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 I asked a few friends — those I happened to be in touch with — for recent unpublished work.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,…
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…
A certain college professor used to say that one sits down to write ABC, but in the process discovers — ah! — DEF! He was talking about writing nonfiction, but there is DEF in fiction, too. We discover through writing that we know more than we know — hopefully, if we’re writing with honesty and…
For the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. This writer’s block was so bad, so pervasive, so debilitating and humiliating (and so pretentiously stereotypical) that I couldn’t write anything. Or perhaps, more accurately stated, I couldn’t write anything with any sort of confidence. The words still filled up the page, but I…
Just one of the many delights of putting together this issue of Ploughshares had to do with the sense of discovery I experienced as I came upon submission after submission which challenged, and changed, my notion of the world. However familiar I might have been with the work of my colleagues in Princeton University’s creative…
It’s probably a shame to say so, at least at the outset of an introduction to this issue of Ploughshares, but I may not be a particularly good or efficient reader of other people’s fiction. By nature I am somewhat distractible. And although my distractibility is matched at times by my ability to concentrate, these…
The old year’s over. So, too, the old century, the old millennium. Two thousand years of Western Civ! . . . Finished, achieved, collapsed. Silly, of course, but it’s how people think. Some people (oh, definitely a smaller set) are wondering whether the shiny new millennium which has just begun will have much literary fiction…
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