Monthly Archive:: April 2012
Gatekeepers (Part One), in which I play my flute in a meadow and lament The Death of the Editor
Editors aren’t what they used to be. I admit that I don’t have much authority to say so: I’m young(ish), my editorial “career” spans a whopping four years, and I didn’t grow up with a quill-pen in the days before simultaneous submissions, hand-delivering my poems in the snow, up-hill
On Improvisation: a Farewell (For Now) to Blogging
When asked about the experience of improvising Two Thousand Year Old Man with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner famously said, “I always tried for something that would force him to go into a panic—because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see.” Panic (or, to use less
Joanne Randall: Remembrance and a Poem
Joanne Randall, a longtime friend of Ploughshares, passed away this February at 81 in Kansas City. Along with her husband, Emerson professor Jim Randall, Joanne was a full partner in Pym Randall Press, and helped create a community that includes many of Ploughshares‘ early contributors and guest editors. As
And Then We Came to the End
“That’s it,” my thesis advisor said. “You’re done.” I still have a month left of classes, but with my thesis velo bound and signed, it’s hard not to feel like my MFA is complete. I’ve got a bunch of new writer-friends (having come into the program with none; most
Wonderful Investigations
Wonderful Investigations Dan Beachy-Quick Milkweed Editions, April 2012 212 pages $20 Reading essays by poets is just plain fun. Take Dan Beachy-Quick. Author of five collections of poetry and now a second essay collection, Wonderful Investigations, he writes sentences like, “We must build a wall to find out that
Momentum
I’ve heard of a mythical thing that some writers get to experience: momentum. Like a heavy stone, a writing career starts out motionless and seemingly without hope of ever moving, but then it starts to roll, and, sometimes, builds speed. Momentum can happen to “good writers,” or so I’ve
On Quietness: an Interview with Brian Morton
It wasn’t long into my semester in Brian Morton’s graduate fiction workshop at NYU when I realized that the understated manner in which he led the class was misleading. On the page, that same writer who led class so unobtrusively was one of the toughest critics I’d encountered, examining
Abrazos, Adrienne, and The Revolutionary Idea
I’ve been thinking about my old friend and first teacher Adrienne Rich every day since she died on March 27th in Santa Cruz and I was thinking today of an old funny moment in the sun I had with her and her partner Michelle on their deck in 1997,
Blurbese: “funny”
Book reviewers’ relationship with the word “funny” is, well—a little funny. I’m somewhat sympathetic about this one, too, at least when it comes to novels that are deliberately comic, because it’s tough to review authors whose reputation is based entirely on humor. What, after all, can the word “funny”
Those Who Can, Teach
It’s a question every newly minted, card-carrying poet/fiction writer faces after graduating from an MFA program: should I go and teach creative writing to pay the bills and make connections while I finish my Great American Poetry Collection/Novel? Or should I get as far away from academia as possible?