Ploughshares Spring 1987: Poetry Issue

by Derek Walcott (Editor), Rita Dove, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham

Overview

An issue of Ploughshares from Spring 1987, guest-edited by Derek Walcott. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This classic all-poetry issue, guest-edited by the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott, features the work of a number of established masters as well as lesser-known poets. The issue includes work by Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Dunn, Rosanna Warren, Jorie Graham, and many others. As Walcott writes in his introductory note, "My principle was affection, and affection meant variety, not theory."

INTRODUCTION
Derek Walcott

POETRY
Katy Aisenberg, "Excavations"
Randall Barfield, "Armero," "Colombia"
Robert Bensen, "We've Been Domesticated, I Tell You"
Lucie Brock-Broido, "Magnum Mysterium," "Domestic Mysticism"
Joseph Brodsky, "Lithuanian Nocturne," "The Fifth Anniversary"
Teresa Cader, "Open Letter to the Polish Government, 1986"
Stuart Dischell, "Macbeth"
Rita Dove, Three Poems
Stephen Dunn, "The Listener"
Carol Frost, "Acorns," "In Scarecrow's Garden"
Barry Goldensohn, "Great Horned Owl," "You Are Not Yet Asleep"
Jorie Graham, Three Poems
Michael S. Harper, Three Poems
Seamus Heaney, "Inferno III"
Garrett Kaoru Hongo, "'Pinoy' at the Coming World"
Marie Howe, "How Many Times"
Andrew Hudgins, "A Christian on the Marsh"
Colette Inez, "Naming the Moons," "Daughter's Photo in an Old Folks' Home"
George Kalogeris, Three Poems
Gary Keenan, "July 4, 1984"
Dan Masterson, "Heron"
Askold Melnyczuk, "And So," "Forsythia"
Sue Owen, "The Wolf," "My Name Is Snow"
Lawrence Pitkethly, "Return of the Native"
Jennifer Rose, Three Poems
Mary Ruefle, Five Poems
Miriam Sagan, "Full Moon: Ceremony," "All Hallows"
Robert B. Shaw, "Degrees of Resolution"
Gerald Stern, "There I Was One Day," "Bob Summers' Body"
Terese Svoboda, "Laughing Africa"
James Tate, "Under Mounting Pressure"
Rosanna Warren, "Ice," "Daily Mail"
Nancy White, Three Poems

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014940955
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	04/15/1987
Series:	Ploughshares , #131
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	142
File size:	433 KB

About the Author

The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, "1944" appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

In 1957, he was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. Since then, he has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently White Egrets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), Selected Poems (2007), The Prodigal: A Poem (2004), and Tiepolo's Hound (2000).

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott has also written several plays produced throughout the United States, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981.

His first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1998.

About his work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said, "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Walcott's honors include a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He currently divides his time between his home in St. Lucia and New York City.