Category: Letter

Tony, Cathy, Emma and Lucy Grundhauser on the ferry from Vancouver to Nanaimo, BC in July.

Cyd Gillett, Daniel Sadoff, Abe Sadoff (15), Lydia Sadoff (9). We just completed an Alaska family vacation and, of course, we took The Rake along.

We landed on Ruth, a glacier named after the daughter of a man, Frederick Cook, who falsely claimed to have both been the first person to scale Denali (Mt. McKinley) and to reach the north pole. Another Alaskan controversy, the official name of the highest mountain peak in North America, persists – it was named Denali “the tall (or great) one” for centuries by the natives until some Ohio newswriter in the late 1800’s decided to curry favor with a local politician who was running for president at the time and started calling it Mt McKinley in his reports. William F. McKinley never once set foot in Alaska. Alaskans current day attempts to get the mountain’s name of Denali federally recognized are perennially thwarted by congressional representatives from Ohio.

Annie, a student at Wheaton College, in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

Bob Sater, of Apple Valley, writes: This picture was taken in a solitary confinement cell on Ile Royale (Devil’s Island) French Guiana. It was in the upper 80% humidity with the temperature in the low 90’s.

Centro de Justicia

Janella and Adam write: On a recent trip to Playa del Carmen for our friends wedding, we brought along our February issue of your magazine to read on the beach. I think our friends got a big laugh out of the fact that we wanted them to take our picture reading The Rake so we could send it to you. We don’t know if this is exotic enough for you but you’ll get a logh at the picture at least! Keep up the great work, we love your magazine.

Safari in Kruger National Park, South Africa. “That’s a giraffe in the background!”

Loren, Sarah, and Jane Benson Turner at Mayan ruins in Tikal, Guatemala.

I agree that it is ironique to unveil an establishment eighteenth-century period room at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on Bastille Day; a day on which the establishment was overthrown [Broken Clock, July]. But that was 216 years ago. Sure, the MIA can use that day to celebrate all things French, but most of the details in your notice were cheap shots by a disgruntled anti-establishment mind. Beauty should be praised wherever it appears. Your notice was stupide.
George Soule
Minneapolis

Perverse it is to deny the post of the poet laureate [Good Intentions, July], which began in England with the bard. Queen Victoria appointed William Wordsworth as poet laureate after he had retired to his garden. He refused. She then sent out the prime minister to persuade him, and during one of her galas, Wordsworth busted the seams of the borrowed attire he was ordered to wear. Lord Alfred Tennyson is known to have equally held the hearts of both the aristocracy and rising middle class. Soldiers requested copies of “Charge of the Light Brigade” in droves; Tennyson is buried with the British flag over his chest. His bust is within the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Our national poets have been savvy in decimating their ideologies to the public. Robert Pinsky made a cameo on The Simpsons and CNN interviewed Billy Collins, which stunned me to see a poet on national TV.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh accounts for the social exclusion of women to the post. Aurora’s husband Romney is at first disgusted at her will to be a poet. He catches her unaware playing in a garden as she crowns herself with ivy. She pretends she’s a caryatid elevating the role of the poet. The figuration of Aurora crowning herself on her birthday is a literary gesture to Madame de Stäell’s Corinne, or Italy as Corrine crowns herself at the capital. E.B. Browning was one of Tennyson’s competitors for the post. Aurora Leigh had to design her own laurel and post. Is this the only option for Minnesotan poets?

Toni Holland
Minneapolis