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…
RINGS: ON THE LIFE OF COLLIS PHILLIPS recounts the experience of an ex-boxing champion and trainer who has lived most of his seventy-five years in the Saint Bernard housing project in New Orleans. It is based on personal experience, three years of research, letters, legal documents, hospital and prison records, newspaper reports, and scores of…
EVENT: The caretaking lady next door was horsing around with the horse who wanted to kick her because he had a sore she was trying to put something on. It's an old Morgan, swaybacked, still beautiful in head and stride, but bored in retirement. It will come to the fence to say hello even to…
This conversation took place in Philip Levine's home near the Tufts University campus where he teaches each autumn. During the winter and summer months, he and his wife Frances live in Fresno, California, although in the winter of 1985 Philip Levine will be a visiting professor at Brown University. Levine's Selected Poems was published in…
– from Hamann's Bond The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has become…
Twenty-seven-year-old William E. Griffis, a native of Philadelphia, took a leave of absence from Rutgers Theological Seminary in the fall of 1869 in order to accept a three-year position as a teacher of natural science in Fukui, a Japanese feudal domain (feudalism ended in the fall of 1870) just beginning to modernize. Arriving in Yokohama…
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