A poem from Gibbons Ruark's Staying Blue was reprinted in Best American Poetry of 2009, and two more were anthologized in No Place Like Here, ed. by Billie Travalini. Here is a link to a recent interview with Gibbons on PBS:http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/Staying_Blue.mp3/view. A fine article summarizing Gibbons' career is in The Hollins Critic (Oct. 2011).

Three new books are now available from Lost Hills. The first is a poetry collection by Charmaine Donovan, a former President of the League of Minnesota Poets. The second is a poetry collection by Dennis Herschbach, whose memoir Brown Sugar and Jack Pine Sand recently won a Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. A third book is a collection by various hands in response to photographs by the editor, Stephani Schaefer. It is called Fo&Woodsmoke: Behind the Image. Meena Alexander, a contributor to our collection in honor of James Wright, has a new poem in The New Yorker (Sept. 5, 11). Congratulations, Meena! And congratulations to Judith Pacht, also a contributor to the Wright collection. Judith has won the 2011 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Her collection is entitled Summer Hunger. Judith and Robert Walton, Fog&Woodsmoke, also have science fiction novellas accepted for e-publication on the Amazon Kindle as part of The Galaxy Project.

Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve is a fascinating account of the rediscovery, in the 15th Century, of De rerum natura, written in the first century BCE by the Roman poet Lucretius, a writer actively repressed during the first 1300 years of Christianity. On the Natural Order argued for a materialistic description of existence that was seen as a threat to the early Church but which now is acknowledged as a remarkable foreshadowing of many modern scientific truisms.

Lucretius posits a particle theory of matter, explains why any soild object must contain empty space, discusses the mind-body relationship in a manner that anticipates brain chemisty. He even offers a delightful explanation of why the old theory of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) is nonsense. Moreover, he argues for the civilizing value of pleasure, hardly an acceptable point of view in a culture of guilt and self-flagellation.

In 200 pages of verse, Lucretius explained that atoms and "void" play mutually dependent roles in the composition of existence. He points out that variants in the densities of things are functions of how closely atoms are packed. All of this in a verse that is very readable in modern English translation. Reading the poem and Greenblatt together is a rare treat.

Greenblatt, after outlining the major themes of the poem, describes the lives of medieval "book hunters" who searched out and translated ancient manuscripts in the context of Christianity's opposition to classical learning, not to mention its own inclination toward persecution and corruption. A superb writer, Greenblatt creates a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 15th Century, when the manuscript was found. This is the same Greenblatt whose recent book on Shakespeare, Will in the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The latter part of The Swerve focuses on the impact of Lucretius on the modern world, starting with the turning of Renaissance literature and art toward the celebration of nature and of the human body. Greenblatt concludes by pointing out that Thomas Jefferson owned multiuple copies of Lucretius in various languages. Perhaps the Roman poet's vindication of pleasure is even reflected in our Declaration of Independence, which raises the persuit of happiness to an inalienable right.

You'll find pleasure and happiness in reading about this remarkable poet and the adventures of his manuscript.

Robert Wright's newest book, The Evolution of God, traces the development of religious thought from hunter-gatherer days to al Quaida days. Like Will in the World, Wright's book was also a finalist for the Pulitzer. Reading the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the order in which things were written (not the order imposed by religious institutions), Wright argues that a progression emerges in which early, warlike gods (mirroring human, warlike tribes) slowly gave way to gods who got along with each other and finally to God. The key assumption is that gods and God are defined by "events on the ground."

When the Hebrew Bible first has Yahweh say that people should love their neighbors, the neighbors Yahweh had in mind were one's own villagers. He was not requiring love for Egyptians, Assyrians, etc. Only after navigation and trade began to shrink the world and cause people to see the value of co-operation--of playing nonzero-sum games with distant others--did God start to talk about extending moral considerations beyond tribal or regional boundaries. Finally, when Paul set out to modify Judaism with the teachings of Jesus and to take the new message on a global tour (well, so to speak) did God advocate something like universal love.

When I was taught English and American literature in the 1960's, my professors revered T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, not mentioning their antisemitism. Students in that decade read Leon Uris, who never met an Arab he didn't hate, and in our own day V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel Prize winner, has shared some of Uris's animosity.

Under the regime of "formalism" in literary studies, too much explicit moral content in a novel, too much "didacticism," was thought a fault of a soft mind. Literature earned its credibility via formal intricacy rather than "external" social value. The values that informed literature were often presented as a constellation of linguistic manipulations that had little to do with life outside the academy. But the Seventies and Eighties saw an effort to bring the literary imagination into cooperation with the moral imagination. Gender, ethnic, and muticultural studies linked literary values to the broad spectrum of lived experiences and encouraged us to use our imaginations to extend empathy beyond the boundaries of our own personal experiences.

I think that the moral imagination can be taught with the aid of the literary imagination. A good place to start would be the creative writing class, where the first thing to go should be the old saw about "writing what you know," a bit of advice that encourages a narrowing of the young writer's horizons. Moreover, narcissism is not in short supply among the young and need not be encouraged. The creative writing class I imagine would tie writing to the discovery of other points of view, and "point of view" would be about something more than pronoun choice.

A new principle for this course might be "write what you didn't know the last time you wrote," and another might be "self-expression is not the point." After all, two-year olds express themselves. Donald Trump expresses himself. An example of writing in this vein is Robert Olen Butler's story collection Had a Good Time. For many months Butler collected postcards from junk stores, yard sales, etc., cards that had been addressed and mailed in past decades. Eventually Butler selected a dozen or so and imagined his way into the lives of the correspondents, lives touched by important moments of American history. In the book, each story is introduced with a photo of the card that inspired it. Butler is not gazing in the mirror here; there's no "self-expression" in the simple sense the word often implies. In this book, the writer's imagination moves outward to sympathetic contact with others.

Sadly, many American politicians today seek to deny equal rights to American Muslims and to Gay Americans, and they have lost track of our history of caring for the poor and disabled. These politicians make careers via fictions that deny moral consideration to others. Their fictions reveal a sort of bebased literary imagination, but not a moral imagination. Bringing the two imaginations together might be a project worth addressing. --Bruce Henricksen

Submit your own short essay or review to brucehenricksen@gmail.com.