Nonfiction

Anne Stevenson has been around, quietly, for some time now. Born in England, daughter of the philosopher C. L. Stevenson, she grew up in New Haven and Ann Arbor, married and moved to England almost twenty years ago. She published two books of verse in this country, most importantly Reversals (Wesleyan, 1969). Then Oxford University…

The Nightingale What is it to be free? The unconfined Lose purpose, strength, and at the last, the mind. ANTHONY HECHT: a couplet to accompany Aesop The American poets who were born up and down the 1920s have come into their full powers and fame well before now, though the contours of some careers have…

A long time ago I watched Margaret Mead's film, Four Families, with a bunch of high school kids. While I sat there, wholly mesmerized by the dark flow of those domestic images with their latent and compelling content, the kids' responses had been quite different. "Is that all there is?" one prescient fourteen-year-old demanded: "Eating,…

Along with its counterparts in Europe and the United States, Canadian fiction during the past half century or so has been moving beyond the limits of literal realism, though this departure has not been as radical or as consistent as it has been elsewhere. Many prominent Canadian writers – Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood,…

George Garrett wrote four volumes of short fiction along with about thirty uncollected pieces including “A Record As Long As Your Arm,” which appears in this issue of Ploughshares. He had his share of praise along the way, but not as much as his short fiction warranted. In a very real way, he was a story-teller…

For the great majority of people who love poetry, ` religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry . . . I do not pretend to offer Vaughan, or Southwell, or George Herbert, or Hopkins as major poets: I feel sure that the first three, at least, are poets of this limited awareness. -T. S….

I was going round Manhattan . . . and I noticed a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck – a girl of about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, `I…

The following interview took place on two occasions in July of this year at my apartment in Cambridge. Bill Knott drank instant iced tea, as is his custom, and talked easily once we had started. Knott is the author of nine books of poems, most of them published by small presses, beginning with the Naomi…

* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…