Wave Composition

Table of Contents:
INTERVIEWS• Robert Coover • CREATIVE • John Ashbery – Not Beyond All Conjecture • Rae Armantrout – Exit Row • Lisa Steinman – Two Poems • Stephanie Yorke – Two Poems • Tim Smith-Laing – Cimetière Marin • ESSAYS • Getting Wires Crossed / Science Fiction in Conversation • Killjoy • Art in the Age of Economic Recession

Michael Heitkemper-Yates
“Narrative, it seems to me, is by nature immersive, both for the writer and for the reader. You may stay on the surface of a text in the sciences, or in scholarship generally, but story is meant to draw you inside. From the oral taletellers to the present time, the artist’s task and reader’s joy is this absorption in story. It’s why we laugh aloud while reading, why we cry at the movies. And it’s what we fear to lose in the more restless digital world.”

John Ashbery
“Something no American has yet achieved”

Rae Armantrout
You will buy your life
as a series
of “experiences”

Lisa Steinman
Can you write your way out of this
impasse?

Stephanie Yorke
Don’t be smart. Only uphill one way –
But I went barefoot in both directions.

Tim Smith-Laing
Time’s temple, summed in a sigh’s loneliness
I accustom myself to the cliff’s crest
surrounded by the sight of burning sea

Alexandra Manglis
“While science fiction provides us with its awkward, often graceless, technologically advanced futures, we arrive, haltingly, at our past, surprised that we have actually, as a race, lived through science fiction.”

John Culbert
“The joke never fails to amuse. That said, certain conditions must be met.”