March/April 2005 
Archduke of Darkness: Anthony Hecht 1923 to 2004
Rachel Hadas
The poetry of Anthony Hecht, who died at the age of eighty one last October, presents a feast to the senses even as it challenges our comfortable expectations about the pleasures to be derived from mastery of language, such as Hecht commanded throughout his long career.
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Stacking Stones: Building a Unified Short Story Collection
David Jauss
I have a confession to make. While I know from my own experience how carefully, even obsessively, a writer will assemble the stories in a collection into their optimal order, until recently I rarely read a collection's stories in the order they were printed.
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'The Only Courage is Joy': Ecstasy & Doubt in James Wright's Poetry
Kevin Stein
Perhaps more than any American poet of the recent past, James Wright appears simultaneously enamored and yet distrustful of a poem's ability to embody the ecstatic moment. On one hand, Wright's poems show his yearning for transcendent release, emotional if not physical escape, and ecstatic reverie initiated by contact with the natural. On the other, a number of poems reveal an intent to keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds.
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Cinema of the Mind
Robert Olen Butler, edited by Janet Burroway
Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We're not talking here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.
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An Interview with Alfred Corn
Christopher Hennessy
I see myself within the tradition of American Romanticism, and within that tradition the self is primarily the subject matter. But that topic can get pretty boring, so I've tried to expand the compass and talk about myself with respect to history, works of art, or geographical sites. Fundamentally, it's still me, but me in different contexts.
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What's Gained in Translation: The Question of Poetry
Don Bogen
When I think about poetry and translation, the comments of two very different poets come to mind. They loomed over my shoulders as I was writing this essay, a bit like the angel and devil you see in cartoons when a character has to choose between right and wrong. On the one hand-or, over one shoulder-is T.S. Eliot's beautiful, outrageous statement that great poetry is so immediately recognizable by its sound alone that even someone who did not understand the language in which it was written could still appreciate it.
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President's Budget Jeopardizes Social Services Including Education, Libraries, and the Arts
D.W. Fenza & Matt Burriesci
In Washington this past January, while marching bands and police motorcades practiced their maneuvers for President Bush's inauguration, hundreds of alarmed educational and nonprofit groups began a frenzy of meetings and networking. The alarm was in response to White House budget priorities soon to be announced in the President's 2006 budget.
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An Interview with Edwidge Danticat
Sarah Anne Johnson
At first when I started the program, I told my parents I was going to be a teacher to appease their worries. From this place where you're sneaking to do this thing that you love, suddenly I was in this community of writers, and I had the constant fellowship of writers and people who take writing seriously. That was extremely important to me.
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