Introduction

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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….

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

What is the meaning of a “little” magazine in the life of poetry in American culture today? Is it a forum for the inquisitive reader to see what is being written, what kinds of thoughts and forms of thought are occupying the minds and hearts of writers both established and unknown? Is it a place…

Introduction

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 I asked a few friends — those I happened to be in touch with — for recent unpublished work.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…