Volume 2 Number 1 • Spring 2010
What Wittgenstein's College Friend Frank Says
Art Must be Useful to the People
Interspecies
What Wittgenstein's College Friend Frank Says
What we can't say, we can't say—and we can't
whistle it either.
Art Must be Useful to the People
Summers, school-age Tolstoy held the densest book he could find at a ninety-degree angle to his chest—six minutes each day—getting his forearms fit for sorrow.
And then there was that day in Camel's Back Park—she remembers forgetting details—the two of them snug on the bench: She'd let her brother's boyfriend sip her left breast. Her twins writhed in the dirt. An airplane raised its nosy eyebrow. The brother's boyfriend slurped. Her brother's boyfriend grew ecstatic and horrified. Spat it to the ants. Sputtered to the snails.
The Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, Diane Raptosh has taught literature and creative writing at the College of Idaho for 18 years. She has published three collections of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica Editions, 1992), Labor Songs (Guernica, 1999), and Parents from a Different Alphabet: Prose Poems (Guernica, 2008). She has published widely in such journals as The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Women's Studies Quarterly. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies in the U.S. and Canada. Through the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she has won three fellowships in creative writing.