ISSUES | fall 1998
21.2 (Fall 1998): "Men"
Featuring work by Bill Embly, Gary Fincke, William Gay, Otis Haschemeyer, Tom Ireland, Davis McCombs, Ron Nyren, Henry Shukman, Peter Walpole, an interview with Harvey Shapiro, and a found text by Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Penn Warren.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Fiction
Jun 01 1998
Distant Lights in the Foothills Beyond Owari-Eki
20:42 The emergency call from Central comes over the line at 20:42, but Matsuda has already decelerated the train. He often reacts faster than the automated shutdown system. Central tells… read more
Nonfiction
Jun 01 1998
Fianchetto
Hannah, my daughter, asked me to teach her to play chess. She had been teaching school in Istanbul. There, she said, young people take chess lessons the way they make music lessons in the States, but none of her turkish friends wanted to trouble themselves with a total beginner. This took me by surprise, not so much because she wanted to learn the game, which she had never expressed any interest in before, but because of her sudden forthcomingness.
Poetry
Jun 01 1998
Poetry Feature: Gary Fincke
“The Uses of Rain”
“Schmaltz”
“During Sixth Grade”
“The End of Uncertainty”
Fiction
Jun 01 1998
Those Deep Elm Brown's Ferry Blues
I heard a whippoorwill last night, the old man said.
Say you did? Rabon asked without interest. Rabon was just in from his schoolteaching job. He seated himself in the armchair across from the bed and hitched un his trouser legs and glanced covertly at his watch. The old man figured Rabon would put in his obligatory five minutes then go in his room and turn the stereo on.
Fiction
Jun 01 1998
Monastic Ruins
August 25 Dear Mairead: I’m writing to say that I made it and I would like to go forward with our tentative agreement, that is, that I will live here… read more
Poetry
Jun 01 1998
Ultima Thule
Ultima Thule Mammoth is a grand, gloomy and peculiar place, not soon to give up its last, darkest secret. -Stephen Bishop Stephen Bishop was the slave of Dr. John… read more
Interviews
Jun 01 1998
An Interview with Harvey Shapiro
Interviewer: What have you found the hardest thing about being a poet?
Shapiro: I suppose the hardest thing about being a poet in America is the unreality of what you do. You spend most of your creative time doing something that society for the most part has no use for.
Nonfiction
Jun 01 1998
The Storekeeper
Splash Four days before the UN Security Council resolution will turn Desert Shield into Desert Storm, the team waits for the scouts on the south side of a dust-covered washout… read more
Fiction
Jun 01 1998
Mortimer of the Maghreb
CHARLES MORTIMER WATCHED the rippled brown land wheel back to horizontal. He drained the last drops from the plastic glass of Johnny Walker the air steward had given him, and… read more
Fiction
Jun 01 1998
Ordinary Apples
ASK SOMEONE HOW EVE tempted Adam, and the answer will likely be apple. But the Book of Genesis says only that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree.… read more
Found Text
Jun 01 1998
The Porter-Warren Letters: The Turbulent Years
These letters cover 1935 to 1942, the years when Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter emerged as important American literary figures. Warren, fifteen years younger than Porter, was enormously active during this time. In addition to his writing, teaching, and traveling, he helped found a major literary magazine and cowrite, with Cleanth Brooks, one of the most influential textbooks in American literary history. Porter, meanwhile, was publishing some of her best stories, in the spare, realistic, yet numinous style that was her trademark.