That rare beast, the house literary magazine, has come yawning with some grace from its cave. Two stories, eight poems, and seven photographs form a slim Winthrop House organ, modes in pretensions as well as bulk.

Most of the undergraduate poetry is derivative, but very candidly so.

John Foster's oddly rimed fourteen-liner, "Mockett's Point Revisited," pays homage to Wordsworth's Immortality Ode: rocks, lakes, and mountains "shall mock/ Our childhood vision--our point can be no more." Of the poem's four stanzas, three are built around colons; they stand, in effect, as equations. If the articulation of the poem's parts seems too elaborative, not sequential enough, these colons may be the root of the evil.

Wayne Jones's "Chimney Shadows" is a still life, a piece of neo-imagism. For me it's too adjectival to register ("Red shapes and white lines on the sun bleached blue"), and not timed in a way that lends its abstractions much substance. "Back through the flatness of the day/Upon memory's shadow of itself": such melody pleases the ear but leaves the mind alone.

Poetry Editor D.S. Ament has two poems here, one an untitled experiment in anti-syntax ("deep as death's yet pools are/her eyes") which has some interest but some impossible tin-ear cacaphony ("and then more than ever i know of"). His other effort, "The Deed," is doggeral. The rhythm of its short rimed phrases suggests Bob Dylan's fine song "Like a Rolling Stone," but comparison insults Dylan. Ament's phrases are all empty rime-tags:

because of the deed, if you ever need

a shiny new thing

a Princess that rings

a bell-boy to bring

just call my number...

David Rockwood's "Simon of Rhodesia" is rambling, exuberant, and fun. If there's more to it than meets the eye, I don't think we should look for it: if mention of a "blue guitar" and a Prufrock spoof (substituting "Henry Miller-O" for "Michelangelo") are supposed to plunge us into thoughts of Stevens and Eliot, the poem does not justify its allusions. But taken lightly it's pleasant, and occasionally striking, as when a guitarist "plucked a flatted fifth as one might pluck the eyeball of a kitten."

An untitled poem by Merrill Kaitz makes quite explicit use of Stevens, though it's not clear whether as a model or as an object of satire. The poem begins:

The poet Logofax would form a club,

A group, a convocation, or a knot,

Association, plenum, orchestra, or crew.