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John Ashbery
I came early in the evening to lower Manhattan, more than an hour before the showcase reading that night at Poets House. I came to browse the showcase shelves and to meet a friend and share a bit of...
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Ploughshares Spring 2015: An Extended Introduction by Guest Editor Neil Astley
Why is it that most American poets know very little about contemporary poetry from Britain and Ireland? A good number of them are published in Britain; they give readings at festivals in the UK and...
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As the Train of Fiction Rolls On, the Space Between
Last year, I interviewed Pam Houston about her novel Contents May Have Shifted and the fine line between fact and fiction. “Well, I don’t think of it as a fine line,” she wrote to me in an email. My...
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“I really wanted to just drive and talk with someone”: An Interview with John...
John Gallaher’s book-length poem In A Landscape has the feel of a long, wide-ranging conversation with an old friend. It’s like one of those cross-country car ride conversations when there’s time to...
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Journey into the Unknown: An Investigation of Metaphysical Poetry
At a poetry workshop recently I heard the word metaphysical used to describe several contemporary American poets of disparate temperaments. At times metaphysical sounded erudite, at times dismissive,...
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The Importance of the Difficult
In his essay “On Difficulty in Poetry,” Reginald Shepherd helpfully outlines several different types of poetic difficulty. He writes first about lexical, allusive, and syntactic difficulty: poems that...
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