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Old Poems

Old poems in U-Store-Its. Old poems in leather-tied journals, on loose-leaf foolscap ripply with weathermarks. Old poems on public websites. Old poems in stacks by the printer, in hidden folders on crashed hard drives. I go back to my old poems with a dry suspicion, a parental eye, poems that have lingered five, ten years…

Close-up image of rain hitting the street

Rain

Peter Kline, our second guest blogger, will post on Wednesdays through August.  Peter’s poems “Universal Movers” and “Revisionary” appear in our Spring 2011 issue edited by Colm Toibin. “For the rain it raineth every day.”-Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Weeks of rain here in San Francisco.  Pissing spritzes and forty-eight-hour hosings.  Orgiastic immersions.  Delicate, misty sheaves that…

Image of a girl reading a book which covers her face.

What I Reread and Why

This week we welcome three new Get Behind the Plough bloggers to Ploughshares. The first is Angela Pneuman, whose fiction story “Occupational Hazard” appears in our Spring 2011 issue edited by Colm Toibin.  Angela will post on Mondays through August. When I started writing, one thing I never considered was how many other writers I…

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Voice: Self

I want to preface this whole thing by saying that I’m not writing this because of the Rankine/Hoagland debate that sprung up in/around/after AWP. I’m happy that conversation is in existence, and I’m glad people are debating notions of voice, ownership, and race, but that’s not necessarily where this started. I should also mention that I was thinking about this stuff before I…

Image of desks in a classroom.

Rules, Shmules

Because several of my preceding posts have been very earnest, and also, possibly, a little depressing, I thought that it might be nice to end my tenure as a Ploughshares blogger on an upbeat note.  With this in mind, I recently asked a group of anonymous literary authorities to comment on some of the writing…