Article Archive

I am in the middle of Don Quixote—where many writers are and, according to Cervantes scholars, where every writer should be. I’m reading it because this year marks the 400th anniversary of its publication. I would like to say that I’ve finished it, but I cannot. The Quixote, as it is affectionately referred to by die-hard fans, is not something you finish. It’s something you rattle around in.

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Diner, the Massachusetts Review, Night Train, the Women’s Review of Books, DoubleTake, the Oxford American, and Cranky Literary Journal.

Ted Kooser, appointed the 13th poet laureate of the United States last August, launches American Life in Poetry, a weekly newspaper column featuring a poem and a brief introduction, which is distributed free to any paper wishing to publish it.

How did I become a sestinas editor? It all began with a rejection letter. “Thanks for sending,” it read, “but we’re looking for more traditional, iambic pentameter sestinas."

From the beginning the founders of the Associated Writing Programs and other pioneers have argued that, through effective creative writing programs, students can attain lifelong skills of critical thinking, empathy for others, and an understanding of the creative process, the key to all innovation. The schools featured in this article—Knox College, Oberlin, and Sarah Lawrence—have been working to make undergraduate creative writing degrees a hallmark of their respective institutions for some time now.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Calyx Books, Graywolf Press, and nthposition press.  

Despite the fluctuating aesthetics and ideologies espoused by critics, professors, and practitioners of poetry, there remain two general subjects that consistently offer poets inspiration: love and war; but with walentine’s Day just around the corner, three new anthologies of love poems are offering readers a respite from verse about violence.

In the world of hip-hop, Lewis Turco would be considered an “Original Gangsta,” an “O.G.”—a title given to someone who started it all. In the more genteel business of poetry writing, however, Turco would be called an “Institution,” and what he started was nothing less than a renewed appreciation of poetic forms. Since its first edition in 1968, his reference book The Book of Forms has become a standard text for poets of all stripes. A cross between The Joy of Cooking and According to Hoyle for poets, Turco’s text remains a rarity: a reference book with personality. Turco’s lucid, empathetic entries on every form under the sun continue to serve many poets writing their first pantoums or settling drunken bets on the rhyme scheme of the rimas dissolutas (abcdef abcdef ghijlk ghijlk ..., if written in sestets).

Cindy Dach, the events and marketing manager of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, recently launched First Fiction Tour, a program that she hopes will heighten the public image of the first-time author. But it’s not what you might expect: She isn’t packing customers into the bookstore, she’s inviting them to the bar.

No entry fee? Little chance of rejection? Any poet worth her iamb has reason to be suspicious. And, indeed, the International Library of Poetry and its affiliates—the International Society of Poets, Watermark Press, poetry.com, and so on appears on several Internet-based contest-scam watch lists. Still ILP education director Len Roberts argues that the organization has its purpose and is taking steps to redeem its reputation.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Fish Publishing, Zygote Publishing, and Perugia Press.