December 1992 Cover Image

One Writer's Big Innings

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Robert Clark Young
When I was eighteen, Doctor God made me want to become a writer. Doctor God was not his real name. He was Doctor SomethingUnpronounceable-in-German, and because his name began with a G and he had escaped from Hitler and he had devoured the whole of English Literature and he had begun the first session of Contemporary Poetry, in which I was enrolled, by stating "I too am One of These"- meaning a Contemporary Literary Figure- everyone called him Doctor God.
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Tradition & the Institutional Talent (Part 3): Deconstruction After the Fall

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David Lehman
When I went to England for the British publication of Signs of the Times last fall, I gave a talk under the auspices of the Oxford University Literary Society. On selected walls and bulletin boards the organizers had hung posters identifying the guest speaker as "David Lehman, deconstructionist." Since deconstructionists frequently collapse the difference between a thing and its opposite, and since they and I are supposed to exist in a state of mutual antipathy, I marveled at the poster.
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What Did You Do in the Culture Wars, Daddy/Mommy?

Liam Rector
During the fall of 1991, while studying the First Amendment and cultural policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard, I taught a graduate course called "Censorship: The Culture Wars" in the writing program at Emerson College. We studied public funding of literature and the arts and content restrictions on that funding; we studied issues of hate speech and political correctness at American colleges and universities.
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Standing & Listening: Marianne Moore's Strategies

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Nancy Sherman
In the 1970s American poetry lost Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop-three women whose collective power can't be underestimated, though their individual legacies have differed vastly. From the distance of these twenty years, we can see that their art forms a kind of triangle of restrained self-expression: the "compacted compactness" of Bogan; the elaborate, encoded constructions of Moore; and Bishop's eventual achievement of poetic statement sui generis.

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