Opus

A curious lethargy has settled on the most prestigious of Harvard's literary magazines. The Advocate, clearly awaiting some celestial go-ahead, has yet to publish an issue of undergraduate writing this year. The Scorpion, which last year out-sold all its competitors in Cambridge, has also been struck dumb; and in spite of the Boston Review's cry that it is "on the move," its second issue has not appeared. Only The Island and the Winthrop House magazine. The Lion Rampant, have produced two issues, excellent ones at that.

Now, from that most insular of insularities, Quincy House, comes Opus. Edited by Alexis Viereck and Newton Kershaw, it is a tidy collection of prose and poetry by six previously unpublished students. Any local magazine would do well to look as attractive, and most would be improved by including some of its best pieces.

Unfortunately though, Opus is a mixed bag. Too often the editors have succumbed to the pedestrian urge to assert their vitality. They have avoided the embarrassment of a here-we-are introduction by having no introduction at all. But they celebrate themselves in the approved modern manner: by celebrating copulation.

Opus begins with Frank Bidart's "After Catullus," a poem with an explicitly sexual ending. This has reportedly enraged the Quincy House Committee, and it is rumored that funds for a second issue are dependent upon more polite selections. It is of course easy in such cases to avoid examining the poem behind the shock; here, it is a disservice to the author. In this and his other poems, Bidart exercises a kind of Jewish irony in his diction which recalls Alan Dugan, last year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. This is certainly a refreshing change from the surfeit of pseudo-Lowell which burdens other magazines. Bidart's conversations are pleasantly conversational, and his imagery works primarily to advance the narrative. With deceptive simplicity, he sketches the complex relationship between the poet and his subject in these lines:

Above her in jeans A boy maybe younger worked away. He was good! But he didn't see me staring with blind eyes In the sun.

Bidart's work consistently outshines that of his fellow contributors Jeff Fine and William Mullen.

The only prose in the issue is Newton Kershaw's "A Matter of Love," and I found it hard to decide what kind of game he's playing here. The plot is saccharine even by the standards of the traditional Harvard sex story, so Stephen and Maria, "two very unordinary students," share a special relationship which features endless avowals of their love (the word is used a record thrity-three times) and a never-to-be-equalled scene in which they sit, naked, in Stephen's living room, listening to Beethoven. Not surprisingly, they retire to his bedroom as "Beethoven erupted in his finale." It is said that the story is a parody, but the author's intention is nowhere revealed. If it is meant to be a parody, it fails because of its length; at best, it's a five-line joke. Kershaw's story stands as one of the more misguided pieces of published fiction in recent memory.

His co-editor, Alexis Viereck, is also forthright; witness this line of his short poems: "That I might fornicate with you." The line is actually more comic than shocking; his poetry of cruelty is really the poetry of humor in disguise. Viereck's other poems are more traditionally successful, and his imagery is more subtly sensual, although he consistently approaches cliche.

But Viereck is outdone by Todd Boli, whose poem, "To My Wife About Pears," is the best piece in the issue. The purchase of three dozen pears is not the most likely source of good poetry, but it succeeds here because Boli effectively brings us into the world of both characters. He captures his wife's thoughts neatly in these four lines:

What three dozen pears remind you of I can only imagine. The budget, no doubt, as we wonder how we bought so many and who will eat them all.

In spite of the cloying ryhme at the end of each stanza, the poem still delights after several readings.

With any sort of luck Opus wil not trudge into obscurity. Its faults are the faults that attend any lack of self-assurance, and if this issue gets the welcome it deserves, there is no reason to think such misdirection will persist. It remains for the established magazines to get jealous.