Foreword

Foreword In the Peter Weir film Dead Poets' Society Robin WilUams plays prep-school teacher John Keating, whose theatrical talents and fresh attitude inspire his students to think for themselves. During their first class discussion of poetry, Keating tears out the introduction to the "J. Evans Prichard" textbook. Later, he stands on his desk and encourages each of his students to do Ukewise to "get a different perspective." Keating's popularity inspires a small group from his class to look through an old yearbook, where they discover their teacher's affiUation with the "Dead Poets' Society" when he was a student, and they proceed to recreate the society, gathering to read poetry in a cave not far from the school. WhUe physically not distant, the cave is an exotic place for these teenagers, where they are carried out of their world into the eternal time of poetry. "Exotic" comes from a Greek word meaning "outside," and I take an "exotic place" to be anyplace with imaginative or incandescent potential, outside one's usual experience of settings. It may be on the other side of the world or it may be on the other side of town, but in either case it depends upon the eye of the beholder. It depends not at all on stereotyped characteristics Uke white sand beaches or palm trees. Thoreau's "I have traveUed a good deal in Concord" is the wry profession of someone who knows that moving over great physical distance is only one of the ways to travel. The contributors to this issue describe intimate experiences of settings, some of which indeed are distant from their ordinary Uves. In her essay "Go Slowly and You Arrive," traveler Carol de St. Victor is a single woman touring India, and as such she receives the fuU treatment in the streets by people driven by the fight for survival to vivid performances of conning and self revelation. De St. Victor's experience of India becomes a journey into herself, testing her essential attitudes and her powers of acceptance. Another of our distance travelers is WiUiam DeCosta. In 1849, this young typesetter of Plymouth, Massachusetts, feU into the grip of gold fever. Like thousands of Easterners, DeCosta chose the fifteenthousand -mile aU-water route, around the Horn, booking passage on the three-masted ship Duxbury. Here presented for the first time, DeCosta's diary shows how one young man dealt with the rigors and discoveries of the seven-month voyage. DeCosta's diary provides intriguing snapshots of the rebelUousness, disagreements, and goofy entertainments of these ninety-six American argonauts in the mid-nineteenth century. Talvikki Ansel, this issue's McAfee Discovery poet, goes to BrazU, into the rain forest. Her poems are gentle and as grand as the rain forest they describe. Poet Gary Fincke journeys from a "steelslaughtered town" in Pennsylvania, where the painted eyeUds of statues have been seen to close and reopen, to the China of Emperor Huang Ti, four thousand years before Columbus. Along the way, he explores the tabloid landscapes of spacemen and miraculous conceptions, and how the new metaphors of medical science have turned our everyday world into a place fiUed simultaneously with extravagant potential and no-nonsense ironies. Joe Ditta travels from the harsh emptiness of his present South Dakota landscape into the burgeoning immigrant New York of his past as he retraces his chUdhood in order to come to understandings about Ufe, death, and pain. In her interview, contemporary noveUst Jamaica Kincaid describes one of the primordial American experiences: Kincaid moved from Antigua to New York, where she began as a maid cleaning houses and rather quickly found herself doing something that she would not have predicted—working for the New Yorker, where she soon was writing "TaUc of the Town" columns. Henry Green was an EngUsh comic novelist who died in 1974, after a long life of writing as an "amateur," in addition to working in his famUy's Midlands industrial business. The titles of his best known books are gerunds—Living (1929), Party Going (1945), Loving (1945), and Concluding (1948). They mostly eschew conventionally structured plots in favor of showing the ongoing business of life, the confusion...