New England Review

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Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)

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A Note from the Poetry Editor

Poetry
BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY  The Dragon
AGHA SHAHID ALI  There Is No God But
G. C. WALDREP  Their Faces Shall Be As Flames
PAISLEY REKDAL  Birthday Poem
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS  The End of Life, a Secret
KHALED MATTAWA  Borrowed Tongue
LAURA KASISCHKE   Executioner as Muse
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI  Boxers in the Key of M
CARL PHILLIPS  Parable
JERICHO BROWN  Prayer of the Backhanded
VICTORIA CHANG  Yang Gui-Fei
DEBORA GREGER  Head, Perhaps of an Angel
MATTHEW OLZMANN  Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion
TOMAS Q. MORIN  Red Herring
JORDAN DAVIS  From the Twentieth Floor
DAVID YEZZI Woman Holding a Fox
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT  Redbud
JENNIFER GROTZ  The Woodstove
GERI DORAN  Tonight Is a Night Without Birds
NATASHA TRETHEWEY Elegy

Fiction
KRISTIEN HEMMERECHTS  Fairytale
  translated by Margie Franzen & Sandra Boersma
PETER LASALLE  He Was Beginning to Wonder
DENNIS MCFADDEN Little Brier
JONATHAN DURBIN  Husbands
LENORE MYKA  Mascots
CHRISTINE SNEED  Clear Conscience
BROCK CLARKE  Transported

Music
J. E. UHL  The Prince of New Orleans Piano:
How James Booker Missed the Boat but Made the Parade

Investigations
ROBERT POGUE HARRISON  The Riddle of Age
VINCENT CZYZ  Collage and the Secret Adventures of Order

Testimonies
NATASHA LVOVICH Sister in Russian, Cousin in English

Observations
ELIZABETH O’BRIEN  Naming Is a Sacred Act Because: A List
ALEXANDRIA PEARY Holes and Walls

Reports from American Places
RICHARD TILLINGHAST  Eastward Bound, Across a Storied Landscape

Rediscoveries
BORIS SIDIS  American Mental Epidemics

Contributors’ Notes

 

Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)

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Editor’s Note NER_34-34_front cover

Poetry
DERRICK AUSTIN  Okaloosa
TOMMYE BLOUNT  What Are We Not For / The Black Umbrella
G. C. WALDREP  What David Taught & Where He Taught It
PAISLEY REKDAL“When It Is Over It Will Be Over” / Saturdays at Reynolds Work Release
JOHN POCH  Pomegranate Queen
JOHN KINSELLA  The Bourbon Baudelaire: A Set of Variations
CATE MARVIN  Memory in Plain English
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL  The Two Times I Loved You Most on a Farm / Five Letters Returned to Sender
SARAH MURPHY  The Chain
CHRISTOPHER BROOKHOUSE  November
KARL KIRCHWEY  Janiculum Staircase / Santa Cecilia
GARY FINCKE  Calculations: A Love Poem
MARTHA RHODES  Nothing Is the Thin Wall
JENNY JOHNSON  In Full Velvet
MATTHEW NIENOW  I Wear the Work Upon My Clothes
CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER  Centering

Fiction
CASTLE FREEMAN, JR.  Who’s Stopping You?
LESLIE BAZZETT  Studies in Composition
CHARLES BAXTER  Sloth
NICK WOLVEN  Found by Thee
YOUNG RADER  Oido Beach
ANDREW TOUHY  Visit to the Beach

Provocations
STEVEN POOLE  The Favored Language of the Apparatchik: A Contemporary Sampler
JEFF STAIGER  Kindle 451

Literary Lives
BARBARA HYAMS  Reading Rilke with Denise Levertov
RICK BAROT  The Image Factory

Observations
MERRITT MOSELEY  Evening, All

Rediscoveries
HELEN KELLER  The Dream World

 

The Russian Presence

Poetry
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN  Again I visited . . . (translated by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie)
ZINAIDA NIKOLAEVNA GIPPIUS  Devillet (translated by Robert Chandler)
OSIP MANDELSTAM  Poem No. 78 / Poem No. 129
(translated by Joan Aleshire) / He Who Had Found a Horseshoe (translated by Alex Cigale)
VLADIMIR NARBUT  Séance / from the Cycle “Seventeenth” (translated by Alex Cigale)
MARINA TSVETAEVA  Black as the pupil . . . (translated by Robert Chandler) / Where does such tenderness . . . (translated by Joan Aleshire) / from The Two (translated by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie)
SOFIA YAKOVLEVNA PARNOK  They’ve cut a hole . . .  / I pardon all your sins . . . (translated by Robert Chandler)
ANNA SEMYONOVNA PRISMANOVA  The Jolt (translated by Boris Dralyuk)
ARSENY TARKOVSKY  Saturday, June 21, 1941 / Ignatevsky Forest / Beautiful Day (translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev)
NIKOLAY ALEXEYEVICH ZABOLOTSKY  Goodbye to Friends (translated by Robert Chandler)
OLGA SEDAKOVA  The Feast  / Old Women / Beads (translated by Stephanie Sandler)
LEV RUBINSTEIN  Poet and Crowd (translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky)
ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA  Let’s Go to Morocco / Trains (translated by Andrew Wachtel)

Fiction
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY  Three Scenes from Crime and Punishment (translated by Michael R. Katz)
ANTON CHEKHOV  Verochka / Ionych (translated by Rosamund Bartlett)
TEFFI  Lifeless Beast (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler)
MIKHAIL SHISHKIN  Nabokov’s Inkblot (translated by Mariya Bashkatova)
OLEG KASHIN  Fardwor, Ruissa! A Fantastical Tale from Putin’s Russia (translated by Will Evans and Pasha Mrachek)
OLGA SLAVNIKOVA  The Cherepanova Sisters (translated by Marian Schwartz)

Revaluations
ROBERT CHANDLER  “To Overcome Evil”: Andrey Platonov and the Moscow Show Trials

Cultural History
PETER SAVODNIK  Lee Harvey Oswald Arrives in the USSR
FRIDA VIGDOROVA  The Trial of Joseph Brodsky (translated by Michael R. Katz)
DAVID EDGAR  From Babel to Pentecost (And Back Again): The World After the Wall Came Down

Literary Lives
TOMAS VENCLOVA and ELLEN HINSEY  Meetings with Anna Akhmatova

Film
P. ADAMS SITNEY  Andrey Tarkovsky, Russian Experience, and the Poetry of Cinema

Provocations
EVE ADLER and VLADIMIR SHLYAKHOV  Russian Slang, Circa 1995

Contributors’ Notes

Cover Artist  SEAN THOMAS

Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)

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NER-cover-33-1

A Note of Gratitude

Poetry
VICTORIA CHANG  Edward Hopper’s Office in a Small City
CARL PHILLIPS  Now You Must Go Wherever You Wish  /  Blizzard  / Border Song
JOHN LUNDBERG  String Theory
BEVERLY BURCH  A Brief History of Rejection
ADRIENNE SU  On Writing  /  Contentment
MATTHEW NIENOW  It’s the Boat That Haunts You  /  Ode to the Slick
DEBORA GREGER  Elegy to a Carpenter’s Carpenter  /  To a Redbud
JEFF FRIEDMAN  Mud
VALERIE WOHLFELD  Dead Letter Office
C. L. O’DELL  Father, Son  /  After Reading the Bible
CALEB CURTISS   Primer  /  Poem with You Drinking a Cup of Coffee
SHARA LESSLEY  In Arabic

Fiction
BROCK CLARKE  Of the Revolution
CHRISTINE SNEED  The Finest Medical Attention
CASTLE FREEMAN JR.  Plain Tales from the Hills
JANE RATCLIFFE  You Can’t Be Too Careful
WILLIAM GILSON  At the Dark End of the Street

Reflections
KAREN HOLMBERG  Songs and Calls of the Human Species
FRANCIS-NOËL THOMAS  Tea

Cultural History
RICHARD J. SMITH  How the Book of Changes Arrived in the West

Literary Lives          
JOSEPH FRUSCIONE  Hemingway, Faulkner, and the Clash of Reputations

Testimonies
MATTHEW VOLLMER  Keeper of the Flame
PAUL PLAGENS  The Ding Tank

Translations
SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL  Café Chats (translated by BENJAMIN EHRLICH)

Rediscoveries
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE  Rome: First Impression (translated by A. J. MORRISON)

Contributors’ Notes

COVER ARTIST: Jennifer Riley

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Writer’s Notebook—Revisiting “It’s Important I Remember . . .”

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Nichols

“We need to see the ugly things to make the beautiful things matter, not more, but in their appropriate measure, which we truthfully underappreciate now . . .”

The moment that a poem comes into being is practically impossible to pinpoint. Of course, there is the act of recording language to the nude page, whether by way of a preferred writing utensil or a keyboard stroke, but come the moment you’re in the throes of that emotional and intellectual labor, you’ve already been living with the questions or the concerns of the poem—if not yet the words—for some length of time. Living with the essence of the thing, as one may live with an illness, or with grief, or with love, or faith. What the poem requires to come into the world is a catalyzing moment, a happening that compels us to reach into our darkest recesses for what has been awaiting our readiness, as though toddlers sounding out their first notes of external comprehension.

The poems I contributed to New England Review Vol. 44, No. 3, each opening with their title as the initial line (“It’s Important I Remember . . .”), are products of my preoccupation with the past, recent and far, as are the other poems sibling to them in what will, one day, be a collection. Since the early period of the most recent Republican presidency, when the present controversy was what monuments should stand tall and what monuments should be toppled, I’ve wrestled with our collective history, its needed revisions, its outright omissions, the battle we were fighting at the time (and are intensely fighting now) being: what is the story we are going to tell ourselves about ourselves?

To be sure, I have no great nostalgia for the America that came before my birth, namely because I stand an opponent to myth generally, but more importantly because that America of yesteryear, like the one today, in so many verifiable ways, was no good for me or my people. Please don’t misread me in sentiment: I do love my country, my home, but I love it the same way James Baldwin did, enough to critique it, to want and work to make it better—less violent, less greedy, more compassionate, more equitable. That cause is as just as it is grand, multi-faceted, and though I understand the role of political organizing in that, of collectivist spirit, of personal sacrifice and self-interrogation, I also understand that a certain type of awakening must occur simultaneously: not through the introduction of new ideas, but the retirement of bad ones. That requires revisiting our stories—capsules of big ideas, makers of meaning, inspirers of action and belief.

An American to my very core, I’m not unlike my troubled nation. People have sung my praises for aptitude and character for as long as I can recall anything; why would I, at any point, question my own goodness? How could my eyes, untrained in some ways and lazy in others, ever see my wrongdoings for what they were if there was never another person to say that’s not how it went down? I live in a country that not just believes in its inherent virtue, but depends on it like a drug, otherwise it does not have the faintest clue what it is at heart. 

How we tell it, by and large, Abraham Lincoln, the most-esteemed scion of my home state, was the Great Emancipator, not a bigot or homestead colonizer. How we tell it, by and large, Frederick Douglass was a courageous abolitionist crusader and supporter of women’s rights, but not a man who subordinated a woman in his own marriage. We need to see the ugly things to make the beautiful things matter, not more, but in their appropriate measure, which we truthfully underappreciate now. America is so beautiful: those are fighting words—not to maintain anything as it exists currently, but to make this vast place of varied peoples truer to the songs it sings to itself about itself.

I can only pray these little writings of mine contribute anything to that difficult work. When people pause to read them who are unfamiliar with these versions of events and these variations on people, I hope it induces a struggle in them. A beautiful struggle.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, he has published his poems in Poetry, the Nation, the Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at the Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

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