Logofax was not a man of words.
and caps its evocation of Stevens a few lines later by mentioning "A jar in wilderness upon a hill." Unfortunately Mr. Kaitz, whatever his intent, has failed to echo Steven's typically smooth movement, so different from the ragged rhythms above. Nor could these strings of monosyllables occur in his pentameter: "His cause was meager and his flag was thin."
The two poems from Instructor Stephen Sandy's forthcoming book are both minor, almost "light" poems. "Soaking" is a bathtub meditation on the body:
I hear beathing
a wind tunnel, loud,
...a jet engine
taking its time.
"The Grasshopper," syllabic verse, gives us the poet contemplating a dazed grasshopper on the highway. The general simplicity of its diction make soccasional eclecticisms quite exciting;
his legs on cement,
rough as a strip of
Brobdingnagian sandpaper.
Photographer Mark Rosenberg has contributed some interesting shots of poor folk, some sleeping on benches, some staring past his camera with weary eyes. Unfortunately, the reproduction process here has been, if anything, less successful than newsprint photo-offset.
The only undergraduate prose in the issue is by Thomas Fallaw. His long story "We are These Witnesses" may demand greater interest in jazz and Protestant liturgy than all readers can provide. Fallaw gives us exhaustive and often confusing detail: "I go under his arm over my head;" "rising and making two medium steps, he pushed shut the door;" "touching the strings with his right forefinger." The protagonist, anonymous for 800 words, suddenly and confusingly becomes "Rip Sanson." There is also some pretty unidiomatic dialogue ("'What say to a good idea, Toby?' Rip kidded him") and this is a story so dry and ascetic that the reader must seek his pleasure in the rendering of realistic detail.
The greatest pleasure in Lion Rampant lies in Carter Wilson's "Instance of Atavism in the Case of Adrienne." Through a tight 2000 words, we experience a cold March morning in the mind of a girl grad student. Though superficial action roots her in downtown Syracuse, her memory and imagination yield lucid vignettes of infinite variety; at one point we cut to Rimini; at another, a recollection of her lover's anti-psychiatric bias prompts a flashback, and these changes in locale from an exhilarating narrative texture.
Wilson achieves a tour de force when he makes Adrienne rehearse what she'll tell her psychiatrist, then "jump-cuts" forward to the appointment, where we hear her conclude the recital aloud. Very effective in that passage is the use of telegraphic, abbreviated, highly substantive language to convey Adrienne's thought:
...they lie down. Man. Jim. Adrienne. In a row. Hardly dropped off to sleep when she feels Jim's hand on her breast.
Of course not Jim's hand...
Wilson's story, and incidentally the rest of Lion Rampant, should not be missed. That rare beast, the house literary magazine, has come yawning with some grace from its cave.