Editor's Notes
The Native American plays a prominent part in this issue. The cover features a statue of Tedescung, a chief of the Lenni Lenape, the Native Americans who originally inhabited the Delaware Valley to the Hudson Valley. The cover photograph was taken by Peter Campbell, the graphic designer of the SVJ. Finding this statue in the Wissahicken area of Fairmount Park was itself a triumphant trek as Mike Cohen points out in his article with the intriguing title, “The Paradox of Public Art.” Cohen highlights some of the sculptors in Philadelphia’s history, including Alexander Milne Calder, who built the immense statue of William Penn that overlooks Philadelphia from City Hall. In fact, the statue of Penn is the largest statue on top of a public building in the world. Fran Baird provides a brief history of the Lenni Lenape and the words they left with the land. Joe “Hoagie” Hauser traces, as he points out in the title of his article, “From Sidekick to Star: The Portrayal of Native Americans in American Film.”
Hayden Saunier, who is also an actor, is the featured poet for this issue. Readers will remember her poems. Her style is exceptional and her expression follows Pound’s dictum to “make it new,” which she certainly does. Here are opening lines of two poems — “I’m sitting between a dead girl and a prostitute” in the poem “Dayplayers in the Makeup Trailer” and “You’ll never get your ass back in those pants” in “Rx.” Another poem talks about going through a body search at an airport, and another about pulling staples from the floor. She takes the reader to a place worth going to, which I believe can be said about a number of other poems in the SVJ. There are 32 poems in this issue, and the following, (besides the featured poet) have more than one poem; Diane Shipley DeCillis, Bridget Gage-Dixon, George Drew, John Grey, Diane Lockward, and Bernadette McBride.
Ray Greenblatt in his article on the Vladimir Nabokov’s only reminiscence, Speak, Memory, serves as a guide into Nabokov’s remarkable sensibility and prodigious imagination. Read this article and you will delight in Nabokov’s range of observation. Greenblatt even provides page references for quotes. Kate DeBevois joins the SVJ staff and provides the article “Children’s Poetry: Encouraging Public Expression.” She will join me as one of the essay editors of the SVJ. Anna Evans, the online architect of the SVJ, offers the article “Beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex: The Love Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. What an interesting title for an article, and it does give insight into Millay. As Evans points out, Millay communicated her personal struggles and the conflict between physical passion and romantic love in some of the most beautiful sonnets written in the last century.
Three short stories begin the issue by three new voices in the SVJ. Jeffrey Kingman’s “Marriage” is about a fifteen-year-old boy who is infatuated with a married woman. When the woman and her husband are on vacation, the boy is paid to feed the cats, and it all leads to a revealing outcome. Jim Sprouse’s “Medicine Ball” is the story of an aging man who realizes how an incident changed his life. “The Greatest of These Is Love” by Kirsten Marcum, concerns two people at the margins of life who drift together and stick there for a while.
As Fran Baird points out in his article, “Where We Go to Drink” (which means Manayunk) about the Lenni Lenape, that “Their presence lived on in the names they gave the land” with words such as Nockomixon, Wissanonming, Wissahicken, Tuplehocken, Neshaminy. Certainly the Native Americans have left a lasting influence in the vocabulary of places like Lakawanna, Monongahela, Mississippi, Susquehanna and so many other sonorous place names that make America.