Editing my second issue of Ploughshares, in my seventy-third year, I look back on a life’s worth of editing. It began in high school, continued at Harvard, then at Oxford. Late in my Oxford time, I took up editing poetry for the new Paris Review, and lasted nine years. I edited or helped to edit…
Asking Carrying a bucket full Of a broken window or Watching people and their mirrors on TV; the woods tamped down By snow and the very high iron of trees; Air passes from purple to blue into Black pitched lower than trees; Glass for this Half-week….
What’s it all about? Don’t ask and then you’ll know.
“. . . most desires end up in stinking ponds . . .” —Auden The water, if you can call it that, is black as tar, and the lily pads are seared at the edges, curling up as if trying not to touch it more than they have to. The lilies themselves have gone to…
Last week my head was too small. This week, it is too big. My face in the mirror is a picture of dismay. If I try to correct the disproportion with baggy clothes, I will look not only moonheaded but squat, Charlie Brown-esque. When the head is too small, I fare no better: tight clothes…
On freezing winter nights, the boys had two chores before going to sleep. They had to tie the blankets down to the bed frames so that they would not toss their covers off in their dreams and get frostbite on their hands and feet. And they had to empty their chamber pot so that what…
He wasn’t her first lover, or her best lover, or even her lover at first. He was too gangly, for one thing. There was nothing but leg connecting his chin to his shoes, so it was awkward for her always to be craning up to look at him. Except when he sat down; then, because…
—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us a single buttery dumpling stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms and the seafood risotto and before the snapper with tomato and black olives and the duck in balsamic…
They kept him alive for years in warm water, The soldier who had lost his skin. At night He was visited by the wounded bat He had unfrozen after Passchendaele, Locking its heels under his forefinger And whispering into the mousy fur. Before letting the pipistrelle flicker Above his summery pool and tipple there,…
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