The Green Room, Winter 1984

We’re About to Launch a Costly and Crazy Arms Race in Space.” So proclaimed a headline in the Sunday “Outlook” section of the Washington Post last fall. Yet, as Clayton R. Koppes clearly shows, the militarization of America’s space program did not begin with the Reagan administration, even though the process has accelerated since Superhawk Casper Weinberger arrived at the Pentagon. Reagan, Weinberger & Co. are, however, merely following a trail that opened with the coming of the New Frontier in 1961 and, in Mr. Koppes’ words, with “John F. Kennedy’s impetuous decision to send a man to the moon.” How far the military exploitation will go—and how many billions it will cost—are questions for politicians to ponder. Nonetheless, just as the bomb at Hiroshima opened a Pandora’s box that mankind has failed to close, so the possibilities for a real “Star Wars” will loom ever larger as the arms race in space continues. A specialist in 20th-century American history, particularly scientific and technological history, Mr. Koppes spent four years (1974—78) as a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of more than 30 articles and papers on scientific, technological, and environmental topics. Now an associate professor of history at Oberlin College, Mr. Koppes is also the author of JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a book published by Yale in 1982, and a recipient of the Dexter Prize given by the Society of the History of Technology for the best work in that field to appear over a three-year period. Mr. Koppes is currently completing a book on the oil policies of the U.S. and Britain vis-à-vis Latin America.

While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s place in American poetry is today somewhere between that of Joyce Kilmer and Edgar Guest, he was one of the most popular poets of his time, his verse, as John Seelye observes, “providing the text, his life the example of what poetry and the poet were in America during a time when both had a popular reach.” Mr. Seelye is no stranger to that time, being a specialist in 19th-century American literature. He is also a specialist on the rivers of America and is completing a three-volume work on that subject, one volume of which has already been published. Mr. Seelye is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Virginia A. K. Moran, a native of the state whose name she bears, is making her debut as a short story writer with the publication in VQR of “Down by the River.” Ms. Moran has spent her life in the Old Dominion and is the recipient of B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Virginia, with her M.A. specialty being fiction writing.

A previous VQR poet, Greg Kuzma is the author of two recent books of poetry, Everyday Life published by Spoon River Press and A Horse of a Different Color put out by Illuminati Press.

John Unterecker is a member of the faculty at the University of Hawaii. His VQR poem is from his third collection, recently completed. He is also the author of a Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of William Butler Yeats and Voyager, a biography of Hart Crane.

Susan Ludvingson has had her second book of poetry accepted for publication by Louisiana. She is currently in Europe as a Guggenheim Fellow.

Mark Rubin teaches English at Forman School in Connecticut, a high school for students with dyslexia. His poems have appeared in Antaeus, The Nation, and elsewhere, and his manuscript, Avenues on the Elm, is presently being submitted to publishers.

Barry Spacks is the author of Spacks Street: New and Selected Poems, a book published last year by Johns Hopkins.

Mary Oliver was poet-in-residence at Case Western Reserve University during the spring of 1983. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, American Primitive, also came out in 1983 as an Atlantic-Little, Brown publication.

Carolyne Wright’s second collection of poems, Premonitions of an Uneasy Ghost, was published by Hardin-Simmons as a part of that institution’s Associated Writing Program’s Award Series. Her poems have appeared in such publications as the Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, and Ms. magazine. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at William Jewell College in Missouri.

A frequent VQR contributor, Colette Inez teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York.

David Weiss has had poems in recent issues of The Georgia Review, Poetry, and Antioch Review and recently completed a manuscript of poems.

Sandford Lyne spent last summer participating in a series of residential Summer Writers’ Workshops for high school students.

Martha Webb is a native of Hawaii and has worked extensively in that state’s Poets-in-the-Schools program.

A senior career civil servant, Spence W. Perry codrafted the regulations which governed the 1971 wage-price freeze. He subsequently served as secretary to the Pay Board of Phase II of the wage-price program. He was later director of allocation and price regulation at the Federal Energy Administration. He is now involved in nuclear power plant licensing litigation before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Mr. Perry holds a B.A. degree from Harvard University and a J.D. degree from Duke University. He notes that his views about economic controls are “personal rather than official.”

Greg Johnson holds a Ph.D. in English from Emory University, where he has been teaching a course in fiction writing. His work has appeared widely in American and Canadian magazines, most recently in Windsor Review, Kansas Quarterly, Ontario Review, and Southwest Review.

A native of the Philippines and an authority on Third World literature, Richard R. Guzman is a personal acquaintance of N. V.M. Gonzalez, in whose home he has visited many times. Now an assistant professor at North Central College in Naperville, III., Mr. Guzman is the author of Bande Mataram: Nationhood, Character, and Style in Third World Literature.

A native of Huntington, Long Island Deborah Seabrooke graduated with a B.A. in English from Cornell in 1972 and also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was a student of Fred Chappell. One of her earlier stories, published in the Greensboro Review, took first prize in a North Carolina Arts Council contest. She is married, has “two beautiful children,” and writes “when I get the time.”

William Collins Watterson, now an associate professor of English at Bowdoin College, received his Ph.D. degree from Brown University. His field of special expertise is pastoral literature of the Renaissance. He is also the author of a book of poems, For the Dark, “which is currently seeking a publisher.” A champion of undergraduates, Mr. Watterson sees himself “fighting a one-man battle against a horrible new trend, that of the professorial bureaucrat who commutes to classes and makes a sharp distinction between his “professional” persona and his humanity.”

Howard P. Chudacoff is a member of the faculty at Brown University, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of numerous books and articles on American urban, and social history, including The Evolution of American Urban Society.

A poet, literary critic, and teacher, J. D. O’Hara has also long been interested in psychiatry and particularly in the work of Jung. Mr. O’Hara is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

A frequent VQR reviewer, Raymond Nelson is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of a biography of the American critic, Van Wyck Brooks.

Herbert J. Levine is a member of the English faculty at Franklin and Marshall College. His first book, Yeats’ Daimonic Renewal, was recently published by UMI Research Press. He is now working on a book about strategies of secularization in 19th-century poetry.

Woodford McClellan, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of Svetozar Markovic and the Origins of Balkan Socialism and Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First International and the Paris Commune. A specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Russian and European history, Mr. McClellan recently completed a history of the Soviet Union, 1917—1982. He has lived both in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

William E. Cain is an associate professor in the English Department at Wellesley College. He is general editor of the Garland Press bibliographical series on modern critics and critical schools and last year finished a manuscript on contemporary literary theory.