Got a rejection letter last week. All authors, and especially poets, are used to them. What was striking for me was that I hadn’t sent off any hard-copy submissions in the last three years. Repeat, THREE years.
As I’ve explained, a while ago I shifted over to online-only submissions as a consequence of much higher acceptances that way and of simplifying the difficulties of trying to maintain duplicate sets of files. (One for online, and a duplicate for hardcopy.)
So it took the editors of this particular journal more than three years to decide? What’s their problem? No wonder they’re feeling swamped!
This also touches on the issue of exclusivity in sending out work for publication. In the old days, meaning when I started, you didn’t dare send your work simultaneously to different periodicals. It was more a kind of serial monogamy. Or serious business.
Although the hard-and-fast requirement started melting, I stayed with exclusivity more as a matter of keeping track of what was out where – but I did keep an unmentioned caveat: after six months, if I’d heard nothing, it was fair game to send out again. In more than a thousand acceptances, I don’t recall more than a half-dozen cases where this became a problem.
Suppose I could look up the five poems to see if they’ve been published elsewhere in the interim, but frankly it’s not worth it.
Some of the best art museums in the country are found at New England’s universities and colleges. In other parts of the country, the larger ones would be the region’s jewel. But here they often sit in the shadow of some pretty powerful competition. Some, like Harvard, charge admission, but others are blessedly free.
A crown jewel at Harvard.
Here’s a sampling from our travels and travel plans:
Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, Connecticut: Reopened after extensive renovations, this is quite simply the best university art museum in America; possibly, the world. And admission is free.
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts: This newly renovated jewel delivers a fine array of Old Masters, although I’ll emphasize its Turner, Blake, and Whistler for variety. Admission ($15) includes the Sackler and Busch-Reisinger boutique galleries, now under one roof for the first time, thanks to a contemporary, glass-pyramid roofed addition by Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
Smith College Art Museum, Northampton, Massachusetts: I wasn’t braced for the magnitude of this collection when I zipped out for an hour lunch break during committee meetings just down the street. I’d run into examples from its collection in art books (it has five Childe Hassam paintings on display), but its range of Impressionists and outstanding regional and American landscapes is worth the whirlwind, even before getting to the old European masterpieces. Am I off-base in thinking this display nearly rivals Harvard’s?
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island: As the collection for the Rhode Island School of Design, New England’s premier art school, the museum is smaller than one might expect, with a respectable sampling of earlier eras, often masterworks by lesser known artists.
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: An unanticipated but celebrated gem in the western part of the state. We’re told it’s worth the trip.
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire: Wonderfully diverse, with uncommon awareness of the Americas and Africa, it mounts an impressive array of special shows and is part of the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine: Small, with some emphasis on the regional past and the founders’ roots in its permanent collection. Renovations unveiled in 2007 more than doubled the exhibition space, moving the entrance to a glass cube to one side of the building and opening the basement level, where visitors now begin their tour. The special exhibits make for some exciting use of the facility — a recent trip for me included a focus on Marcel Duchamp and his influence, downstairs, as well as prints by Dutch master Hendrick Goltzius, upstairs.
The Zimmerman House in Manchester, New Hampshire, is one of the few Frank Lloyd Wright structures in New England. I remember chancing upon it on an evening stroll, looking at the lights in the windows, and thinking, “It’s either by Wright or one of his students.”Now owned by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, it’s open for tours.Just a block away, though, is an example of his more mass-produced Usonian project.This one’s still a private residence.
A fitting fanfare as a welcome in Manchester. It moves in the wind.
Growing up in the American Midwest, I had the impression that New England was, well, uniformly cultured. Moving here at the end of the roundabout route that emerged, however, I was surprised to discover how unevenly that Culture was distributed. It was essentially centered in Boston. Or more specifically, Huntington Avenue in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, in the Theater District, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Symphony Hall, plus Harvard Square in Cambridge across the Charles River.
For perspective, New England has only one major-league professional orchestra, the Boston Symphony, compared to eight in the Midwest – Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. (Well, maybe seven these days, after the disastrous events in the Twin Cities.)
The underlying reason, I’ve sensed, arises in the historic ownership of New England’s economic base – the textiles mills, especially, along the rivers and streams – by the fabled Boston Brahmins. In other words, while New England’s products sold around the globe, the profits flowed into Proper Bostonians’ mansions, and these, in turn, endowed the great cultural institutions.
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The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The region’s art museums, on the other hand, provide another slant on this legacy. I’ll argue that the largest, wealthiest galleries are not always the most exciting; when it comes to art collections, quality is often based on the gifts of a few insightful, daring donors. Since we frequently visit museums when we travel – and art museums, especially – here’s an overview of what we’ve found. Admittedly, we’ve missed some.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston: The Grand Dame comes with a stiff admission fee and all the air of a leading museum, and her strengths are impressive, indeed, especially in Impressionist painting and Asian artifacts. But there are also some glaring gaps, especially in Old Masters. The new American Wing has at least brought one shortage up to snuff.
Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, Boston: A block away from the MFA, Isabella’s quirky “playhouse” on the Fenway is one you either love or hate. With its galleries circling an impressive indoor garden, her idiosyncratic assemblage is displayed exactly as her will demanded; undisputed masterworks are left hanging between many third-rate paintings, detracting from the experience. Still, the egotism, pro and con, remains staggering.
Worcester Art Museum: Considering the current economic condition of New England’s second-largest city, the collection comes as a delightful, comprehensive surprise. From its powerful pre-Columbian gallery on the top floor through the Americans and the Old Masters below, visitors will find themselves richly rewarded. One small room featuring New England’s Childe Hassam and Edmund Tarbell is both confident and moving, an example of the wise presentation throughout.
The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford: The glory here is the large collection of American Illuminist paintings (a term I prefer to the Hudson River School), but the routing through the rest of the otherwise impressive collection becomes jolting. We are not led smoothly around, but rather thrown from dark Colonial rooms into brilliant Modernist department-store presentation and then back into dark caverns again. Senselessly disturbing.
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem: Originating in the “cabinets of curiosities” ship captains were expect to bring back for display in their hometowns, this institution’s transformation into a vital force is a model of building upon a clearly defined mission. Recognizing Salem’s role as a principal port in historic China sea trade, the collection focuses on Asian art (both the works manufactured for export and works intended for native use) and on the region’s seafaring riches. I love the bowsprits and captain’s logs as much as the Korean and Japanese galleries. Many of the special exhibits have been incredible. Surprisingly, it claims to be among the 20 largest art museums in the country, based on its holdings.
Currier Art Museum, Manchester, New Hampshire: Here’s a moderate-size museum that has a wonderful sampling of art history, some renowned pieces from the 20th century, and justifiable pride in the Granite State’s own artists and traditions. Well worth revisiting.
Portland Museum of Art, Maine: Its Impressionist collection is a major coup. New York wept when the key donations were announced. Need we say more?
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine: Quite the surprise in a small working-harbor town on Penobscot Bay. Lively works of our own time, with a focus on Maine … and not just the Wyeths. Alex Katz, for instance, has helped the collection make some impressive purchases. We were delighted by a recent major show of Shaker artifacts, mounted with assistance from the only surviving Shaker colony, the one at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester.
Ogunquit Art Museum, Maine: This small, seasonal, seaside museum made its way into our hearts with a special exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings that turned out to be made on and around the site.
Greetings again from this old mill town along the Merrimack River.
There is still a special feel to an octavo-size, typeset journal – a unity of design and purpose carried throughout – even in this era of desktop design and photocopy wizardry. A major challenge, whether it’s in shaping a literary journal like yours, a daily newspaper, or even an old-fashioned country dance, is simply: what can we do to make our own locale distinctive?
An example: a few years ago, the New England contradance scene was becoming generic: you’d drive for miles to a village town hall only to find the same faces and same pieces you had faraway the week before. Fortunately, that seems to be changing as different callers, musicians, and promoters are striving to put their own distinctive signature – and a local stamp – on each venue. So there’s your challenge!
I’m struck by the fact that even familiar voices from our round of journals seem to sound different in varied locales. If you’ve ever been around paintings, as I was when married to an artist, and seen a piece go from her studio to our living room to an art gallery to a major museum, you would be amazed how different it appears it each setting. Publishing is the same.
Now for the magazines rack. The one in the meeting library, where we display our current periodicals.
First is the monthly Friends Journal: Quaker Thought and Life Today, published in Philadelphia from a Friends General Conference perspective. In its elegant format, it’s a delight to hold. Admittedly, the articles often run the range of crunchy granola-head interests and sometimes a too “politically correct” editing and can leave one wondering just where Friends stand as a body, but there’s almost always something provocative, from one side or the other. Look, too, to see how it progresses under editor Martin Kelley.
Second is Quaker Life: A Ministry of Friends United Ministry published six times a year in Richmond, Indiana. This colorful, glossy magazine underwent a lively transformation in its few years under youthful editor Katie Terrell, who attempted to give each issue a distinctive focus – integrity, transforming lives, what does a new kind of Quaker look like, humor, authority, discernment, even controversy itself. Considering its audience of primarily Midwestern and Southern pastoral Friends, I’m often impressed by the number of writers from unprogrammed meetings, many of them in New England – as well as those from Third World nations. If you want to get a quick overview of how our spiritual roots influence us today, turn to historian Tom Hamm’s one-page question-and-answer column in each issue.
Also of note are the quarterlies. Quaker History can be anything but quaint when it’s examining the difficulties of integrating Sidwell Friends School in Washington, as well as its not-so-orderly roots, or the psychedelic influences of ergot-infected oats on the early Quaker movement. (The real Quaker oats?)
And Quaker Religious Thought, often focusing on a single topic such as Speaking Truth to Power or the strand of Holiness movement in Friends tradition, typically counterpoises the primary article with considered reactions. Sometimes a thorny theological issue can be too arcane for general discussion, but that’s offset by the others that prove unexpectedly stimulating.
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Oh, yes – the extra magazine and newsletters piling up in your home? Consider dropping them off at the public library magazine swap pile, a local coffee house, or the Laundromat. You never know who might learn of us that way.
Some of the most helpful or inspiring writing I’ve encountered has come in short volumes. In poetry these are typically called chapbooks, while in prose they’re often pamphlets or booklets.
Among them, the rack of Pendle Hill pamphlets in our meeting library presents an astonishing array of Quaker wisdom. Published by subscription (currently five volumes a year) at the retreat center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, the series now numbers more than 400 titles. Admittedly, there are some duds among the jewels, but somewhere in the collection is likely to be a reasoned answer to your nagging question about Quaker faith and practice.
Some, like Margery Mears Larrabee’s Spirit-Led Eldering and Sondra L. Cronk’s Gospel Order: A Quaker Understanding of Faithful Church Community, focus on vital aspects of Friends’ community. Others, like William Taber’s The Prophetic Stream and Four Doors to Meeting for Worship, serve as guides for the experience of our hour of open worship. John Punsheon’s Alternative Christianity finds in Quaker practice itself a different expression of Christian faith than is found elsewhere (that is, he looks at the results, while I’ve been looking at foundations). Peter Bien’s The Mystery of Quaker Light parallels some of what I’ve been uncovering in the revolutionary aspects of this central metaphor of our faith. Brian Drayton’s Getting Rooted: Living in the Cross, a Path to Joy and Liberation, spring from personal practice.
The series has also included a wide range of social action issues, like Pat Schenck’s Answering the Call to Heal the World or labor lawyer Richard B. Gregg’s A Discipline for Non-Violence, as well as volumes on art and theater, prison work, nurturing children, and Quakers’ experiences in yoga and Zen.
There’s even a Quaker Pamphlets Online project to provide free downloads of classic early issues.
For now, I’d like to take a more extended look at four volumes that came in around the same time:
Benjamin Lloyd’s Turnaround: Growing a Twenty-First Century Religious Society of Friends is an exciting and challenging argument of extending Quaker faith to younger generations. Funky interracial ads on the sides of city buses, anyone? With his theater background, Lloyd’s right in contending we need to reach out, vigorously, and shake off unnecessary baggage. He’s right in sensing we need celebration and true community. And he’s refreshingly candid about our weaknesses.
John Lampen’s Answering Violence: Encounters With Perpetrators is a hard-nosed blueprint of the author’s work as a peacemaker who moved into a land of engrained conflict. The incidents he relates are difficult, dangerous, courageous, sometimes leading to tragedy, sometimes bridging opponents trapped against their own heart’s desires. Yet he also marks important turning points in the time-consuming drive to pacify Northern Ireland.
Framed by an enigmatic old English folksong, Richard Kelley’s Three Ravens and Two Widows ponders the modern Society of Friends through the quite different legacies of his mother, with her urbane Philadelphia outlook, and his paternal grandmother, with a Holiness-based pastoral Quakerism in Ohio. Somehow, they had to find ways to live together after the deaths of their husbands. By implication, so do we, as a diverse community of faith.
Brian Drayton’s James Nayler Speaking considers the brief, prolific outpouring of early Quakerism’s most important minister. More articulate, mystical, and systematic than George Fox, Nayler was at the forefront of bringing the Quaker message from the north into London and all the upheaval that followed. No one else has written more powerfully of the Light or embedded its metaphor into Quaker thought so thoroughly.
There are people who feel nostalgia for the ‘50s or early ‘60s. Not me – except for the high culture, which was still deemed important — I was glad to see them go. Those decades, despite all of the lofty aspirations in some circles, really were confining and laced with hypocrisy and denial.
What I lament losing most in the decade of civil rights and hippie movements that followed, though, is a side that gave a sense of hope in its spiritual, political, and social justice yearnings. But not the narcissistic or hedonistic excesses that too often accompanied the movements.
To be honest, that stretch of my history had its own pluses and minuses … and a lot of lonely heartbreak. Seeing it honestly, then, means accepting both sides and their lessons. As well as continuing the mission.
One of the secrets to living a richer life comes in learning to evaluate experiences beyond a simple like or dislike – especially on first encounter. So many of the delights of living are found in acquired tastes. Returning to a challenge for new insights. The critical examination and perspective.
So it’s been with the opera, so much classical music, visual art, beer and wine, even literature I’ve come to love. To say nothing of Holy Scripture. Or the places I’ve lived. To be honest, there are often stretches in a long hike I might admit I don’t like, especially if the insects are biting and the incline’s steep, no matter how much I’m enlivened by the entire outing.
Somewhere along the line, I’ve learned to distrust what comes easily. In living with a piece of art, you may realize fatal flaws behind the initial flash, or to your continuing delight you may find the revelations expanding.
Part of the transition comes in learning to see value in ambiguity and paradox, or to find riches in the shadings of gray beyond simple black and white. It’s not an argument for self-torture or meaninglessness, but rather a willingness to suspend disbelief long enough to consider many other dimensions.
Yes, I like pizza. But, as an illustration, I never would have discovered the joys of manicotti if I’d insisted on the familiar pie that one night.
At the moment, I’m cracking open the Bartok string quartets by means of repeated listening and finding such beauty beneath their outward gruffness. Any examples you care to add the list?
Way back in my senior year of high school, I remember a moment when our English teacher invoked the dictum that all fiction requires conflict – and my immediate contrarian reaction blurted out, “No, it doesn’t!” My objections were gut-level rather than coolly reasoned and certainly wouldn’t have held up to the novels that were capturing my attention at the time – Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Yet seeded somewhere in my aesthetic, the low-key, nonviolent approach to a story lingers. Few of us, after all, are parties to a murder, which is a key component of so much fiction. And Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to take a nice character and inflict the worst possible calamities on the poor soul still offends my spiritual proclivities, never mind so many passages in the Bible. Yes, I’ll now admit that true character can be shaped and revealed in intense confrontations and struggles. That is, conflict.
Still, my own entries to date have focused on day-to-day realities drawn from my own observations – attempts to comprehend contemporary social interactions, even if they appear to be history by the time the words finally appear in public.
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In retrospect, my admiration of so much of Richard Brautigan’s output probably arises in the laid-back meandering of his hippie-era characters and their encounters. Think of Trout Fishing in America for starters.
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More recently, Nicholson Baker has emerged as my favorite embodiment of the nonviolent sensibility. You could argue that nothing happens in the first 50 pages of The Incredible Story of Nory, and yet the tension is already mounting. To construct a successful novel on a father’s bottle-feeding session of an infant (Room Temperature) or a short escalator ride (The Mezzanine) is artistically courageous. Book of Matches, meanwhile, takes off on the simple premise of sitting by a fire in the predawn hours of deep winter – it could almost be blogging.
His latest volume, Traveling Sprinkler, pretty much slipped under the radar, yet impresses me as a nearly perfect example of the no-major-conflict novel. His main character, the minor-league poet and anthologist Paul Chowder, faces nothing more challenging than the question of whether his ex-girlfriend will return to him as he muddles through middle age. Yet along the way, Baker weaves in ruminations about the American health system and public education, the advantages of rhyming in song lyrics in contrast to poems, aspects of recording technology, basics of bassoon performance, collectors’ perspectives on lawn sprinklers and related outdoors gear, experiences of Quaker worship, and some travel pointers for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Billed as a sequel to The Anthologist, it stands well on its own as a rich and deeply personal tapestry. What could be better? Even without a slew of dead bodies?
Jnana's Red Barn 