Monthly Archive:: July 2011
The Stroke of A Pen
The Stroke of a Pen: Essays on Poetry and Other Provocations Samuel Hazo University of Notre Dame Press, May 2011 136 pages $20.00 In the semi-rural pocket of Pennsylvania where I grew up, poets are a rarity. Last year, as I prepared to uproot my life and move to
Why I Reread the Sun Also Rises
I first read The Sun Also Rises in college, in a survey course of the American Novel. I don’t know if such survey courses even exist anymore, or if Hemingway is still taught to our undergraduates. But I took this class during springtime in Kentucky, which is long and
Once More, with Feeling, Part I
This fall, for the first time in three years, I’ll be teaching an undergraduate poetry writing seminar at my university. Because it’s been some years, it’s time to rethink that class; it’s also time because, as in most institutions, class sizes are rising, and the good old standby of
There is No Year by Blake Butler
Blake Butler Harper Perennial, April 2011 416 pages $15.99 Literary experimentation has been successfully blended with genre fiction before; Robert Coover’s Ghost Town used the western, and Paul Auster’s New York Triology, noir. And though Blake Butler may not be the first to try the trick with horror, no
Finding Readers
How do we find good critical readers for our work? Whose eyes will see it as ours can’t or won’t? Who makes for a better critic – a sympathetic reader, or a skeptical one? We ask much of these readers – they must devote time and emotion and thought.
Ploughshares Weekly Contest: Derek Walcott
Round four of our free Ploughshares contest! This week, comment to win a copy of our Spring 1987 issue, guest edited by Derek Walcott and featuring work by Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and many more. For those of you that don’t know the drill: comment in our
Pieces for Small Orchestra
Norman Lock (illustrations by Sasha Meret) Spuyten Duyvil Press, April 2011 166 pages $16.00 On the surface, Norman Lock’s recent book, Pieces for Small Orchestra, is a collection of two novellas and two stories. Really, it’s a book of many books, all doling out the life (and dream-life) of
Why I Reread First Love and Other Sorrows by Harold Brodkey
This is a story I love because my grandmother might have loved it—though perhaps for some of the wrong reasons. Brodkey’s character (like Brodkey) is a high school boy born into a life of education and privilege but taken down a peg by the death of his father. He
Travels with Grond
Many years ago, my mother took me to the Library of Congress to hear Galway Kinnell read. She had written her Master’s thesis on Kinnell, a thesis I’d read a time or three, so we were looking forward to hearing the living voice. The living voice said a number
A Riot of Goldfish
A Riot of Goldfish Kanoko Okamoto (Translated by J. Keith Vincent) Hesperus Worldwide, January 2011 114 pages $15.95 David Mitchell, in his fine introduction to this slim volume of two novellas, writes that author Kanoko Okamoto’s great theme is the “frustrated striving for aesthetic perfection.” Certainly her novellas have