Issue 142
Summer & Fall 2012
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You are currently looking at the fifth issue of TriQuarterly Online, and it's a good one. We're very excited to feature recordings of some of our poets reading their work. John Bresland was kind enough to curate another set of video essays for us, each one constructed around a single image. You'll also find the work of poets Ghalib and Yang Zi translated from Urdu and Chinese, respectively, and we're proud to host three new poems from Sharon Olds. We have fresh creative nonfiction from the likes of Sven Birkerts, Monica Berlin, and Ander Monson, who also sends photos. Finally, this issue's fiction includes astronauts, Keats, and X-Men, among other things (but what else could you want, really?). We truly hope you enjoy this issue as much as we do. Send praise and grumblings to triquarterlyonline@northwestern.edu. --L.P.
Managing Editor: Lydia Pudzianowski
Faculty Advisor: Alice George
Literary Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisor: Alex Miner
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Ruth Goring
Graduate Fellow: Ben Schacht
Book Review Editor: Karen Zemanick
Assistant Book Review Editor: Leigh Arber
Chapbook Review Editor: Anthony Opal
Fiction Editors: Matt Carmichael, Cathy Gao, Carrie Muehle, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Sarah Hollenbeck
Poetry Editor: Lana Rakhman
Assistant Poetry Editor: Virginia Smith
Staff: Rebecca Bald, Cathy Beres, Michelle Cabral, Patrick Allen Carberry, Bonnie Cauble, Jen Companik, Rachel Curry, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Vincent Francone, Andrew Galligan, Barbara Ghoshal, Yliana Gonzalez, Eric Grawe, Betsy Haberl, Ish Harris-Wolff, Noelle Havens, Elizabeth Herbert, Gretchen Kalwinski, Nath Jones, Jen Lawrence, Joyce Lee, Eldad Malamuth, Carrie Muehle, Tien (Mimi) Nguyen, Amber Peckham, Cory Phare, C. Russell Price, Jenna Rabideaux, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Ross Ritchell, Paula Root, Dan Schuld, Michi Smith, Megan Marie Sullivan, Adam Talaski, Myra Thompson, Alisa Ungar-Sargon
Forecast
A storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin on Angelus Novus
Sea-Level Elegy
Once a year, for a minute, I let myself
go back, to the summer rental, the stairs
down into the earth, I let myself descend them
and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go
Hip Replacement Ode
A week later, when it takes me only
a couple of minutes to get out of bed,
when I can sit up in the living room
with my partner, and watch the Knicks win,
Beatles Girl, Where Have You Gone?
Contributor's Note
Skeptical of pat endings and forced epiphanies, an essayist may explore a subject without being required to arrive at certain conclusions. (“If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions,” said Montaigne.)
The Lightning
Contributor's Note
Noah Saterstrom is a visual artist who’s also my neighbor here in Tucson; he’s a good friend, and I’ve known him since he collaborated with Noah Eli Gordon and me some years ago when the three of us lived in Denver. Saterstrom made some wonderful pieces for a book that Gordon and I wrote called Figures for a Darkroom Voice.
You Are Here
Contributor's Note
What's with all these hapless, ineffectual young men?
I’ve scrawled this question countless times in the margins of essays I could never quite finish writing.
Starflower
Contributor's Note
I wrote from the image, just stared at it a longer time than I might normally, and realized I was thinking of my mother. So I started there, something she'd said to me once probably fifty years ago.
Hanoi Jane, Mon Amour
In 1972 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made Letter to Jane, a film built largely around a single still image. If you’ve not had the pleasure, if pleasure’s the word, let me quote Pauline Kael’s review in its curt entirety:
The Fourth Man
It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.
Pablo Picasso, on news of the first moon landing, quoted in the New York Times, July 21, 1969