A few years ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, sitting in the offices of Inprint, Inc., a literary nonprofit based in Houston, Texas, I asked Tony Hoagland if he considered himself to be a cat poet or an ox poet. Rich Levy, another Houston poet, was in the kitchen slicing us an apple to share…
As we change the past, so are we changed. These words, from Eleanor Wilner’s essay "Playing the Changes," are striking for how profoundly they speak not only to the poet and to the practice of poetry—indeed the practice of all art—but for how appropriately they also reveal the human situation—or at least, that impulse within us…
For many, gifted writer and giving teacher Jean Valentine has always resided under the radar. Poet/meisterblogger Ron Silliman writes in 2007: "In over a quarter century of visiting New York, where she’s made her home, for readings, talks, conferences, I’ve never—not once—heard a New York poet ever mention her name. For her sense of ‘presence’…
James Alan McPherson mocks the Horatio Alger aspect of his background via the young writer-narrator of his first published story, “Gold Coast” (an Atlantic Monthly First in 1968), in a passage where Robert dreams that “there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: ?…He knew life on…
On a rainy day in Claremont, California, you might find B. H. Fairchild drafting a poem and drinking a double espresso in the second seat of the front window of Some Crust Bakery. Other days, you might find him writing in a little place behind his garage. Officially, "B. H." stands for "Bertram Harry," a…
Although Philip Levine turns eighty this year, he continues to be one of our most energetic and prolific American poets. A working poet for more than a half century, he is still writing and publishing new poems, mentoring younger poets, taking on editorial projects like this issue of Ploughshares, giving readings all over the country,…
Andrea Barrett, after spending years immersed in science and history, recognized her literary calling in a house in western Massachusetts. She was working on a paper about the Franciscans and noticed the narrative threads circulating throughout her research. "I was enrolled in a master’s program in Reformation and Medieval History, thinking I might go on…
As the work of Rosanna Warren reminds us, to be a poet is to be a writer of poems. The forces of abstraction that threaten always to turn real individual artworks into mere manifestations of moods or (worse) theories or (worst of all) institutions—these forces go limp before poems so brilliantly made. The sculptures are…
In 2003, Edward Hirsch left his eighteen-year teaching post at the University of Houston and moved to New York City to become the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. At the time, his decision to accept such a position surprised many of his colleagues and students, who knew him as a generous, passionate,…
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