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In a dark lecture hall, students raise their hands and light filters in from above.

Book People

Apparently, E.L. Doctorow once taught a course that only had one book on the syllabus. The class read the one book and decided from there what the next book should be. If it was Jane Eyre, somebody might then suggest The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel and written by another writer at a…

image shows a series of red, rusting gates side by side

Gatekeepers (Part Two): why my pop-music philistinism makes me fear for the poetic canon

Gatekeeper, seasons wait for your nod. / Gatekeeper, you held your breath, /made the summer go on and on.—Feist Here’s a confession, Ploughshares readers: I’m a musical dinosaur. I have an unabashed love for Green Day and Counting Crows, and I’ve listened to Wu Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers almost weekly for eight years. If pressed,…

Three images of The Pomegranate Papers side-by-side. A pomegranate cut in half with seeds spilling onto and staining a book page.

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents The Pomegranate Papers

As the recent VIDA graphs all too clearly indicate, there’s a wide disparity between the number of men and the number of women published in well-known literary journals. One explanation for the lack of women’s voices in literature may be that so many of us tend to our careers in the small gaps between making…

black and white headshot portrait of Gordon Lish, who looks directly at the camera

Gatekeepers (Part One), in which I play my flute in a meadow and lament The Death of the Editor

Editors aren’t what they used to be. I admit that I don’t have much authority to say so: I’m young(ish), my editorial “career” spans a whopping four years, and I didn’t grow up with a quill-pen in the days before simultaneous submissions, hand-delivering my poems in the snow, up-hill both ways. Still, it seems obvious…

Sheet music sits atop a music stand in a dark room.

On Improvisation: a Farewell (For Now) to Blogging

When asked about the experience of improvising Two Thousand Year Old Man with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner famously said, “I always tried for something that would force him to go into a panic—because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see.” Panic (or, to use less panic-inducing terms: fear, uncertainty, garden-variety doubt)…