Harp & Altar

Jessica Baran is assistant director of the White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the art writer for the Riverfront Times. Her first book of poems, Remains To Be Used, is forthcoming this winter from Apostrophe Books.

Roseanne Carrara lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of A Newer Wilderness (Insomniac Press, 2007), from which the poems in this issue have been selected. She is at work completing a novel entitled The Week in Radio; drafting a second collection of poems, Spectral Evidence; and, with her husband, Blaise Moritz, producing an English translation of Silènces, the poems of the philosopher and anarchist Jacques Ellul.

Andy Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program. He is the author (along with Jon Cotner) of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). His chapbook Island is forthcoming from The Song Cave, and his critical study Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. The audio recording from which Island derives has been published in a special issue of TextSound.

Eileen G’Sell teaches at Ellis University and Washington University in St. Louis, where she serves as publications editor at the Kemper Art Museum. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in Ninth Letter, Super Arrow, Zone 3, and Boston Review.

Amy King’s most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and the forthcoming I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), and she is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett. She teaches English and creative writing at SUNY NCC, works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-edits Esque with Ana Bozicevic and Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples. Please visit amyking.org for more.

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, and Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

Jesse Lambert was born in Hudson, NY, and received an MFA from Hunter College. He has exhibited his work at eyewash@SupremeTrading and Klaus Von Nichtssagend in Brooklyn, White Columns in New York, Miller Block Gallery and Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, and Joseloff Gallery and Artspace in Connecticut, among other venues. He lives in Jackson Heights, NY, and works in Long Island City. More images can be seen at www.jesselambert.net.

Lawrence Mark Lane’s writing has appeared in Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, Double Room, New Orleans Review, and Oxford American, among others. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Jesse Lichtenstein lives in Oregon where he writes poetry, fiction, journalism, and screenplays (and helps run the Loggernaut Reading Series). His poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, Diagram, EOAGH, Gulf Coast, Octopus, Boston Review, and other journals.

Dan Magers is founder and co-editor of the online poetry magazine Sink Review and runs the chapbook press Immaculate Disciples. He has poems published or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Eleven Eleven, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. A regular contributor of book reviews at New Pages, he lives in Brooklyn.

Patrick Morrissey’s chapbook Transparency was published last year by Cannibal Books and his poetry and criticism have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar. He lives in New York.

The American novelist and critic Charles Newman (1938–2006) was raised in the Midwest and taught for many years at Northwestern University, where he founded the literary magazine TriQuarterly, and Washington University in St. Louis. His books include The Post-Modern Aura (Northwestern University Press, 1985), White Jazz (Dial Press, 1984), and In Partial Disgrace, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews appear regularly in Harp & Altar.

Leslie Patron lives and writes in Providence, RI, where she received her MFA in literary arts at Brown University. Recent poems and stories have been published in Dewclaw, OCHO, and Parthenon West Review. The work in this issue comes from a recently completed manuscript entitled The SeaMaids, a collaborative work with illustrator Margaret Powers. Her hometown is San Jose, Calif.

Lauren Russell is the author of the chapbook The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better). Her critical writing has appeared in Scapegoat Review, and recent poems are forthcoming from Eleven Eleven. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Neruda.

Rob Stephenson is the author of Passes Through (FC2). He lives in Queens, NY. Visit rawbe.com.

Stephen Sturgeon’s first poetry collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Dark Sky Books early in 2011. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cannibal, Eyewear, Harvard Review, Jacket, Open Letters Monthly, Typo, and other journals. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

G.C. Waldrep's fourth collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts—in collaboration with John Gallaher—is due out from BOA Editions in April 2011. He has work in recent or forthcoming issues of American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, and other journals. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.

To a Translator of Horace

Roseanne Carrara

You spoke of the followers of a mathematician who drew

from his example the promise of a second life. Pythagoras

lived as Pythagoras. And, having chosen the weapon

of an ancestor from a pile, he lived again, or that earlier hero

whose weapon he had chosen lived a second life in him.

Now that it is sure the both of them are dead, your take

on the old question stings us iron and fresh: what good

does it do the hero to have stood for something once?

The sea eats the captain and his crew. The aged still tear

at the bright youths and those in their prime on their way

to the underworld, tumbling down as if they, too,

were young again. Nobody escapes the sport of the old gods

or the shame of the new Christ, cold in his chiefly literal state.

Stay with us. We will need you soon enough. Stay to confound

what might be termed the second life of Edward Teller,

our father of the h-bomb, what with the ethos he delivered once,

his theme, reprised by the stiffs come to trade upon his take

on the human condition: the heart’s essential weakness,

the self-serving nature of humankind, our vision, base,

not visionary, caught wittling down the truth. That Teller

was no Pythagoras, in truth, come tell us. Come sink these stiffs

already bidding in his name for a license to spread a sea of mirrors

into space so as to make the sunlight flicker and to cool

what they have frequently termed this sunken earth. They will ask

to dust the stratosphere, too, with haze enough to reproduce

what Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens threw upon the day-

light once. They will ask to engineer a thick albeit

temporary age of winter, to put an end to the warmth

we forced upon the atmosphere and in upon ourselves

in this (and it is almost fair) our bent for self-indulgence.

Set us right again. Ask this group the old question,

and in an even sharper strain of certitude, what good

does it do you now that you are dead (though they

remain, for all intents and purposes, among the living)

to have treated our predicament from the tips and not

the roots? Ask them, what good, not to confirm in us

our primal lethargy but to make it plain – the most of us

would choose, on behalf of our two hemispheres and their

surrounding gases, to go without our deeper wants

and most of our possessions, with little grief, and long

before we make our way to Proserpina, swung at and torn

by the aged and the youths enticed or bidden there.