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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)…

image of a tall stone statue next to a small path in a park at autumn--the surrounding trees are bright orange, covered in autumn foliage

Joanne Randall: Remembrance and a Poem

Joanne Randall, a longtime friend of Ploughshares, passed away this February at 81 in Kansas City. Along with her husband, Emerson professor Jim Randall, Joanne was a full partner in Pym Randall Press, and helped create a community that includes many of Ploughshares‘ early contributors and guest editors. As Ploughshares founder DeWitt Henry writes, “For…

Wonderful Investigations

Wonderful Investigations Dan Beachy-Quick Milkweed Editions, April 2012 212 pages $20 Reading essays by poets is just plain fun. Take Dan Beachy-Quick. Author of five collections of poetry and now a second essay collection, Wonderful Investigations, he writes sentences like, “We must build a wall to find out that we are a circumference always expanding,…

Momentum

I’ve heard of a mythical thing that some writers get to experience: momentum. Like a heavy stone, a writing career starts out motionless and seemingly without hope of ever moving, but then it starts to roll, and, sometimes, builds speed. Momentum can happen to “good writers,” or so I’ve been told. Up until recently, I…