Ploughshares Winter 1987: Poetry Issue

by Bill Knott (Editor), Craig Raine, Mary Karr, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds

Overview

An issue of Ploughshares from Winter 1987, guest-edited by Bill Knott. 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 poet Bill Knott, features the work of a number of outstanding poets, including Gary Soto, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, Denise Duhamel, and many others. There is also a spotlight on the English poet Craig Raine, featuring appreciations by Mary Karr, Seamus Heaney, and Sven Birkerts.

POETRY AND PROSE
Ai, "Family Portrait," "Boys & Girls, Lenny Bruce, or Back From the Dead"
Marvin Bell, Three Poems
Star Black, "Rendezvous"
Karen Brennan, "A Beautiful Way of Looking at Something Starts," "The Black Puppy Story"
Melissa Brown, "Trinity Street"
Revecca Byrkit, "The Effluvial Mood"
Andrea Cohen, "Story of the Tattoo"
Martha Collins, "Slug"
Mary Cross, "I Am Told"
Michael Cuddihy, "In Ignorance," "Bread"
Stephen Dobyns, Three Poems
Denise Duhamel, "On Being Born the Same Eact Day of the Same Exact Year as Boy George"
Elaine Equi, "Cannibals in Space," "Aperture"
Gao Fa-lin, "Iron Meteorite"
Linda Gregg, "Night Music"
Joy Harjo, "Hieroglyphic"
Erica John, "The Land of Fuck"
Mary Karr, "Sad Rite"
Claudia Keelan, "Towards"
Nancy Lagomarsino, "On Skimming an Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
400-Yard Girls' Relay"
Lyn Lifshin, Three Poems
Ginny MacKenzie, "Aunt Lena Is Committed to Bellefonte State Hospital"
Kevin Magee, "The Boss & His Beauty," "After Whitman (Gramsci's Whitman)"
Paul Mariani, "The Gospel According to Walter," "Landscape With Visionary Blue"
Sandra McPherson, "Ridge Road," "Sonnet for a Singer"
Steffen Mensching, "Mayakowski's Vacation with Lilya and Ossip Brik, Summer of 1929," "Siqueiros: Our Countenance"
Michael Milburn, "The Funeral"
Barbara Molloy-Olund, "Night and Effort"
Karen Ohnesorge-Fick, "Ma's Ghost"
Sharon Olds, Four Poems
Mary Oliver, "Maybe"
Gregory Orr, "The City and the Barbarians"
Bob Perelman, Three Poems
Robert Polito, "Cathy's Braces"
Robin Reagler, "Big Swim"
Donald Revell, "Polygamy"
Sarah Rosenblatt, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?," "Past Closing Time"
Karl Rosenquist, "Black and White Dream"
Jerome Sala, Three Poems
Tomaz Salamun, "The Blue Vault"
Lloyd Schwartz, "Pseudodoxia Epidemica"
R. D. Shipp, "Suspects"
Charles Simic, "First Thing in the Morning," "The Gods"
JIm Simmerman, "The Public Job of Blood"
Michelle Blake Simons, "The Fourth Wall"
Gary Soto, Three Poems
John Tarver, "No Time"
Mona Van Duyn, "Mockingbird Month"
Peter Viereck, Three Poems
Rebecca Weiner, "The Payment"
Mary Karr, "An Interview with Craig Raine"
Thomas Lux, "On Craig Raine"
Sven Birkerts, "Craig Raine's 'In the Kalahari Desert'"
Seamus Heaney, "The Glamour of Craig Raine"
Craig Raine, "A Chest of Drawers"

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014941013
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	12/01/1987
Series:	Ploughshares , #134
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	180
File size:	717 KB

About the Author

Bill Knott’s poetry collections include The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (1968), Becos (1983), Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988), Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000), The Unsubscriber (2004), and Stigmata Errata Etcetera (2007), a collaboration with collages by the artist Star Black.

Knott published The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans under the pseudonym Saint Geraud (a figure who, it was claimed, lived from 1940 to 1966). Poet Thomas Lux wrote of the collection: “The best poems in this first collection … confront the reader with their directness and imagination …. They’re poems of anguish and frustration because the poet takes responsibility.” Knott’s poems are sometimes surreal, with startling juxtaposed images. Critic Meghan O’Rourke noted the variety of forms in Knott’s poetry, identifying the simple style of some poems and the “highly-torqued syntactic compression” of others. In The Unsubscriber, she found “the mode alternately heroic and vernacular, the subjects ranging from ecocide to the degradations of age to meditations on the sword of Damocles and Rilke’s archaic torso.”

Knott, who was an orphan, spent a year in an institution for the mentally ill in Elgin, Illinois, when he was 15; he worked with his uncle at a farm in Michigan, spent two years in the army, and wrote his first book while working as a hospital orderly. He taught for many years at Emerson College in Boston.

Knott has self-published collections of his work, which are available for free through his website.