Last weekend I had the privilege to travel up to Bennington College, where I spoke on a Life of Letters panel with friend (and fellow Ploughshares contributor/guest blogger) Megan Mayhew Bergman. Megan and I are both alums of Bennington’s low-residency MFA program; I graduated in 2009, Megan in 2010. We sat down in the Symposium…
When the poet Alan Dugan was alive, there used to be a reading every summer in Wellfleet at the local library where members of his workshop would read their poems to, mostly, locals. It was a generous thing of Alan to do, and also something rare – seeing poets sharing their work in obstensibly the…
The work of getting a manuscript published, that rejection and frustration, begins to feel at times like self abuse. Writing is a lonely adventure, but most of us feel driven to it; quitting is inconceivable. Submitting work, though, is more like managing a business, and most poets I know are not business managers, so it’s…
Anatomy Courses Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick Lazy Fascist Press, January 2012 132 pages $10.95 Anatomy Courses by Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick is twisted in the best possible sense: linguistically. Butler and Kilpatrick’s work of fiction consists of 62 short sections, mostly one or two pages long, that interlock and move toward a visceral,…
When I entered Poets House on May 31st for Martín Espada’s Home Page talk on Puerto Rican poetry, I carried with me a long-standing memory from Ernesto Quinoñez’s Bodega Dreams. Early in the novel from 2000, the narrator recalls his junior high school in Spanish Harlem: The whole time I was at Julia de Burgos,…
Several weeks ago I wrote a post called Why I’m Not On Twitter (Yet). I spoke about my compulsive/addictive tendencies as they relate to the Internet, and expressed my concern that joining Twitter might not be the best thing for me, my family, or my work. I received an overwhelming number of responses, from friends,…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the sixth post on Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota by…
As soon as you find your voice, you’ve lost it Jon Anderson * Shifting the point of view is…
Today is June 19. For those that don’t know, this is a holiday celebrated in some parts of America as Juneteenth. Also known as Freedom Day, it marks the day that the Union army arrived in Texas in 1865 and actually enforced the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it was declared. Juneteeth, famously,…
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