MacDowell Colony Research Articles

The Invitation, and From the Window of Your Class You Can See a Tombstone

The Invitation, and From the Window of Your Class You Can See a Tombstone Keith S. Wilson (bio) The Invitation the thing about the scorpion is he builtfrom nothing frogsong: a sad song. the story as we tell itends sooner than it has to end. consider: the poisonsits like a child in the boiling water of the back.the frog yells this or that (he moralizes) and is sure to dieand then you go to bed. america: next the frog turns over, sunny side up. thenthe scorpion licked instead his stomach (if you takewhat i mean). then the frog swallowedflywater. the scorpion thought this is it! this is really it! advancing west acrossthe river like the sun. exoskeleton, then beneath: the strange fluid of a different myth.do you think the scorpion dared to dream? he built from nothingfrogdance (a flopping). strange satellites encircling. radio chatter. we might tell any story of the water where the dead choose to go. we might call ourselvesanything to save ourselves the trouble. no angel would call this hell. he calls it idaho. says my forefather was not born here but here i amborn. and then he tastes the water. he lifted up as if about to drownand struck again and again and again but the frog was in another story, deep below him, in the thickest part of the daylight and the water.and then he pledged the story. thenhe too crossed the water [End Page 98] From the Window of Your Class You Can See a Tombstone (try to remember: they aren’t looking)a ghost is a rerun. the graveyard holds hermitcrabs and the sun is a whiteblackening. a prayer is a form(ababa) that someone strong made you learnwhen you thought you were weak. a gavel is a keythat only locks. you are the oneway street and the flashing light floored youcoming the wrong way. they’ll never findall the bodies. the sea opens up and the foamis one skin and the bottom holds so many another. [End Page 99] Keith S. Wilson Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon, 2019), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry. Copyright © 2022 Middlebury College

Announcements

Announcements

Recent Thornton Wilder Scholarship: 2016–2020

Recent Thornton Wilder Scholarship: 2016–2020

Error of the Ingénue

Error of the Ingénue Lauren Hilger (bio) We were in the country. A video store let us in, thirteen. We knew where to find the VHSwe had traveled to her lake house to see. A compilationof the worst things you could watch.You could watch a cow's center sliced so all of its self came out. One beer for four girls. We said now we have to get naked and run down the road. We expressed ideas of not sleeping. I thought, the woods know I want to barrel through.Imagined a wind, a sea, the moon, a bonfire, a bunch of skeletons with flags of primary colors; they're raising us up. The best people I knew were because of homes. Who was beautiful, whose home I could be let in. The morning of the first dayof sixth grade, new girl in town, crush from the farm, I broke the glass of perfumeand didn't make a face because no one was watching. My brother and I watched a VHS called People that scared us.We hated it and asked for it over and over. My mother tongue? Just a leaning into the wrong words, being correctedand sticking with this instead; ~ as punctuation. [End Page 211] Don't tease, she can't take it,I want them to stop saying of me. [End Page 212] Lauren Hilger Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in BOMB, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Massachusetts Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Buttercups in Foil on the Windowsill

Buttercups in Foil on the Windowsill Barbara Tran (bio) She never set foot in that house, wason the other side of the world, livingher life as if every day were Sunday, thoughgiven her location this was noblessing, just another day ofshortages, of thuds in the distance that madeone's mind leap even when one'sbody was in bed. One day bledinto another, the ash of intention blowinginto oblivion. To accomplishanything, one had to leap through thedoorway of existence, existence beingan opening that allowed all you love to leaveas easily as it arrived. [End Page 153] Barbara Tran Barbara Tran's honors include a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and Lannan Foundation Writer's Residency. Longlisted for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize, Barbara is indebted to Hedgebrook for radical hospitality at a crucial time, and to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for essential support. Tran's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Puritan, Bennington Review, and The New Yorker. Copyright © 2019 Emerson College

Announcements

Announcements

Our Town, the MacDowell Colony, and the Art of Civic Mediation

Abstract Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. These productions recognize what terms like middlebrow obscure: Our Town is a civic mediator, a performance that installs art at the center of community life and community at the center of art. Taking inspiration from Antoine Hennion’s sociology of music, this essay ventures into the archive to trace an unfamiliar origin story for Our Town, involving a turn-of-the-century writers’ colony, a Progressive-Era historical pageant, and Wilder’s self-understanding as both confirmed bachelor and “community man.” Through the trajectory of a single play, civic mediation emerges as a pervasive strategy and ethos of American cultural practice, connecting diverse media through time and space.

Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman Destiny O. Birdsong (bio) after Kerri French I'm not ready to say I didn't deserve it,but I can admit that, at twelve, I thoughtI could live a better life with white people.That summer, I'd left a letter outlining my planpoorly hidden in the pages of my first bible:Please adopt me out. I don't fit here,I begged in a buoyant pre-teen cursiveunweighted by failure or rejection, having never learnedto read between white girls' smirks whenever I madea point to sing "See You Later!" in locker-strung hallwaysas they headed to cheerleading tryouts or soccer practiceand I walked back to Eden Gardens South.So, when I whispered bitch one Monday morningas my mother railed about something I'd forgotten—shirts left on the clothesline to sag with rain,blood on the toilet seat, paper I'd thrownabsentmindedly into the bowl again—I had it coming. I was green as a banana,and my mother, blessed as she was with the giftof work-hardened fists, beat me ripe.No school for three days, and I only returnedwhen she found an oversized shirt of my sister's:sheer bishop sleeves with Madonna's faceprinted in oranges and reds—logical enoughfor a Louisiana September, long enoughto cover bruises rotting from purple to brown.My friends knew enough to be suspicious.I'd been threatened enough to stick to a story.My teachers—who knows?—might have looked the other way.I cradled my head in the Madonnas and thought of herPepsi commercial: a black-and-white reel of her childhood—perfection on a screen within a screen. [End Page 138] I'd be grown before I learned she was namedfor a mother who died early. The fictionsof who we've wished to be flash before us, burn relicsthat aren't extinguished even after flesh heals.I wish my mother understood the mysteryof my skin, how lonely I've always feltin this house and hers, that was so often emptyof the choir of her voice, which drownedout my own with its lush siren, but stillheld together the plaster of walls that, without her,felt as vulnerable as blades of grass.My best friend laughs, "I wonder if every black girlremembers a day her mother beats her into a woman?"Madonna wails: "Everyone must stand alone."I learned as much, and in the tear-stiffened hazeof the days after, I learned that there are lyricstoo godless to be uttered, and others—more subtly so—for which I am compelled to lift my tongue. [End Page 139] Destiny O. Birdsong Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, essayist, and editor whose poems and essays have either appeared or are forthcoming in African American Review, Bettering American Poetry Volume II, The BreakBeat Poets Presents: Black Girl Magic, The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, Split This Rock's Poem of the Week, and elsewhere. Destiny has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony. Read more of her work at www.destinybirdsong.com. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Sitting Isohydric Meditation

Sitting Isohydric Meditation Brian Teare (bio) weather is water is one way to think about the season seizing the street tree another drought year measured in questions I asked the nurses who gently strapped me to the clang & throb inside the passing time the MRI ground into windows the doctor looked through to see my future I sit on the couch & watch the sparrows on the branches pant & puff their feathers a sort of solstice truce with the dry heat moving scorch from edge to stem on each leaf the heat’s so quiet it’s a kind of pain [End Page 61] nothing seems to soothe not even his damp armpit & its scent of moss soaked with rain woody sweet dear bacterial earth mouth my mouth opens onto & into his skin confusing outside inside me when we fuck we go deep mammal all fur & genital scent in my beard a soak of pheromones taut swollen erectile tissue & the swoon of adrenaline a chemical world that feels insular but is immersed in stimulus the way a magnetic field held my prone body whose protons aligned their axes & flipped their spins to allow radio waves through flesh made newly resonant I felt [End Page 62] removed from the world & cocooned in sound while the protons slowed & their spins flipped back radio signals that rendered image vertebral detail so precise it hurt to look at the bones as the doctor talked drought’s about being porous & storing water if you can’t travel to get it so some tree species close their stomata & wait for water the way maples do dying slowly from edges to center as a stress response it’s a real gamble to shut yourself up inside of yourself if I could I would stay as open as his face when I sit on his cock & he holds my hips & tilts himself up deeper [End Page 63] injury insists it remain hidden & grows its quota of pain from the bones the doctor showed me calcifications white as dry lichen leaching life from a lip of granite how to keep going into the quotient of future the bones divide inside me the incurable instance a given faultless or at fault I remain hidden how to keep going [End Page 64] Brian Teare Brian Teare is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). His sixth book, Doomstead Days, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2019. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications

Fresh Tracks

Fresh Tracks Rose McLarney (bio) "Coywolf: New dog-coyote-wolf hybrid already numbers in the millions." After Philip Levine Out of coyote and wolf crossed. Out of coyote's compromisesabout where to live, what to hunt. Out of wolf's big bones,bearing wolf's bulk, fed by wolf's broad jaw, wolf's bite. Out of dog, out of willingness to mate with dog,out of tameness turned. Away from coyness. Out of coyness. Into clamor, crashes of cars and construction, into noiseno longer weapon against the wild. Into crowds, into cities,not creeping. Holding full tail high, nose proudly lowfor the trails to where fat, suburban rabbits go. Into the unheralded havens of highway-sides, into the unclaimedkingdoms of park corners, into habitats we createthat cannot shelter us—the tender furless. Following graveyards'green, beckoning glows from borough to borough. Each generation,gorged on garbage, grows. From earth, when we can no longer endure orbe endured. From cold forests cut and no more, from trees,from all we've made fall like the trees. Following timber,following trade routes, following trains, arriving by railroad,as once to the West, another civilization— [End Page 169] Out of survival, out of desire for it, out of dogs' past being petsand the doggedness with which life persistsdespite the end of one form. Out of the fresh tracks life lays.Over the ways of we who will not scavengeso cannot be saved. Street-crossing, side-walking,coywolves, not coy, they come. [End Page 170] Rose McLarney Rose McLarney's collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Forage (forthcoming), both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, Warren Wilson College, and Dartmouth, as well as prizes such as Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in publications including the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. McLarney earned her mfa from Warren Wilson's mfa Program for Writers and has taught at the college. Currently, she is assistant professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and co-editor in chief and poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Three Generations of Women: The Star Side of Bird Hill – Interview with Naomi Jackson

NAOMI JACKSON'S NOVEL THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL (New York: Penguin, 2015) was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. It won Late Night Library's Debut-litzer prize, was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was selected for the American Booksellers Association's Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programmes.The Star Side of Bird Hill examines the life of two sisters, Phaedra, ten, and Dionne, sixteen, who are sent to Barbados to spend time with their grandmother Hyacinth as a result of their mother's depression and inability to care for them. The novel examines many social issues and cultural motifs, and shows how both sisters deal with their new environment, but in particular, their relationship with their grandmother.Born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents, Naomi Jackson considers herself a pan-Caribbean mongrel as her mother is from Barbados, her father from Antigua, and she has a Jamaican stepmother. As a child, Naomi spent several summers in Barbados, and says all of these places influenced who she is as a writer. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A recipient of residencies and fellowships, including Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, and Djerassi, Naomi Jackson was a visiting writer at Amherst College in Fall 2016.1The following interview took place in June 2016 via the internet.OPA: Although The Star Side of Bird Hill can be said to be a coming-of-age novel, the story is not simply about Dionne. It is as much about her mother Avril, little sister Phaedra and grandmother Hyacinth. Why did you decide to have a community of women as the protagonists?NJ: Thanks so much for noting the fact that Star Side features not just one protagonist but instead a family of women. The novel is told in a close third-person perspective that switches from the younger sister Phaedra to her older sister Dionne to their grandmother Hyacinth; Avril can be said to be a shadow protagonist, as the story is never told from her perspective, but we do experience her through the lens of her family's experiences of her. I am committed to telling stories that employ a broad perspective, reaching beyond one individual's experience in order to tell a more complete, complex story of a family, a church, a district, an island, a community.OPA: Most of Caribbean literature portrays the strong, almost invincible mother, but your mother is the opposite. She is neither strong nor caring. In fact, she emotionally and physically abandons her children, and they have to take care of her as well as fend for themselves. Where does your portrayal of this fragile, depressed, psychologically incapable Caribbean mother reside within the popular existing frame of Caribbean motherhood? What space does it open and how does it reframe Caribbean motherhood?NJ: It's true that the mother in my novel is quite different than the mothers we have seen in anglophone Caribbean literature. That said, I think she bears some traits in common with the mothers in Jamaica Kincaid's novels, especially Annie John, which had a profound influence upon me as a child and continues to inform my writing today. I disagree, however, with your characterisation of Avril as neither strong nor caring. I worked on crafting a mother character in whom readers would recognise resilience as well as fragility, neglect as well as tenderness. Avril, as I imagined her, is a person with a mental illness who has the best intentions for raising her children, but whose struggles eventually get the better of her. I hope that readers will witness her journey with compassion, and that Avril offers a different model of motherhood that is a reflection of an underrepresented reality of Caribbean mothers who toil in the face of considerable obstacles to their wellness. …

Bad Piano

Bad Piano Marianne Boruch (bio) The Anderson Center, Red Wing, Minnesota The piano can’t at the moment, sorry.Room high-ceilinged and perfectlyout of old wood made new by sanding. Like turtles doze in waterunder a slab on bricks, their concrete troughbeneath heat lamps allbarn winter. Just wait. A pond outside,real light to come. Lots of music that way, the old snapperprehistorically, preternaturallycranky at the heart of it. But one timea turkey got into its head to walk freshly pouredcement in there, to leave tracksonce I was,every claw starred into the stuff heavierand heavier. Put thatin the final riff for a grave-glorioussecond movement. If ever violin and cello orviola and dark anything joinedin holy matrimony, the sound would be soBrahms again, the bad piano’soh yes under their [End Page 132] “sexual interlude,” a phrase my soon-to-retireexcruciatingly odd professor as ifwith the most delicate tweezersloved fixing to what a playwright let loose onvery unhappy people, skimpy clothes,shades drawn, sweltering midsummer, the stage I kept picturing,biking to class so ago mid-November, mostlysnow wilding sideways—iridescent! The piano is badfor a reason. Played to deathit might complain like any other creatureafter a hard day being human. [End Page 133] Marianne Boruch Marianne Boruch ’s work includes nine collections of poetry—including, most recently, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; Cadaver, Speak; The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon)—and three books of essays on poetry, including the forthcoming The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry. Her collection The Book of Hours received the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award in 2013, and the recent Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing was selected by the New Yorker as a “Most Loved Book” of 2016. Her poems and essays have appeared in such places as the New Yorker, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, Poetry London, FIELD, Iowa Review, the Georgia Review, the London Review of Books, the Yale Review, APR, Poetry, and have been thrice anthologized in The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her awards include four Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the nea, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Glick Award for Indiana Writers, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press

The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages Lauren Hilger (bio) Handed from barbarian to barbarian. The Burgundian Code saysif they pull my hair with only one handthey’re free. I carry what I own overmy ovibovine shoulders. In my stone home, doing a book, copyingthe work, keeping things, illustratingthe corners with spilled water, hiding under the table. Mix of miracle and sap. I eat the grainsout of my sack with my tongue and hands, many blocks home. When they want something, the monarchs raise their arms.The edge shivers. I want something,namely,to be out of The Dark Ages. Its name like a joke that fills you with awe. [End Page 402] Lauren Hilger lauren hilger’s debut poetry collection, Lady Be Good, is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016. Awarded the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from the Mac-Dowell Colony, where she was a fellow in 2012 and 2014, her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review Online, and Kenyon Review Online, among other journals. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Notes for Notes

Notes for Notes Donald Manildi, Mary Black Junttonen, Maristella Feustle, and Deborah Campana The International Piano Archives at Maryland (IPAM), part of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland, has acquired an extensive collection of materials documenting the professional activity of New York composer, pianist, critic, entrepreneur, and radio personality, Jed Distler. A Virgil Thomson/Deems Taylor ASCAP Award recipient and a MacDowell Colony fellow, Mr. Distler has donated audio and video recordings of his concerts and recording sessions, airchecks of his radio broadcasts, complete documentation of his output as composer, his correspondence, photos, programs and clippings, as well as materials relating to his organization ComposersCollaborative, of which he is a cofounder. During the 2015–16 academic year, IPAM celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as the only institutional archive devoted specifically to the history and performance of classical piano music. Founded in Cleveland and originally established independently in New York, IPAM became part of the University of Maryland Libraries in 1977. The collection offers comprehensive holdings of recordings in all formats from 1889 to the present, scores both published and unpublished, and documents covering the careers of thousands of concert pianists. Donald Manildi University of Maryland The Michigan State University Music Manuscript Collections have moved from their previous home in the MSU Libraries’ Special Collections to the MSU Archives and Historical Collections. The collections include works of emeritus faculty H. Owen Reed, Jere Hutcheson, James Nib-lock, Ernst Victor Wolff, Merrill Sherburn, and Paul Harder. Also contained in the collections are the commissioned music of the Verdehr Trio, Elsa Ludewig-Verdehr’s clarinet music collection, the compositions of alumni Wallace De Pue and Eloy Fominaya, and the saxophone orchestra collection donated by alumnus Dick Charles. Music together with theater and dance are represented in the collection of choreographer, dancer, and alumnus Forrest Coggan. The Joe Cappo Band and the Floyd von Richter Orchestra (donated by Roger Grove) comprise popular music of the twentieth century. Several of the collections are still being developed, and new donations sought. Finding aids are available at the library Web site http://www.lib.msu.edu/branches/fal/musicmancoll/, [End Page 268] and at the University Archives Web site http://archives@msu.edu. Mary Black Junttonen Michigan State University The University of North Texas Music Library has acquired several noteworthy collections in recent months. Received as a gift from Al and Anna Julian in November 2015, the Woody Herman Society Collection consists of the official records of the Woody Herman Society; it also includes an extensive set of photo albums, scrapbooks, and memorabilia (as well as Woody Herman’s music stand). In that same month, the library purchased a small collection music manuscripts and dye-line copies of music by Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Cat Anderson, Lou Carter, and Paul Gonsalves from J&J Lubrano Music Antiquarians. In March of 2016, composer and former UNT College of Music faculty member Larry Austin donated his extensive collection (comprising personal papers, compositions, and sound recordings) to the Music Library. In April, the library received the band library of Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians as a gift of director Al Pierson. Most recently, the library received donations from Mrs. Madeleine Forte, widow of the late music theorist Allen Forte, which complement the existing Forte collection and focus on Mrs. Forte’s own performing career, and that of her aunt, Sonia Chalon. In June, the UNT Music Library purchased additional correspondence and other materials from Chalon via J&J Lubrano. Maristella Feustle University of North Texas As tradition has it, Notes column “Prices of Music Monographs and Scores” appears in the December issue of each volume. This issue is no different—save for the fact that we are bidding Kerri Baunach Scannell adieu with this, her last installment on the topic, and we welcome Peter Munstedt, who will take the reins from Kerri for future issues. Thank you, Kerri, for your contributions as part of the Notes staff, and welcome, Peter! The “Prices” column provides a snapshot of how our music collection funds were spent. We have grown accustomed to working with dedicated vendors, honing collection development plans, and observing...

Louise Talma: A Life in Composition by Kendra Preston Leonard (review)

COMPOSERSLouise Talma: A Life in Composition. By Kendra Preston Leonard. Farnham, Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2014. [xii, 263 p. ISBN 9781472416438 (hardcover); ISBN 9781472416445, 9781472416452 (e-book), $109.95.] Music examples, appendix, bibliography, discography, index.It is high time for a book about Louise Talma (1906-1996), the pioneering American composer, pianist, and pedagogue. Talma remains one of our foremost American composers of the twentieth century. Hers is a story that could easily have been lost, but Kendra Preston Leonard has given us an important first in bringing Talma's tale to the world with Louise Talma: A Life in Composition.Not only was Talma the second female composer (after Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1930) to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was also the first female composer to receive two of them consecutively (1946-47), after scores of male composers had received two or even three since the first awards were given in 1925. For years, Talma spent summers studying with the famous French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger; she was the first American to teach with Boulanger at the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau. She was also the first female composer to be invited to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1974, thirteen years after receiving an award from them for her three-act grand opera, Alcestiad, written on a libretto by Thornton Wilder). Throughout her life, she received numerous awards and fellowships for composing, and she taught at Hunter College for over fifty years. When not teaching, she spent most of her time composing at artists' colonies such as the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and others.In her introduction, Leonard presents the analytical approaches used in the eight chapters that follow: music analysis, feminist theory, queer theory, and women's autobiographical theory. All but the last are briefly mentioned, while the author spends more than five pages explicating and delineating women's autobiographical theory. This theory is rich and reveals much about Talma through examination of her music. Leonard presents Talma's life chronologically from Myth and Meaning in Talma's Early Life and Career to Final and Afterlife. In each chapter, Leonard presents pertinent musical pieces, digging more deeply into selected works while interweaving the facts of Talma's life with elaboration on the above theories.One of the strengths of this book lies in the music analysis. Somewhat like a fish riding a bicycle, writing about music can be awkward. Leonard rises to the occasion, making readers wish they could hear the pieces she parses. We are provided with a discography, but unfortunately there is no way to listen to the music. Photographs are also absent from the text. Despite these omissions, Leonard's patience with the analytical process creates a result that is commendable, with music examples that support her investigations. In particular, her parsing of Talma's Piano Sonata no. 1- dedicated to Mrs. Edward MacDowell-is beautifully detailed. Presenting the first movement as a set of non-traditional variations makes sense and echoes several works Talma wrote during that time.For all of its strengths and importance, this book contains a number of questionable assumptions put forward with little or no evidence. Leonard posits that an operation mentioned by Talma in a letter from 1935 was a hysterectomy (p. 66). However, existing datebooks available at the Library of Congress in the Louise Talma Papers (and listed in the finding aid as Date books and address books, 1925-1990) show that Talma often recorded the dates and intensity of her menstrual periods, which clearly would not have occurred after a hysterectomy.There is also an odd category found in the handy-yet now already outdated- works list appendix: Nonexistent Works (though there is just one listed). Leonard states, The Mass for the Sundays of the Year . …

Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World by Denise von Glahn (review)

Music and Skillful Listener: American Women Compose Natural World. By Denise von Glahn. (Music, Nature, Place.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. [xiii, 397 p. ISBN 9780253006622 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780253007933 (ebook), $37.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Denise von Glahn's Music and Skillful Listener: American Women Compose Natural World offers evocative descriptions of compositions influenced or inspired by nature by nine North American women. It is a very readable book that is appropriate for and will likely appeal to undergraduates and general readers with music-reading skills. Von Glahn avoids using term ecomusicology (the burgeoning subdiscipline on whose coattails her book rides) and most of critical and theoretical aspects of ecocriticism, instead defining her purpose as examining the many processes individual composers engage in when they reflect nature's presence in (p. 2). She is upfront about limitations of her single, homogenous demographic of educated, white, middle-class women, which helps situate this book among other recent publications that engage with intersections of music and environment (p. 2). Although she writes in her introduction that she wanted to study [her] topic in depth, von Glahn more often provides brief and tantalizing glimpses of more in-depth studies possible for many of works she describes; I hope that her book serves as a springboard for scholars to create truly comprehensive analyses of many of pieces she includes (p. 3). Von Glahn devotes a chapter each to Amy Marcy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle, exploring (greatly varying) extent to which their compositions owe a debt to composers' involvement with or response to nature. She divides into groups of threes; those who saw Nature as a Summer Home (Part 1); those who found Nature All Around Us (Part 2); and those who are working in a world Beyond EPA and Earth Day (Part 3). Von Glahn briefly provides some contextual background on writing about nature and visual art focused on nature by North American women, citing rapturous accounts by Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller and paintings of Elizabeth Gilbert Jarrow. Von Glahn touches lightly on recent feminist ecocriticism such as that by Lorraine Anderson and asks several framing questions about nature of women 'nature composers,' their values, and reach of their works, before taking up topic of three composers who created musical works referring to nature while in residence at MacDowell Colony: Beach, Bauer, and Talma (p. 22). This first section and its search for historical roots among composers addressing nature is, however, weakest part of book. Von Glahn notes countless women's compositions that address nature prior to twentieth century, but does not sufficiently explain highly gendered conventions during this time that sanctioned such topics as appropriate for women. Nor does she address issue of privilege that both of that time and ours enjoy that assists them in their creative process. Her emphasis on MacDowell Colony as a singular place of inspiration to these composers is overstated: it was not only artists' colony her subjects attended, and von Glahn ignores fact that their reasons for attending had more to do with being able to escape mundane duties of everyday life in order to focus on their work than a desire to be close to nature. In addition, perhaps because of chronological distance from these composers, and because of vast amounts of archival material necessary to sift through in order to fully understand these composers' relationships with nature, these chapters lack accuracy and authority bestowed by still-living composers of later chapters. …

Fuzz

Fuzz Kevin J. Craft (bio) Christopher Craft, 1970–1974 When I think of him at four I think howwe would slip quietlyfrom the porch each morning before school to see what the grass had washed up,see those rabbits come out of the woodfeeding in half-light on the unmown lawn. Among the wreckageof tricycle and swing setwe could always count on two or three waders, nibbling diligently, vigilantas daybreak, their hungercut like wakes in the backyard shallows. Each morning though our school bus exodussent them scattering, there was a pausebefore we parted ways, a lifting of noses, a tensing of ears just long enoughto amplify the gnawing in our ownamphibious hearts. [End Page 92] Kevin J. Craft Kevin J. Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired writing. Recent poems appear in Poetry, Kenyon Review, NER, and West Branch. He has been awarded fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Bogli-asco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. He lives in Seattle, where he directs both the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College and the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

Priming Light

Priming Light Chanda Feldman (bio) Keywords Chanda Feldman, Tennessee-Arkansas border, cemetery What I want is the assurance that when I goI’ll be taken to the hill. I can see itIn my mind, the grave they should walk me to.It’s almost land unknown, on the Tennessee–Arkansas border, in woods aboveThe flood plain, where my ancestors are buried.They never knew much of me; I’d be strangeTo them, but if there’s time for romance…As if the day could be to scale. I imagine the dirtCovering my body will be a good humus,The loam of pin oaks and hickories. Leave meWith limestone markers for head and foot,The ones that won’t stand up to time,My name’s engraving left to erode under rain,To be crept upon by moss. Leave me in the landOf my priming light. O grandmother-cultivar,Your roses beneath the kitchen windows. OFall men, your chests strung with the season’s pelts,Rabbits’ blood in the sink. Let me retrieveThe yams, pull loose turnips from the garden.Let me escape, O midday heat, to the north sideOf the house. Let me lie on my grandparents’ bed,Where their sex made thirteen children, let meSniff their scents there. I will die wantingTo hear one more time my name in the mouthsOf my old women. Let them call me fromMy daydreams on the summer quilt, then I’ll rise. [End Page 163] Chanda Feldman CHANDA FELDMAN’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, she is also a recipient of grants and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She received an MFA from Cornell University.* First appearance in Ecotone. Copyright © 2015 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Portrait of my family as a pack of cigarettes

Portrait of my family as a pack of cigarettes Melissa Stein (bio) I’d barter your lifefor a brief orangeflame & a lungful of peace. My whole familywas like that, tobacco-stained, curling a little at the edges.Singed. Wheneverthe wind rose, a few blew away, easyas an exhale, & we let goin the way one does with paper, smoke.Until the box layempty, on its side, in some dump. Now and thencold hands wouldfumble it, in hope. [End Page 178] Melissa Stein Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, and other publications, and she has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco. Copyright © 2014 Middlebury College Publications

The Early Writings of Joy Davidman

Joy Davidman’s place in the canon of twentieth century American literature deserves more attention than it has heretofore received. For instance, in her role in the late 1930’s as poetry editor for New Masses (the weekly voice of the Communist Party of the United States of America), Davidman published poets such as Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Alexander Bergman, and Aaron Kramer. At the same time, her poems in Letter to a Comrade (1938) touting a Communist agenda, while clearly written in the tradition of “proletarian literature,” are nonetheless well done; although a political agenda drives her selection of subject matter in these poems, they are not simply set pieces. She uses irony effectively and her imagery is evocative and striking. In fact, Davidman was very much a conscious craftswoman, spending the summers of 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942 at the MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, where she honed her skills. For instance, her best piece of fiction, Anya (1940), is a direct result of her time at the colony. She understood the intellectual energy it takes to become an effective writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and she never backed away from hard work. Her commitment to writing—especially her voice, her rhetoric, her style, and the literary influences informing her work—merit more scholarly attention. In this essay I explore Davidman’s early devotion and commitment to the craft of writing; in addition, I evaluate the poems, fiction, and non-fiction she produced before she wrote for New Masses and published Letter to a Comrade.