The Lion Rampant

That rare beast, the house literary magazine, has come yawning with some grace from its cave. Two stories, eight poems, and seven photographs form a slim Winthrop House organ, modes in pretensions as well as bulk.

Most of the undergraduate poetry is derivative, but very candidly so.

John Foster's oddly rimed fourteen-liner, "Mockett's Point Revisited," pays homage to Wordsworth's Immortality Ode: rocks, lakes, and mountains "shall mock/ Our childhood vision--our point can be no more." Of the poem's four stanzas, three are built around colons; they stand, in effect, as equations. If the articulation of the poem's parts seems too elaborative, not sequential enough, these colons may be the root of the evil.

Wayne Jones's "Chimney Shadows" is a still life, a piece of neo-imagism. For me it's too adjectival to register ("Red shapes and white lines on the sun bleached blue"), and not timed in a way that lends its abstractions much substance. "Back through the flatness of the day/Upon memory's shadow of itself": such melody pleases the ear but leaves the mind alone.

Poetry Editor D.S. Ament has two poems here, one an untitled experiment in anti-syntax ("deep as death's yet pools are/her eyes") which has some interest but some impossible tin-ear cacaphony ("and then more than ever i know of"). His other effort, "The Deed," is doggeral. The rhythm of its short rimed phrases suggests Bob Dylan's fine song "Like a Rolling Stone," but comparison insults Dylan. Ament's phrases are all empty rime-tags:

because of the deed, if you ever need

a shiny new thing

a Princess that rings

a bell-boy to bring

just call my number...

David Rockwood's "Simon of Rhodesia" is rambling, exuberant, and fun. If there's more to it than meets the eye, I don't think we should look for it: if mention of a "blue guitar" and a Prufrock spoof (substituting "Henry Miller-O" for "Michelangelo") are supposed to plunge us into thoughts of Stevens and Eliot, the poem does not justify its allusions. But taken lightly it's pleasant, and occasionally striking, as when a guitarist "plucked a flatted fifth as one might pluck the eyeball of a kitten."

An untitled poem by Merrill Kaitz makes quite explicit use of Stevens, though it's not clear whether as a model or as an object of satire. The poem begins:

The poet Logofax would form a club,

A group, a convocation, or a knot,

Association, plenum, orchestra, or crew.

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.