The Yale Review, new issue

The new issue of The Yale Review (July 2004) is out. My favorite poem in the issue is the stun-gunning "Tomorrow's Living Room" by Jason Whitmarsh, a former managing editor of Verse and a much-missed presence. There also are interesting poems by Annie Finch, Nadia Herman Colburn, Barbara Hamby, and Elena Karina Byrne, whose "Moon Mask" ends with a 32-line syntacrobatic sentence. If you want some wisdom with a capital W, try Philip Levine's "The Great Truth," which ends, "... some / great truth to live by now that it was too late / to live in the world other than I do." There's also a translation of Mallarme by Richard Howard. Anthony Hecht has an essay on Keats, which begins with a look at Keats' hungry reading practices, esp. of Shakespeare, and ends, "It ['To Autumn'] is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language." Stephen Yenser's essay, "Inkles, Shreds, and Scales," is an engaging collage/notebook; it begins, "Not a knot of identity, nota bene, though perhaps a net, a nanonet, certainly never a naught, a nit, the salt and whit of difference, the bread of life." Among Yenser's own musings, the piece includes excerpts from Whitman, William James, Barthes, Bishop, Foucault, and, of course, Emerson.