Issue 14.1

LITERARY MATTERS 14.1
(FALL, 2021)

Image credit: Willis Barnstone

Fiction:

Caroline Kim: A Hair
Caroline Kim: Self Defense

Interview:

Ryan Wilson: “Singing a New Song”: A Conversation with Rock-n-Roll Hall-of-Famer, DION

Meringoff Prize Winners:

Poetry:

Brian Brodeur: Corn Poppets
Brian Brodeur: Barcode Ode
Brian Brodeur: Space Junk

Fiction:

Anca Nemoianu: Truffles and Grapes

Non-Fiction:

Oliver Spivey: “The Secret Rhythm of Chance”: The Nabokovian Vision of Tragedy in Pale Fire

A Garland for Willis Barnstone:

Image Credit: Tony Barnstone

Aliki Barnstone: Willis Barnstone’s The Secret Reader: A Tour de Force Kept Secret Too Long
Robert Barnstone: Narrative Forest
Robert Barnstone: Narrative Interventions
Tony Barnstone: My Father, Lighthouse Keeper and Priest of the Holy Typewriter
Tony Barnstone: My Father Dancing
Willis Barnstone: Animals Begin on the Porch in Days and Nights of Dark War
Willis Barnstone: Paintings of Poets and Magic Couplets
Willis Barnstone: Three Translations from Charles Baudelaire
Geoffrey Brock: The Secret Reader
Lois Connor: Photographs of Willis Barnstone & Sarah Handler
Maxine Hong Kingston: Dear Diary, dear Willis
Yusef Komunyakaa: On Willis Barnstone
Stanley Moss: Celebration for Willis
Daniel Tobin: Now
Brian Turner: The Poet
Sholeh Wolpé: ABC of Willis Barnstone

Artificial Intelligence-Generated Poetry from a Dataset of Willis Barnstone’s Sonnets (Programmed and Collated by Bilal Shaw & Tony Barnstone): All This Occurred in Palestine

Artificial Intelligence-Generated Poetry from a Dataset of Willis Barnstone’s Sonnets (Programmed and Collated by Bilal Shaw & Tony Barnstone): Life on Mars

Interview:

Maurya Simon: Time Sits High on a Throne of Calcium: An Interview with Robert Mezey (pt. 1)

Criticism:

Michael Autrey: The Novel Is All That Is the Case
Brian Brodeur: Bidart’s Silences
Dwight Lindley: Light and Darkness in Dickens
Julia Mueller: George R. Stewart Balancing the Scales
Nick Norwood: On Poetry’s Pure Serene
Daniel Tobin: The Gravities of Heaven
Joshua Williams: Pain Management: A Review of John Foy’s No One Leaves the World Unhurt

Poems:

Derrick Austin: Pierrot’s Face
John Wall Barger: Trained Bears
John Wall Barger: I Saw Two Beat Poets at an Elks Club with a Girl in My English Class
Lory Bedikian: Syllabics for My Mother
Bruce Bond: Labyrinth
James Brookes: Silvius Bonus, Jobbing Psephologist
James Brookes: Silvius Bonus, Accidental Edgelord
Brian Culhane: Recorso
Rachel Hadas: Harvest and Tide
Rachel Hadas: The Labyrinth, the Septic Tank
Jonathan Locke Hart: Ode in Hunan
Samuel Hazo: No Option But One
Ernest Hilbert: Mineral Springs Trail
Ashley Sojin Kim: Whitman in the Ward at Chatham
Quincy Lehr: Okay Boomer
April Lindner: Pretty Boy
Jesse Nathan: Swing Song
Richard Newman: Your Mother Sleeping, I Hold You Up to the Dawn
Jane Satterfield: Discarded Books at Flood Tide
Alexis Sears: For My Father: A Sonnet Redoublé
Alexis Sears: September
Robert B. Shaw: Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man
Felicity Sheehy: Great Blue Heron
Will Toedtman: Homecoming
D. S. Waldman: Overbrook
D. S. Waldman: Lightly a God, If He Wished

Translations:

John Poch: Connecticut (from the Italian of Pietro Federico)
John Poch: Kentucky (from the Italian of Pietro Federico)
Mary Jo Salter: Anton Van Dyck (from the French of Marcel Proust)
Mary Jo Salter: Chopin (from the French of Marcel Proust)
Mary Jo Salter: For Madeleine Lemaire (from the French of Marcel Proust)

HOT ROCKS FEATURE

I.

Emily Grace: “Give Me Both Burdens”: An Interview with Stephen Cushman About the Place of the “Poet-Scholar”

Stephen Cushman: Granny Was an Angelfish
Stephen Cushman: Three Sisters, Los Angeles
Stephen Cushman: Pavilion for Washing Away Thoughts
Stephen Cushman: Spitting Distance
Stephen Cushman: Dealey Plaza, November Again

II.

Victor Strandberg: Robert Penn Warren and Democracy

Clare Byrne: A New Deal for All the King’s Men

Gordon Van Ness: James Dickey, Existentialism, and “The thousand variations of one song”

Fletcher Bonin: On William L. Andrews’ Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865

III.

Amanda Auerbach: Poems and Reflections on Poems