It’s that time again. My university’s semester has ended, and while this does not, alas, mean that I’ve logged any hammock time, nor that all my interns for August are placed, nor yet that a certain grisly assessment report is approved by all relevant parties…it does mean opening the composter. In our semi-rural one-acre lair,…
I began this week by writing about compost…and that, if you’re just breathing a sigh of relief, is still to come, probably next week. Compost, however, has been preempted by word of a minor scuffle back in the northeast, of the type all too familiar in academic circles. It’s given me cause to reopen Ovid’s…
Everyone has them—the books that we loved that got only cursory critical attention, if any. The friends who managed to get the books finally, finally into print, only to hear a few grains of sand shifting in the long silence as they drive to the liquor store to buy themselves the only champagne that will…
It feels as though every posting starts somewhere else, and this is no exception. I’ve been reading one of Angela’s “Why I Reread…” postings, in the midst of state and federal budget cuts which, far from rereading much of anything, seem designed to keep the world from reading most texts even once. As in most…
As a change from the didacticism and mostly-benign aesthetic dictatorship of my recent posts, and before I review anything (though that’s coming), perhaps it’s time I ask a question instead of attempting to answer any. Within recent memory I had cause—or thought I had, anyway—to post a link on my Facebook account to a Mary…
That’s the title of a poem by Marge Piercy. It begins, Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. It ends, The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after…
I began my public blogging career (brief though it may be) last week with “Start with A”, suggesting that teachers of poetry—who are frequently poets—might want to begin at a more basic level than many of us do. That included beginning with the literal level of a poem, because we’ve all seen bewildered students, or…
Our third guest blogger, Catherine Carter, is a poet whose poem “Arson in Ladytown” appears in our Spring 2011 edited by Colm Toibin. Catherine will post on Fridays through August. Hello, Ploughshares readers—it’s my pleasure and privilege to be blogging here for the first time, and as you might imagine, I was hoping to come…
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