Ms. Soppe’s work is nuanced and vivid, distinguished by a strong voice, a bold, experimental style, and wonderfully long sentences. In "The Pantyhose Man," the narrator is the collective spirit of the women who answer phones at a large Midwestern hotel. What begins as a comic account of how these women contend with obscene phone…
As a beginning writer, I had the good fortune to study with Albert J. Guerard, the greatest teacher of creative writing in the twentieth century. Guerard—novelist, teacher, and critic with equal intensity—taught at Harvard for twenty-three years, then at Stanford for another twenty-three, and was a mentor to many of the century’s most esteemed writers,…
I was once asked in an interview why cell phones don’t appear in my poems. This was followed up with a question about where I imagined the things that occur in my poems actually occur: "You know what I mean," said the interviewer, "things like deer and trees, birds and light . . ." I…
As Steiglitz needed to photograph O’Keeffe’s neck in 1921 that we might see her as he saw her, Jennifer Martenson shoots from behind in 2002 “to show the vantage rather than what was seen from it.” The poems, fictions, and hybrid “lulus” (see Field, Thalia) herein, largely by younger writers, work along parallel or intersecting…
The time of us on earth is spent lightly on good peas and gravy good enough for a second time in an hour -poem by Jon, when he was eighteen years old, as remembered by my mother Chapter (Dear) Dear Dad Dear Father Dear Jon Dear Pop, (This letter is now a part of the…
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Muriel Spark. I was speaking to her over the phone at her house in Italy, and so, in addition to my great admiration for her and the distance between us in years, there was a substantial geographical distance. Knowing that she hadn’t published her first…
Last autumn I found myself talking about my new novel at a fundraiser for a college library. Only after I’d committed to doing this did I discover that I was following a man who had written a popular book about the human genome project and preceding a woman who had written about recent war crimes….
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…
Down with a bad case of that mysterious Texas howdy-do called Cedar Fever, I’ll make these prefatory remarks as short and sweet as possible. I embarked on this project with a powerful will to feature young and unknown poets of extraordinary talent. You may not yet recognize the names of most of the poets who…
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