March/April 2001 
An Interview with Chana Bloch
Jennifer Arin
Chana Bloch is a poet, translator, scholar, and teacher. Her third book of poems, Mrs. Dumpty, was selected by Donald Hall for the 1998 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry; it also won the California Book Award Silver Medal and a number of other awards. Bloch's earlier books of poems are The Secrets of the Tribe and The Past Keeps Changing. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs and of four books by Israeli poets Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai-most recently of Amichai's magnum opus, Open Closed Open.
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William Matthews's Silences
Stanley Plumly
I first met William Matthews in 1948, at a Troy, Ohio whistlestop of Harry Truman's presidential tour. Bill was a first-grader, I was a third-grader.
We didn't recognize each other. There were, probably, only a dozen or so souls to greet the President that day, including our two mothers. We met again, of course, years later...
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Voodoo Poems & Magic Prose
Angus Woodward
I don't have to tell you how uncertain our profession can be. Whether a writer has been heaped with praise or buried by rejection, we all know that our luck can change abruptly. We listen attentively to the stories of writers who publish three or four books, mostly ignored, before the spotlight finds them; we also remember the names of writers who we thought had achieved fame, even canonization, but who are no longer read or even mentioned. We hear legends of great books being abandoned by publishers on the eve of publication, and tales of obscure small press titles achieving classic status through word-of-mouth. On a smaller scale, we watch literary magazines flourish and fade like dandelions.
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Feelings vs. Fragments in American Poetry
Zack Rogow
A growing number of American poets feel that we are at a crossroads. The time is ending when U.S. poetry consists mostly of narrative, free verse poems about autobiographical or family history subjects, spoken in a conversational, first-person voice very close to the poet's own. These poems took their first steps with the individual visions of Allen Ginsberg's book Howl in 1956 and the confessional strain in Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959.
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From Anton to Alice: Mining the Masters
Teresa Jones
Throughout the writing process, from workshop to dissertation to "Chaos-Stopless-cool- / Without a Chance, or Spar- / Or even a Report of Land- / To justify-Despair,"2 I have, to quote my good friend, the poor Prufrock, "seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker." And I have, like Prufrock, "wept and fasted, wept and prayed."3 But that was only preparation, nothing more than morning ritual.
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Poetry Lost: When Periodicals Cast Out Verse
Dan Campion
Poetry used to be set from the same trays of type as the news, and it was placed before the American people every day alongside the headlined columns of politics, business, agony, and gossip. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, our Fourth Estate has been barren of poetry since about the time Carl Sandburg last walked out of a Chicago newsroom.
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"Tis Backed Like a Weasel": The Slipperiness of Metaphor
Tony Hoagland
There is something irreconcilably, neurologically primal about the act of metaphor. This primal wildness conceals it from us. Because metaphorical speech is such a commonplace, because almost anyone can and does produce metaphor on a daily basis, we assume that it is scrutable. Because it is a mental process, because it takes place inside our own heads, because it leaves our own authorial lips, we assume we know something of its workings.
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An Interview with Kent Haruf
Michael McGregor
Kent Haruf's latest novel, Plainsong (1999), has earned wide critical praise for its spare, gentle depiction of rural life on the northeastern Colorado plains. A New York Times bestseller, it won the Regional Book Award in Fiction from the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association, a Salon.com Book Award, and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the American Booksellers Book Award, and awards from The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times.
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