September 2007 
An Interview with Bob Hicok
Jeanie Chung
There is also something particularly damning about being considered a funny poet. The most common notion is that poetry is and should be serious, that it's not the place for humor. And it's easy for poets who write with humor to give in to it, to let the laugh take over and steer their work.
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Editing and the Tao of Flower Arrangement
Tony Barnstone
If you choose your flowers too early or too late, the arrangement will never quite cohere. I think the anthologist does something like this. We do violence to the poem, slicing it off from its roots. The poem is dead now, but we can preserve it for a while and bring it to another environment, to the reader's living room.
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Reading to Write: A Conversation with Francine Prose
Andrea Dupree
Francine Prose is the celebrated author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel Blue Angel (2000), a bitingly funny and sorrowful look at love in the time of academic writing programs and "political correctness," was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other highlights include her novel A Changed Man (2005), Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (2005), Guided Tours of Hell (2002), and Household Saints (1981), a novel that was made into a 1993 motion picture by Nancy Savoca and produced by Jonathan Demme.
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Uncommon Reading
Sam Kean
If anyone's going to snap up a free book, it'll be an English major, and English major Michael M. Zoll has had five chances in five years at the University of Maryland at College Park. In late August of 2006, as it has since 1993, the university distributed thousands of free copies of a single title on campus-Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat. The idea was for undergraduates to read the book together, in order to kindle discussions inside and outside class and foster community among the large Terrapin student body.
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Adjuncts on the Frontline
Meryl Spiegel
Perhaps it's because universities have become disconnected places for both students and faculty. Perhaps they need to become more integrated communal centers where professors are not out on a limb trying to convince administrators that a student is in trouble and needs professional help. Perhaps they need to implement mechanisms that make it easier for all faculty to identify and refer troubled students...
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Beautiful Clarity: Jane Kenyon, Anna Akhmatova, and the Luminous Particular
David Harbilas
Yet like Akhmatova, Kenyon showed a fierce devotion to place, and she also often listed the names of places in her poems. The effects were such that the miraculous could be found in the everyday. The Imagists also believed in this, but their reliance on the objective correlative sacrificed the self in an attempt to reach the eternal.
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Living in a Liminal World: An Exploration of Writing and the Mediums of Music, Art, and Dance
Towles Kintz
The best writers of music-perhaps the best writers, in general-do exactly what great musicians do with their instruments: they bring to life inanimate, intangible things; with vivacity, they push themes along; they enliven static prose with melodic, ragged, soulful words and rhythmic, heart-striking punctuation.
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Writing in the Dark
Tyler Dilts
...one of the poorest indicators of the degree to which a student might be suffering from psychological problems is the presence of disturbing material in his or her writing. Time and time again, I have seen the students capable of producing the most troubling material to be among those most able to communicate their feelings and express themselves clearly and effectively.
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Well Begun is Half Done: Successful Story Openings
William Gillard
Speak with any editor of any literary magazine in the United States, and you'll hear some variation on this theme: too often, writers lead with what should be cut, or start off so slowly that no reader, at a literary magazine or otherwise, would be interested in moving beyond the first paragraph. The reality of the literary magazine business dictates that magazines are inundated with submissions. Overworked and underpaid readers peruse stories with the best of intentions, but human nature dictates that first impressions are powerful things.
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Liars, Manipulators, & Evaders
Rachel Graves
Interestingly, while Hersh's methods are questionable by the ethics standards of newspapers, he probably meets Malcolm's moral standards. Since he and his subjects hate each other, the subjects hardly expect Hersh to tell their version of the story.
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