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Ploughshares is the award-winning non-profit literary magazine based at Emerson College in Boston. Most of our print issues are guest-edited, and our mission is to present varying viewpoints. Our blog is an extension of our print publication, and so we feature writing from guest-bloggers. We present their opinions to our readers in order to foster a lively discussion, but do not necessarily endorse all viewpoints published on our blog.
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Tag Archives: Sean Bishop
Plagiarism as Pedagogy
One of my best students was a plagiarizer. I felt stupid, when I found out—I had known her for two years, and I had worked with her intensively as her thesis adviser, for months. And I wasn’t the one who … Continue reading
Books by Their Covers: best poetry presses, by design
Here’s some Not-News-To-Anyone: poetry doesn’t sell itself. Successful first books, in particular, depend on a poet’s overall visibility online, a real-world group of friends and friends-of-friends to assist in writing and publishing reviews, the poet’s willingness to go on a … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Bloggers
Tagged Ahsahta Press, Ben Mirov, Black Ocean Press, CAConrad, Caketrain, Canarium, design, Dorothea Lasky, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Arnold, Eurostile, Fence Books, Feng Sun Chen, Flood Editions, Fort Red Border, Ghost Machine, Gregory Orr, Heather Christle, Jeff Clark, Joyelle McSweeney, Kiki Petrosino, Octopus Books, poetry, PSA chapbooks, Quemadura, Ryan Call, Sara Levine, Sarabande, Sean Bishop, Short Dark Oracles, Slope Editions, Syzygy Beauty, T. Fleischman, The City of Poetry, The Difficult Farm, typography, Uglly Duckling Presse, Wave Books
15 Comments
Gatekeepers Part Four-point-Two: in defense of “telling” and sentimental preachiness
Two winters ago, brand-new to the creative writing community of Madison, Wisconsin, I was at ground zero of the national debate on union rights, caught in a throng of 70,000 protestors marching around the State Capitol, screaming “Whose Streets? Our … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Bloggers
Tagged Ai, Allen Ginsberg, Campbell McGrath, Carolyn Forché, cliche, didacticism, don't tell, Flannery O'Connor, Franz Kafka, Garcia-Marquez, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hejinian, Jesse Jackson, Joyce, Langston Hughes, Madison Wisconsin, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Pinsky, Rukeyser, Sean Bishop, sensationalism, sentimentality, show, Silliman, Stein, the late great Adrienne Rich, Yeats, Zukofsky
2 Comments
Gatekeepers Part Four-point-One: on why the [red] pen is mightier than the sword (and other politically useful clichés)
Nearly ten years ago, when I was a twenty-year-old baby-poet with a sense of self-importance even more inflated than it is today, I organized a “Poetry in Protest” reading in Amherst, Massachusetts to demonstrate against what became, a couple months … Continue reading
“Pineapples Don’t Have Sleeves”: On Assessing Absurdity
In the days immediately following my last post, in which I stumbled semi-sensically through the difficulties of assessing images that are designed (at least in part) to resist explanation, Facebook lit up with a series of articles about a talking … Continue reading
Gatekeepers (Part Three), on comparing apples to desperate, near-extinct marsupials braving the Pacific in coconut dinghies
At its most basic, a literary editor’s job is a series of “either/or” decisions, or a long and hopefully-not-very-drunken game of “would you rather”: the editor takes a stack of poems/stories/essays and weighs them against each other to choose what … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Bloggers
Tagged abstract, comparison, Gatekeepers, Guest Bloggers, imagery, metaphor, Sean Bishop, surreal, symbolism
2 Comments
Gatekeepers (Part Two), why my pop-music philistinism makes me fear for the poetic canon
Gatekeeper, seasons wait for your nod. / Gatekeeper, you held your breath, / made the summer go on and on.—Feist Here’s a confession, Ploughshares readers: I’m a musical dinosaur. I have an unabashed love for Green Day and Counting … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Bloggers
Tagged contemporary music, contemporary poetry, Gatekeepers, Guest Bloggers, poetry, Sean Bishop
9 Comments
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Guest Bloggers
Tagged editor/writer relationship, editors, Gatekeepers, Gordon Lish, Guest Bloggers, Marianne Moore, Revision, Sean Bishop, writers
1 Comment
