artist living in Middlebury and Montréal, he is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His writing and photography have appeared in The Sun, Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, Salon, F-Stop, JPG, File, as well as in numerous Vermont publications.

 

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