Harvard Review
by Joan Menefee
Harvard Review; Number 27, 2004; Christina Thompson, Editor; Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Bi-annual: Subscriptions $16 per year, single issue $13.
Since 1992, Harvard Review, a 6 x 9, perfect-bound publication with a semi-glossy cover featuring original artwork, has topped out around two hundred pages and appeared at least twice yearly. Its first incarnation was a newsletter, Erato, founded in 1986 by Stratis Haviaris, to inform the public about the activities of the Woodberry Poetry Room, an adjunct of Harvard’s Houghton Library. The present format, edited by Christina Thompson who took over for the retiring Haviaris in 2000, retains something of that overheard-at-the-library quality. Thompson’s library, however, is neither complacent nor dull. One of the journal’s underlying purposes, in fact, seems to be redefining the library as a site of risk, a hard sale for anyone familiar with stereotypes of librarians with tight buns and pursed lips who guard the tombs of fallen books. The Harvard Review provides waves of stimulation—the hush of stalking followed by the mute shock of ambush, then the dismantling, observation, and consumption of knowledge itself—that indicate the library’s denizens are anything but weak-hearted.
Number 27 features six works of fiction, seven works of non-fiction prose by four writers—including four related works by K. E. Duffin of under a thousand words each—and fifteen poems, mingled with visual offerings by three artists, including Judith S. Larsen’s “Invisible Alphabet,” a sequence of nudes photographed with “various cultural inscriptions, biological patterning, and diagrams made by visionaries” projected onto “a live model in real time.” The journal concludes with twenty-three reviews, arranged alphabetically by author, and the standard “Notes on Contributors.” Well-known writers to be found within its pages include essayists André Aciman and Honor Moore, poets Jorie Graham and Richard Tillinghast, and novelist Tim Winton. The creative pieces, though placed before the reviews, are not elevated above them, suggesting that all forms of belles lettres are regarded with equal seriousness by the journal’s editorial board. By the same token, segregation of visual works facilitating their appreciation as independent art objects, maintained at no cost to the overall thematic unity of the journal, demonstrates a full-blooded commitment to the plastic arts.
In her prefatory editorial Christina Thompson asserts the theme of adolescence in the three opening stories of the journal, but I would argue that the fourth piece fits in this adolescent cycle tightly as well. Beginning with the second-person narration of Birgit Larsson’s short story “Red,” the narrators and protagonists of pieces by Larsson, Anthony Varallo, Tim Winton and Jorie Graham deliver candid and stinging vignettes, dispatches from the outposts of childhood. Larsson’s narrator Red escapes the confines of her family home with the pack of boys who have menaced and intrigued her throughout the story. The similarly intimate and stylistically adventurous first-person plural narration of Varallo’s “Yearbook” details, among many tart subjects in a surprisingly short space, a mouthy troop of middle school boys encountering the gutters and fast-food joints of the city. While capitalizing on the charged energy of adolescence as Larsson does, Varallo offers events from the viewpoint of the kinds of boys Larsson portrays from a distance.
In crafting this thematic and structural juxtaposition, Thompson eschews an easy positioning of readers in relation to characters. The works of these newer writers (Varallo graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1997, Larsson with a B. A. from Harvard College in 2004) benefit greatly both from being in dialogue with each other, and from speaking to the work of the more established writers. Winton and Graham experiment with complex, telescopic perspectives in the works presented here. Winton’s narrator in “Cockleshell” recalls an unrequited love punctuated by house fires and fishing expeditions, while Graham’s narrator in “Impressionism” regards a child at the edge of the sea from a painstakingly rendered distance, piecing the child’s activity together clue by visual clue.
Contemplating this quartet—its textural, sensory and emotional abundance—I feel as I often do emerging into daylight from a movie theater (or library): aware, apprehensive, dogged by the suspicion that I spend too much of my life asleep. The authors of these works about adolescence might characterize my sense of the numinous as a swelling, a trope that recurs in these opening pieces, and one through which the otherwise mundane and predictably painful process of adolescent growth can be usefully interpreted. In “Red,” Larsson’s narrator swaddles her new aching thirteen-year-old breasts with packs of frozen peas; Varallo’s narrators notice a tampon “afloat in a brown puddle, plump with rainwater”; Agnes Larwood, the unattained object of desire in “Cockleshell,” wears tennis shoes “huge and white underwater” while slaying catfish, a scene echoed by the turkey-leg the child in “Impressionism” uses to lure crab, bait Graham describes as “swollen, thick, pin-cushioned.” Swelling, of course, collapses growth and abrasion, suggesting simultaneously bellies, buds, cuts and bruises. In this light, the cliché of the “growing pain” regains its immediacy and substance.
This realization of incensed witness occurs elsewhere in Number 27 of Harvard Review. It is present in Lasse B. Antonen’s consideration of Frans Masereel’s woodcuts, prefatory to eight of the German artist’s works, each of which features a lone man confronting matter in many guises, from a round-limbed prostitute sprawled on a bed to a forest surging with plants and sunlight. Likewise, it is in Rishi P. Reddi’s perceptive study of Indian immigrant life in Boston, “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy,” when the narrator pauses over a burrito “tasting quite funny” and examines “the stuffing inside . . . dark and crumbling into small pieces.” More directly, it is in Dan Stryk’s elegant poem “Master Heron,” which focuses the reader’s attention, like that of the hungry bird which provides its subject, on “the risen tide swelled ripe / with squirming bream.” Here again, the hungry senses and the fish in “Information” by Xue Di, translated by Hil Anderson and Keith Waldrop:
Discomfort is a ray of light
in harder and harder rain
Crossing the intersection, in my
heart, eyes of a spawning fish
slowly going shut. Homeland
with the sound of ocean
in the ear of someone sick
resonant and more resonant
Though not every piece in the journal crescendos with
a moment of overwhelmed recognition or gratitude or enlightenment, most pieces
are similarly motivated by a strong desire to learn through observation.
Sometimes this observation eventuates not in discovery, but in rediscovery. Those
who have fallen into obscurity swell somewhere in the collective unconscious,
waiting to ripen again for the nourishment of another generation. Number 27,
then, aids the resurrection of writers and artists (like the aforementioned
Masereel) whose fortunes have suffered in the fickle world of American arts and
letters. Christina Thompson makes this purpose explicit in her editorial when
she introduces Kenneth Burke as a literary critic and philosopher who “[t]hough
enormously influential in his day, [. . .] seems to have disappeared off the
radar of the current generation.” Honor Moore’s animated essay about the life
and work of poet Amy Lowell falls under this category as well. Deliberately
distancing herself from half-century old literary gossip about the Boston poet,
Moore asks “But what are her poems like?” then proceeds to praise Lowell’s
erotic lyrics, revolutionary in their openly lesbian character. She was too
independent an artist, Moore argues, for the taste of the reputation-makers
that followed in her wake.
Ellen Davis mounts a parallel defense on behalf of
poet Rebecca Wolff’s most recent collection Figment in the Review
section of the journal. (This section features primarily positive reviews,
though lukewarm and negative assessments, like that of William Doreski on Carl
Dennis or Garth Greenwell on Olena Kalytiak Davis, do occur.) The upstart
Wolff, in response to a publishing community she felt was too afraid of
weirdness, founded Fence magazine in 1997. To complaints that Wolff’s
work, along with that of writers she publishes, is insular and self-satisfied,
Davis replies that the poetry in Figment “offers a great deal to those
willing to accept some degree of opaqueness and ambiguity.” The reviewer’s
characterization of the poet’s work (the rightful focus of honest criticism, as
Honor Moore’s essay about Amy Lowell implies) as yielding “considerable
pleasure, difficulty notwithstanding” is supported, moreover, by several choice
extracts from Figment. In all of the reviews, supporting evidence is
the gold standard of judgment. By both showing and telling, HR reviewers allow readers access to a range of styles and subjects available only
to academicians. Though both Lowell and Wolff are women writers, I do not get
the sense that the essays written in their defense are feminist enterprises.
If there is any special pleading done for ideological reasons in Harvard
Review, it is pleading on behalf of literary objects and their primacy to
cultural and political discussions.
The Harvard Review’s fulfillment of the part of
its mission devoted to fostering new writers is what finally impressed me most
about the journal. Judging from the contributor’s notes, many of the pieces in
Number 27 are first-time or early publications, despite the clear presence of
heavyweights in the journal’s roster. Thompson succeeds brilliantly at putting
different generations of writers into compelling dialogue with one another,
offering a teeming, animated, and sometimes fractious, library to her readers.
By exploring the concepts of youth and maturity themselves, by putting the
recovery of writers from earlier periods on a similar footing with the
discovery of emerging writers, and by recognizing that the review process is as
crucial to new writers as publication itself, Harvard Review encourages
developing artists—people newly immersing themselves in the intense and
engaging problems creation poses—to believe that they may one day reach the
public whose attention they diligently seek. A journal that advances that hope
is doing its job well.
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