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ECOTONE: Re-imagining Place A Literary Review Volume 2. Number 1 Fall/Winter 2006
It‘s hard not to praise Ecotone. But the very word sounds so mundane. Perhaps “praise” is a word to stay away from altogether. Neither can I say that I “laud” it, or “glorify” it or “express approval.” I concede that the red thesaurus at my desk is not altogether sufficient. How about pleasingly contemporary? Or disturbingly trend breaking? More and more representative of the best in art, writing, and editing to inspire readers of contemporary literary magazines? But Ecotone is not just any literary magazine for the “now” crowd clustering around the water coolers in the hallways of MFA Programs in Creative Writing. Or for alums or faculty wanting to be stretched. Like other things of value, Ecotone is next to impossible to generalize about. So as I tell my students, it is necessary to rely on minute particulars. Starting with David Gessner’s essay-introduction “Home and Away,” we notice that Ecotone likes baseball or baseball terminology and lore, at least beer and hotdogs. Western writer Wallace Stegner observes that Westerners are divided into Boomers or Stickers. Which am I, you might ask yourself? Can a person be ambi-placed? How about mis-placed? Ecotone, as all good reading does, prompts self-reflection on this and many other aspects of place-ness. We are where we have “placed” ourselves in the body and in the mind, and where we go for renewal, reassurance, and continuous surprise. Selections in Ecotone, for example look at the prose piece with gaps “The Space Between.” Lia Purpura, since her first book of poems “Between the Veil,” documents in “The Space Between,” a “place” of being where the narrator is chilled by random killings and lulled simultaneously by the beneficence of falling leaves. An interview with Reg Saner, first winner of the Walt Whitman Award in Poetry, and author of “The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World”—a writer whose work and comments about his work seem to form a centerpiece in this issue—flips the mind back and forth with darts and wrenches of language, the language of the commonplace and the esoteric side by side:
“The great-hearted, snow-loaded fir, the hugely stupid boulders I love, the dear wind-haggard spruce, Wind-flustered ravens.
All of us, one sky-lit and empty blue.”
For writers-at-large and readers too, Saner’s poems and prose show how language can be teased into doing all it can and more. A non-fiction piece of outstanding merit, “The Edge Effect” by Sarah Gorham, Editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books, for this reader serves as lynchpin elucidating prose that becomes poem, lyric poems that become essays, short short stories that become prose poems. Gorham’s essay is a course in itself. Should a writer or artist leave a map behind for his children when the time comes for him to add to the compost of the world, asks Brian Doyle in the short essay “Fishering”? Questions of intrinsic depth do not give up their answers easily. Or? Or what? Leave them to make maps of things seen for themselves? And what of that which cannot be seen, for “there is much where we think there is nothing”? There is no doubt that Ecotone proposes questions. That, after all, is what art in the twenty-first century is about—and should be.
Agnes McDonald is a Wilmington poet and teacher of writing. |
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Carolina Civic Voice Winter 2006-07 Vol. 6, No 4 |