Nonfiction

trans. Greek Athan Anagnostopoulos 1930 January 12 "We remain at the same post awaiting orders." I was quietly walking in the street, when they hit me on the back and I found myself in an elevator. There, a priest, sitting on his cap, was combing his hair with a seashell. He turned, looked, and asked…

Saturday, late at night. I've returned from the outside. I know tomorrow's waking and the daily uphill climb. The streets were quiet; the mind light; the soul with all her windows open. Life's despair, sentiments condemned to end, man's wretchedness, the inevitable death – were circulating through the openings and didn't bother me. I am…

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if the poets wrote it. Wallace Stevens Affection for poems is a personal thing, transcending time, fashion, and even friendship. We return less often to what we admire or approve of than to what we love, and there are surprisingly few…

trans. French Richard Wilbur The plot of Racine's last "secular" play is sufficiently well-known. Phaedra, the virtuous wife of King Theseus of Athens, is afflicted by Heaven with an illicit passion for her step-son Hippolytus, and the consequences are tragic for all concerned: the death of the falsely accused Hippolytus, the bereavement of his beloved…

I last edited an issue of Ploughshares (Vol. 1/4) nearly 12 years ago. It was a pleasure doing it once more and I would be glad to do it again in the future-say, in another 12 years. The emphasis in this issue is on younger / newer poets. In many cases, I chose to accept…

I ‘The Strand of Dark Beginnings’ "But metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results," Jacques Derrida writes in Writing and Difference (17). And so for the poet who wishes to write a poetry of discovery rather than a mimicry or recitation of fixed forms of thinking, metaphor must subvert cultural and aesthetic…

In Transit There are times out of mind, times spent alone in a strange place waiting, times when the mind is alive and the body almost ruined, when you hallucinate on the real, and see it in the context of its meaning. These are the airplanes and buses of student fiction. Your thoughts quicken when…

November 9, 1981 Late Monday afternoon It is not yet 5 p.m. now and already near to completely dark, just the sky is still that deep dark blue just before it becomes black. Much to write about, though I have been avoiding sitting down here. What first? The good news or the bad? Last Tuesday…

On a spring day in 1945, not long before his 12th birthday, Bud Gardner headed out to plow his father's fields. His younger brother Gilbert came along for the ride. Sandy, the boys' sister, lingered within earshot. Gilbert climbed on the cultpacker, a two ton machine which, towed in the tractor's wake, crushed the freshly…