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The Place of Noir: I-55 Mile Markers 267 to 238

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Elizabeth Hatmaker, Guest Contributor

There will be a bright, shimmering, silver veil stretched every-
where tight, to hide the deep, black, empty, terrible bot-
tom of the world where people fall who are alone, or dead,

Sick or alone.
Alone or poor,
Weak, or mad, or doomed, or alone;

Kenneth Fearing
“American Rhapsody (3)”

How do you get between nowhere to somewhere? And how, then, you know when you’ve gotten, as Cain writes in Double Indemnity, “to the end of the line”? These used to be central existential questions in the films, novels, poetry, and lyric sensibilities we call noir. It’s certainly been argued that noir is a cosmopolitan form constructed from city iconographies and the pulse of commerce and commercialism, modernism and technology. Yet for everyone who will talk about the urban locales of novels like Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or films like Dassin’s Naked City, I’ll counter with novels like Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Hammett’s Red Harvest, Dorothy Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse or films like Siodmak’s The Killers. If the “someplaces” of noir are cosmopolitan spaces, noir’s “nowheres” are often not pastoral frontiers full of fresh possibilities, but inter-locations—roadside gas stations, industrial spurs, the tract homes of decreasing size, warehouses, exits reliant on tourists just traveling through to big cities or rural retreats.

While modernism idealizes movement and progress, noir often offers the ambivalent alternative to the freedom of movement, a profound sense of dislocation. The protagonists of noir are often escaping, hiding out, on the lamb, running away, or getting lost.

I am fascinated by the travel between somewhere and nowhere, through the interzones that represent neither the energy of the city nor the imagined and idealized frontier. I’m entranced especially by the physical markers of this affective transition. Sometimes you look around and you just know that suddenly you aren’t anyplace in particular anymore. You observe specific physical outliers that mark the edges of cultural signification and you confront their ambivalent affects.

Illinois is a figure divided by the I-80 corridor. Let’s not pretend otherwise. I-55 runs south almost all the way to New Orleans and north all the way to Lake Shore Drive. At mile maker 250, it is bisected by I-80, which runs from Teaneck, NJ, way out to San Francisco. It runs East-West just a little north of the Des Plaines River.

Above exists Chicago, the city and metro area with the largest population, large concert venues, tech corridors, “big city assholes,” a better selection of international food and cosmetics.

I live below, with flat land and solid people who mostly did not vote for Obama, “a couple hours south of the city” to my friends in California. I live in a cancer belt in a nice and affordable craftsman house. I live down here in central Illinois with the Spoon River for which this journal was named. Spoon River is truly lovely. Central Illinois is not nowhere.

The intersection of I-55 and I-80 is in Joliet, IL. Joliet itself is a fine town. It was once home to two famous prisons that you’ve probably heard referenced in many Chicago noirs. Going to Joliet used to have a very specific noir meaning. Now one of the prisons is closed.

A recent highway project along I-55 erected sound barriers along several miles so as to afford local homeowners some privacy and noise control. Recent efforts to build a new mall at the intersection of these two highways seems to have stalled although boarded up homes, originally slated for demolition, still dot the frontage road. Within two miles there is a hotel owned by the Elks Club. Billboards along the highway advertise casinos, laser medical procedure, car dealerships, and the Merrimac Caverns, which are located way down in Missouri.

What might make a landscape lyrically noir? I suppose I return to Elizabeth Willis’s definition of the lyric voice as a figure in which the landscape is phenomenalized. If we look at two prime examples of “noir poetry,” both Kenneth Fearing’s Dead Reckoning or Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make create specific political and aesthetic landscapes of downward mobility. Both use a pop culture pastiche to suggest the lost lonely urban figures, beautiful and doomed. Yet like much post-noir iconography, its translation into our current neo-liberal landscape can seem both naïve and melancholic; the attractions and terrors of mid-century America have played out, after all. Noir nostalgia continues to play on in the beautiful pictures of decaying mansions and public buildings or when we consider evidence that cities like Detroit or even parts of Chicago are dying. We feel it when we sense the industrial beams falling to earth or when we smell the rust from the Des Plaines and feel I-55, scorched at the guardrails, curling in a bit on us.

History mediates and re-mediates roads to somewhere—the future, success, freedom—as a kind of infrastructure of our desires. At the same time counter-landscapes—the past, regret, ambivalence, rejection—wink at us, still demanding the status of place or matter.

In contemporary noir studies, Patrick Blaine describes Chilean writer Ramón Díaz Eterovic’s hard-boiled Heredia series. The power of the Heredia series, Blaine argues, is based. . .“less on the resolution of crimes than on a collective effort to restore a lost past which has been forcefully and artificially extirpated. It also resists the present aesthetic paradigms (as strong as their pull might be), based on the psychology of the market, which imposes a constant, forced obsolescence on all aspects of life, flattening affect and relying on the empty repetition of patterns of communication.”

At mile marker 238 there is a dead exit at Braidwood/IL 129. From South I-55, drivers used to be able to exit via a left lane U turn through the central reservation to merge with southbound traffic. From the southbound left lane, travelers could exit and cross over the northbound lane via an overpass that has, over time, become unstable and dangerous. For about nine months signs for the exit remained, marking movement no longer possible. Barriers were erected and the pavement was broken up and removed and now significant prairie grass grows as if Illinois has simply consumed its own idea. To the casual onlooker, all that remains is a single light to mark the dead.

Braidwood is home to a nuclear facility that powers much of the Chicagoland metro area. I can never not see a whole story in my mind on dark rides back from the city, down under I-80, headed towards the south.

There are vague plans to re-design the entire infrastructure in Will County south of the Des Plaines River. Attention is currently focused on the Arsenal Road exit at mile marker 245 as it is home to both an ExxonMobil Refinery and the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, apparently the largest trucking hub in the nation. This exit is home to the now defunct Joliet Army Ammunitions Plant, which operated through the 1970s. It is current site of a military cemetery. Other portions of the former plant are listed as sites on the EPA Superfund list.

Current road construction often strands drivers on the Des Plaines River Bridge in the range between static and audibility; many popular Chicago radio stations—de facto public spaces—seem to phase out at this boundary. This is not a story about Illinois and yet here Illinois is.

Marc Augé describes the spaces I mean as “non-spaces.” They are recursive, evasive, and out of sync with the systems of meaning that traditionally define identity, space, and temporality. Yet non spaces are replete with words or “instructions for use” with which we are encouraged to enact with words as identity and landscape in the most mundane ways. The far left lane ends after Bluff Road; you no longer require three lanes for your automobility.

Yet the buried pasts, the deconstructed meanings of dead exits, the nowhere of identity, suggest that non-spaces might be productively imagined as noir spaces, that interchange between here and someplace better or worse. In these spaces, in this lyric sensibility expressed in film, novels, and landscape, we unravel the strange routes between desires and demands enforced by billboards and our melancholia for a lost and equally conflicted past.

Try 5 on the dial, try 10, 15
Just the ghost of an inch, did you know, divides Japan and
Peru?
20, 25
Is that what you want, static and a speech and the fragment of a
waltz, is that just right?

Kenneth Fearing
“Radio Blues”

In Natsuo Kirino’s 1997 noir novel Out, the female protagonists work at a bento factory in what is politely called the “Tokyo suburbs.” They actually work the Mushashi-Murayama district, and if you look on Google maps you will see that it is nowhere where anyone, including sex tourists, would ever go in Tokyo. It is as much of the world is, an interlinking set of highways and factories and houses and malls. The novel’s progression takes its protagonists through a series of locations that are out, intertubes encouraging meditation on the physical conditions of their increasing alienation as they progress from one sense of out to another.

Popular among the growing market for novels many would term “global noir” are those by Scandinavian authors Henning Mankell, Camilla Läckburg, Arnuldar Indriðason, and Stieg Larsson. Although there remains much focus on how these writers engage gender oppression, multiculturalism, and the long and complex memory of Nazi collaboration and resistance, often the novelists rely on settings—summer tourist villages, small ferry ports and (in Indriðason’s case, a county) both isolated from and central to global trade and tourism. These places are inter-zones too, vulnerable to the inter-reliance between EU capitalism and socialism, between white nationalist violence and the exploitation of global labor. In these places, on these emptying highways, between cosmopolitanisms, at these travel stops, all global noir subjects feel the increased pressure to become convenient and hospitable to investments possibilities.

At I-55 Bolingbrook exit 267, there once stood an abandoned mall known as Old Chicago. Modeled on early 20th century Chicago designs, the mall, which opened in 1975, featured small boutiques instead of larger mainstream stores. Inside the store, among the small batch product stood a bright yellow roller coaster, a log ride, rides and rides—a whole fair, a reminder of the Chicago World’s Fair and other lost public spaces of populist excitement. And yet it failed by 1980. Rumor at the time was that too many black kids came and scared the white kids and their parents off. I’m sure that the business of malls is simultaneously both more complex and more simple than that.

If you’ve seen the 1978 Brian De Palma film The Fury, you’ve seen Old Chicago. It seems like an idea that could never work. And it didn’t. But I am here to tell you it was there and it was fun. I have nostalgia for a nostalgic place that marketed nostalgia for something before fast capitalism, some other de facto public space where you went to see the attractions of your own age embedded in a nostalgia for past de facto places. Old Chicago is a repetition of a repetition of a place you could go and have a good time along the edges of the city, a haunted city, its attractions, where the beauty of kinder capitalisms that didn’t work are ground to earth, buried under a sea of cars, nowhere that used to be somewhere, at the exit you should take if you want to avoid the I-355 toll road to go to the IKEA.

So what’s to fear here about the noir of the I-80 split? What about these stories of the long journey from Chicago, itself at risk of becoming a tourist destination surrounded by people with dwindling access to public services? How is this different than down the road in central Illinois, suffering from the chemicals of agribusiness and occasional unapologetic regional xenophobia? And between is that I-55/I-80 interchange of sprawl and repetition and slight deaths. Where are we driving? Jodi Dean, in noir-like fashion, defends left melancholia in The Communist Horizon, as a reasonable affect in the face of an increasingly digital culture that has made bad compromises with capitalism, compromises that have wrought serious consequences to global workers. In an interview in CounterPunch, she identifies the dangers of a lyric enchantment with the kind of spaces I’m talking about:

Drive [Freudian] isn’t oriented toward something; it’s shaped from loss and just attaches to any old thing, easily moving from one object of intense attachment to another (I’m tempted to say that with respect to politics drive manifests itself as a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome; you know, how everyone is at one moment obsessed with binary oppositions, then fracking, then “isms,” then debt). It’s a repetitive circuit that results from failure, where people get off (get a little nugget of enjoyment) from failing. . . . This language is reflexive, inward-turning as well as self-loathing. I argue that communicative capitalism (and consequently contemporary democracy as well as contemporary media networks) exhibit the reflexive structure of drive. Examples: getting stuck in the intertubes, clicking around, looking but not finding, repeating the same gestures, having the same pointless arguments, getting invested in them even when (or especially when) they don’t matter.

How, then, do we keep our affects both dirty and true along the road? How do we feel the place of cultural failure as well as the infrastructure that links rust to byproduct? How do we see and embody the ambivalence of our compromised places? How do we re-claim our dead roads and those lost in silence behind our sound barriers?

A proposed bridge between the Danish town of Rødby and the German town of Puttgarden would potentially save the dying economy of the southern communities of Lolland Island in Denmark. Like many communities outside of Copenhagen, the communities of Lolland rely on tourism from Copenhagen and, potentially, from German industrial cities like Hamburg and Hanover, to enhance their minimal agricultural and industrial base. The bridge is predicted to be completed in 2018 after years of negotiation between German and Danish infrastructure agencies. Until then, motorists and those traveling on the EuroRail must use a ferry on which alcohol, snacks, as well as luxury items—perfumes and cosmetics, name brand jewelry, the tools of cosmopolitan living—are available for purchase during the roughly 40 minute journey across the Baltic Sea. Your cars and trains ride on the lower decks, skirting duty-free waters that smell of salt.

Bought at the drugstore down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
night, or day:
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock,
Borrowed or bought, to look well, to ennoble. To prevent
disease. To entertain To have.
Broken or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost.

Kenneth Fearing
“Green Light”

In Shuichi Yoshida’s 2011 noir novel Villain, a girl dies along the haunted Mitsuse Pass, Japan National Route 263 in the province of Saga among a set of characters who have never been to Tokyo or avoid it because of the high cost of train travel and accommodations. They use dating sites because there is no place to meet people in their world; clubs and karaoke are expensive and difficult for awkward people. The Mistuse Pass is used by drivers seeking to avoid a toll road as they move between work and leisure. It looks lovely in photos, but the characters talk about it as a highway between endless shopping centers, roadside love hotels, and residential construction, far from the cities that define our neoliberal industries and desires, even as we look from the car and see our waste.

As you head down I-55 towards central Illinois, right past where three lanes turn to two, your car will drop swiftly towards the Des Plaines River Bridge. On the left you will see shimmering and silver brightness from the ExxonMobil refinery plant at Arsenal Road. It will seem to you a magical city all its own as your radio turns to fuzz, you flatten out, your car speeds towards the dead Braidwood exit and then noses on towards someplace that is not here and is not central Illinois.

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Elizabeth Hatmaker is the author of Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010), which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times book award. Her poetry is featured in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights 2009), ACM, Bird Dog, Epoch, MiPOesias, Mandorla, Mississippi Review, Mirage/Periodical, and Projector Magazine. She teaches writing, cultural studies, film, and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.

Crumbling Binaries and Porous Overlaps: Two Poems in Issue 38.1

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Shailen Mishra, Blog Editor & Series Contributor

As I read the two poems “Picking Pole” and “The Machete” by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra that appeared on SRPR’s Issue 38.1, I was intrigued by the crisp diction, details, and thrifty narrative. I paused and tried to dig deep for meaning and purpose behind each word. But soon I became distracted. I was thinking of the historic conversation on the English language that has preceded this poem in the Indian literary movement. One does not have to be aware of this conversation to understand the meaning of the two poems; yet, it helps one to get a sense of Mehrotra’s aesthetics.

The historic conversation is about the “chutnification” or “biryanization” of the English language. When Salman Rushdie entered the world stage with Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, he had set in motion the chutnification process in the most eye-catching manner (though previous Indian authors have made similar attempts to some degree). For authors like Rushdie and the Indian characters in their novels, English has ceased to be a “colonizer’s tongue” that needed to be approached with caution and trepidation. Why, by that time English had become the everyday or even first language for many. And English was getting chutnified, getting influenced by local languages in varying degree. So the polyphony of Englishes that are manifested in Rushdie’s narrative is a bold affirmation that Indians do have a legitimate claim to the English language. And while Rushdie termed this chutnification, the Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali called it biryanization. The emphasis was on a complex whole without being simplistic about which ingredient played a more dominant role than others. Ali who hailed from the Muslim community of North India wished his readers to “hear the music of Urdu” in his English poetry (4 Twelve Modern Indian Poets). Even though English was the conveying medium here that did not put it on competing ground with Urdu.

Mehrotra admits of “chutnification” or “biryanization” in his own works and any writing in “Indian English” for that matter. But he is of the firm opinion that the intersections between languages are messy, and that any neat model of linguistic convergence/collaboration must be debunked as simplistic. When a fellow poet and critic (Rajagopal Parthasarathy) offered a layered model of linguistic interaction (i.e. Indian languages–the mother tongue–at the bottom, Hindi as the national language in the middle, and English at the top), and authors using one language (read English) as a vehicle to capture the linguistic essence of their mother tongues, Mehrotra scoffed at the idea. He writes: “A problem with this model is that it treats Indian poet as someone who chiefly transports linguistic and cultural material from the bottom to the surface…it tends to narrowly equate Indian poetry with Indianness” (5 Twelve Modern Indian Poets) What Mehrotra criticizes is the essentialism that views English as the “other”, hence incapable of capturing “Indian” experience because of its “un-Indianness.” Against such dichotomic separations Mehrotra rails, and his inclusive approach and hybrid sensibilities are not simply limited to linguistic spheres. In his book The Transfiguring Places: Poems, Mehrotra writes: “…As the bus gathered speed, / I saw it quivering in the heat-haze, / A place whose name I hadn’t known or asked, / Which I sometimes think was Shiraz, or a firth / In the North Sea from where the skalds set out” (7). Thus a moment in the obscure region of Uttar Pradesh (India) transforms and transcends spatially and temporally to ask an unsettling question: who is narrating here? An Indian, Persian or Scandinavian poet? Is the answer that straightforward?

Mehrotra’s belief seems to be that what we take to be rigid boundaries are in fact porous. And for an artist it is not enough to acknowledge and reveal this porousness, but to enlarge it further to an unsettling, questionable degree, where the things that were formerly oppositional, dichotomic, and separated are found “alongside”, their boundaries not just touching but overlapping each other. Mehrotra provides the brassiest example of this porousness in his translation of songs of Kabir, a fifteenth century Indian mystic whose popularity lies in advocating a casteless, inclusive, and benign side to Hinduism. Into Kabir’s simple and ironical expressions, Mehrotra inserts modern day slangs and anachronisms: “When death already / Has you by the balls” (78), “Smelling of aftershave / And deodorants” (72). What irreverence it may seem? But for Mehrotra it’s about breaching the time barrier between the ancient and modern expressions; thus, “elaborating” upon a point that Kabir is trying to make about the slipperiness of Hindu/Muslim, abstract/concrete dichotomies.

When binaries are disallowed, hierarchies are dismantled, and an awareness of “alongside” is introduced, we see things in juxtaposition, where dualities and multiplicities are preserved, without reducing one thing into the other or without separating one from the other neatly. But, how to express these dualities or multiplicities? Or to say in Mehrotra’s sense, how to “elaborate” upon them? His two poems, “Picking Pole” and “The Machete”, present the inside/outside in a seamless poise. In “Picking Pole”, the time has stilled. The Rangoon creeper is about to sneak in to the house and birds have taken to the roof quite comfortably. While their watcher is outside the house, at the “border” of mango trees, with a pole in his hand to pick mangoes, to sever them from their host bodies. Like an intruder he stands (like the plant or birds), and the act of breaching is mutual here: from inside to outside, and outside to inside. Change the implement in hand from picking pole to machete and another intrusion occurs in the next poem: “Dragging it [the young tree] across the yard, / I almost didn’t see the nest…It looked warm, / Habitable, like the house I entered / To put away the machete…” The irony lies in the narrator’s realization, his juxtaposition of the “inside” of the house with that of the nest. Who is the outsider here? The bird who nested in a tree in the narrator’s property, or the narrator whose dual act of violence (upon the tree and the nest) calls into question his entitlement?

In an anthology titled The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Mehrotra writes in the introduction to the poet Arun Kolatkar’s works: “Details are the cornerstones of our visual world” (54). Moreover, these details need to expose the familiar in a novel way. Mehrotra’s two poems are replete with exquisite details. And seeing them in isolation is missing the point; rather, in their juxtaposition they amplify the porosity of what we take for granted as stable, concrete, and unquestionable.

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Shailen Mishra is a book hopper, story whore, poetry pariah, novelist, three times failed guitar learner, and an aspiring didgeridoo player. He holds a Ph.D. from Illinois State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, he edits SRPR’s blog and manages its website.

Critical Alchemy: On Seth Abramson’s “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now”

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Michael Theune, SRPR Review Essay Editor

**Seth Abramson’s entire essay is now Available for free access**

 

The new issue of Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1 (Summer, 2013)) is now out, and it is chock-full of treasures, including new poems by the likes of Rusty Morrison, Lyn Lifshin, Michael Burkard, Virginia Bell, Danielle Pafunda, Kevin Craft, Susan Briante, Sharon Dolin, Kit Robinson, and featured Illinois poet Allison Joseph.  Along with this new work comes Seth Abramson’s review-essay, “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.” [read the entire essay]

The thinking in Abramson’s piece comes at the right time.  Abramson recently came to the defense of contemporary American poetry by publishing “Why Is Contemporary American Poetry So Good?,” an extensive response to an article in the Washington Post called “Why is modern poetry so bad?,” itself a meditation on Mark Edmundson’s essay “Poetry Slam (Or, The decline of American verse).”  In his Spoon River review-essay, Abramson lays out in great detail why exactly American poetry currently is in a Golden Age.  Anyone following this debate certainly will want to read “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.”

Indeed, I believe Abramson’s review-essay is necessary reading for all those engaged with contemporary American poetry.  I so greatly admire “The Golden Age” for a number of reasons.  However, here I want to put Abramson’s piece in explicit conversation with Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition”–a conversation Abramson invites by mention of Hall’s essay.  For me, it is by listening in on this conversation that I come to more fully appreciate many of Abramson’s insights.  I also find myself better able to formulate some questions I have about this being a Golden Age of American poetry.

In “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall critiques a great deal of recent American poetry for its lack of ambition, for churning out McPoem after McPoem.  One of the reasons for such debased production is the poetry MFA.  Section 10 of Hall’s essay begins with a cry to “Abolish the M.F.A.!”  And this undoubtedly should be the case if MFAs really are as Hall describes them, as “a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair.”  While recognizing, in section 11, that “[m]ost poets need the conversation of other poets,” Hall still condemns the MFA, calling it an “institutionalized café” one that hires and pays mentors who then “make assignments” that then “reduce poetry to a parlor game.”

Abramson argues, however, that this understanding of the MFA is wrong.  According to Abramson, the café has long been institutionalized.  Additionally, understood phenomenologically, the MFA is a much more complex and multifaceted offering/participatory event.  According to Abramson, the workshop itself provides an “intensely juxtapositive space,” a space which also opens further out: the MFA “is also the space in which MFA-seekers use social media, non- or quasi-academic program events, and impromptu social gatherings to share their other artistic obsessions–be they musical, dramatic, studio-art, couture, or literarily ‘off-genre.’”  Abramson says that the avant-garde consistently has worked to move beyond objectification and commodification to more closely approach “the praxis of life.”  Similarly, he tries to move discussion and assessment of the poetry MFA away from the (mere) objectification and commodification (and demagoguery) one might find in an analysis such as Hall’s to an understanding and appraisal of the MFA as praxis, as it is lived, experienced, and even co-created.  In short, it is wrongheaded to think of the MFA (merely, or even centrally), as Hall does, as an assignment-giving institution.

And just as the writing program needs to be understood and investigated as praxis, so does the writer herself–and Abramson, I believe, does a masterful job of describing “the ‘Golden Age poetics’ produced by the children and step-children of the Program Era” (on page 110 in Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1)–this is vital reading).  Again, Abramson notes that “Golden Age poetics cannot be treated primarily as a locus for canonization practices”–rather, now, we must “witness poetry as practice, as culture, as civic engagement, as way-of-life.”

Abramson’s review-essay is a masterful critical work, one that demands that its readers experience and interact with the full praxis of today’s writers and writing.  However, even though Abramson’s piece generally eschews (and sometimes critiques) assessment–defined one time by Abramson as “making self-aggrandizing stabs at permanent assignations of value”–one part of the practice of contemporary poetry is evaluation.  Judgments of value are being made all the time.  So: if evaluation (a practice at the core of an essay like Donald Hall’s) is the blinkered remnant of old ways of conceiving poetry, how might the protocols of poetic evaluation be done away with, or productively revised?  Should they be?  Can they be?  Can we even refer to the contemporary era of America as a “Golden Age” without some degree of evaluation being incorporated into that description?  “Golden,” at least, often designates the best.  (Why not simply refer to our current era as a “Very Productive Age”?)  And, at least to my thinking, it simply is the case that there’s some amazing poetry being produced nowadays, including, for example, Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga, Jorie Graham’s Place, D.A. Powell’s Cocktails, Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight, Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains.  It is because of such works (and many others) that I feel we just may be in a “Golden Age of American poetry.”  But without such excellent work I would not be as apt to make this claim.  Is this an outmoded way to think?

I look forward to many, many people reading Seth Abramson’s truly significant review-essay, and continuing the conversation–perhaps here, or else in other venues–it has so powerfully engaged.

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Michael Theune is Review Essay Editor for Spoon River Poetry Review. Theune also is the editor of Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers, 2007), and the host of the Structure and Surprise blog. Along with Kim Addonizio, he co-edits Voltage Poetry, an online anthology of poems with great turns in them, and discussion about those poems. Theune’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. He is an associate professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.