ISSUES | spring 2005

The Letter’s give us Lowell’s life as he lived it, inside out. We find him not just in history but in his house, on a particular morning, taking a break from his other work to write for a friend’s ear.

“What Ho!” I said, tacking on an interrogatory “eh” for good measure. I sounded like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, one of my favorite literary characters. Bertie, however, was not a chap whose brow beetled forth prominently on the frieze adorning the au courant.

A powerfully traumatic event in my childhood was the celebration of Boy Scout Sunday at the Howard Methodist Church on Cherry Street in Findlay, Ohio, when I was in fifth grade. I sensed trouble as soon as our family arrived and I spotted other boys in their Boy Scout uniforms.

The way it woked is that we would stop at Alvina’s house about once a week, either on the way home from Jefferson City or having come from school in Russville. If you volunteered or were conscripted into service, you opened the car door and stepped onto the white pebbles if Alvina’s driveway.

We didn’t really concern ourselves about how informed our audience was going to be. What we wanted was for you to open the book and see the naked Supreme Court justices, and you laugh at that, on a certain level independent of your knowledge of who these people are. We wanted to make sure that the book had a lot of pretty accessible, fun stuff that wasn’t dependent on your level of education or knowledge. On the flip side, some of us are kind of nerdy in our love of history and literature, so we put in jokes for us. One of the things I laughed hardest at was a sidebar in the Supreme Court chapter, the landmark case of V v. V settled on fifth appeal (V v. V V), which was a reference to a miniseries and a Thomas Pynchon book, so not a lot of people are going to get that joke, but we didn’t worry about it because we know that you turn three pages and you’ve got Scalia’s dong.

Featuring the poems:

The Soldier Inside the Horse, Bully, Donut Shop, Leaving the Nurse

Featuring the poems: This Poem is Psychic Traveling Salesman in Providence What Death Said Accidental Report

Featuring the poem: Tobacco Mosaic

Her Breasts. She was wearing one of those dresses with a hole at the top, like someone had cut a circle out of the fabric, so her breasts were sort of framed and you got to see all the way to the bottom, full inward curve, her pretty brown skin shining under the lights with this hot strip of air between them where I wanted my tongue to go.

My nephew Xuan, now forty and too old for such talk, used an American expression I had never heard before, and after his wife explained it to me in laborious detail I briefly fell deaf. This was at out annual family picnic in Fresno, under a shade tree. When my hearing disappeared I pretended nothing had happened…

When I was twenty-two, I moved out of my parents’ house in the Maryland suburbs and down into Washington D.C. I was fresh out of art school with a hundred dollars in the bank, an entirely useless degree in drawing and painting, no job and no place to live.

Twenty-eight years of reading for a literary magazine has led me to appreciate that plot and apparent mood seldom convey the full effect of a great story. Paul Eggers’s terrifying, moving “This Way, Uncle, Into the Palace,” is just such a story—confessional, dark, yet at the same time mysteriously and beautifully hopeful.