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…
Postcard from New York February 2002 It’s a different city now, this New York, the city my wife and I love (and choose) to live in, a new shorthand can be heard for time and location: “The Event,” “The 11th,” “The Pile.” For weeks after, on the way to rehearsals for a play of mine…
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….
I picked these poems, and, except for a few instances, the editors of Ploughshares picked the prose. I picked these poems for the same reasons most readers linger on poems when they come upon them, reasons similar in spirit, no doubt, to those given by most writers invited to guest-edit these pages. I hope those…
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…
I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares. I asked a few friends — those I happened to be in touch with — for recent unpublished work. I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares and which the editors thought…
It had been twenty years since I’d taken a turn in the editorial trenches, so the invitation to return to Ploughshares for one of its anniversary issues seemed an irresistible symmetry, a chance to observe directly some of the changes in the magazine and perhaps, by extension, in American poetry. Three differences are clear. First,…
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