Nonfiction

  • Instead Of

    This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that…

  • Introduction

    I began editing this issue of Ploughshares in the summer of 2004 shortly after my return from Chile, where I was invited, with Yusef Komunyakaa and Nathalie Handal, to participate in the celebration of the Neruda Centenary. We had entered the Republic of Poetry. Restaurants used Neruda’s odes for recipes, and proudly announced this fact…

  • Introduction

    In Story v. Novel, the story nearly always wins. In my opinion. I’ve written in both genres, and these days, when asked which I prefer, I say story. I like the precision of the language, the focus of the angle, the intensity placed on the moment. I like spending just that length of time, and…

  • Introduction

    I used to think a poem could become a flower, a bear, or a house for a ravaged spirit. I used to think I understood what it meant to write a poem, and understood the impetus to write, and even knew a little something of the immensity of the source of poetry. I was never…

  • Don’t Rub Your Eyes

    I understand women the way junkies understand shooting up. Feel the rush, make the pain go away, and think about the next fix. I don’t know what to do when the glow wears off, when a real person floats to the surface of the dream. It’s the sixties, after all, and what might be pathology…

  • Introduction

    The vigor and accomplishment of contemporary American literature is nowhere more easily appreciated than in the journals and quarterlies that labor doggedly, and for the most part thanklessly, to display both the quantity and quality of the enterprise. The quantity and quality of those journals and quarterlies themselves is both staggering and delightful, and the…

  • Intimacy and the Feast

      Women think they know everything about love and they are wrong. Men think they know nothing about love and they are wrong, too. Books spoil you for love Love spoils you for food Food spoils Reading was the first thing worth leaving home for. I read the way you should never love or eat….

  • Introduction

                         ". . . whence a whole world emerges."—Cavafy A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls) that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, "How about putting in some dogs? People love it when…

  • On Nuar Alsadir

    It is my pleasure to nominate Nuar Alsadir. I have been a great admirer of her work for many years now. With echoes of Rumi and Hafiz, her poems are a delicate mix of the quotidian and the profound. In witty, vibrant, always surprising turns, she reveals to us the weight of each fleeting moment….