May/Summer 2006 
The Lyric Self: Artifice and Authenticity in Recent American Poetry
Alan Soldofsky
The late 1950s is arguably one of the great watershed periods in American poetry. The publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems (1956), Theodore Roethke's Words for the Wind (1958), W.D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle (1959), Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), and Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) dislodged the dominance of mid-century formalism.
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Maggie's Farm No More: The Fate of Political Poetry
David Wojahn
The most controversial performance of Bob Dylan's career took place during the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, and to Dylan aficionados, the event is the stuff of legend. Dylan, the young acoustic troubadour of the folk music revival, singer of earnest protest songs, and during the previous two years the darling of Newport Fest, strode onto the stage with an electric guitar, wearing a leather jacket.
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An Interview with Sandra Cisneros
Ramola D
In workshop, Dennis has talked about Yasunari Kawabata's work-about the role of silence or taking a different route in your writing, not being direct.
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Inventory of Ron Carlson: An Interview
Sherry Ellis
What I wanted to do, after I realized I was going to write "Bigfoot Stole My Wife," and these "concept stories," was put human feet under them.
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One Man's Nightmare: The Noir Journey of William Lindsay Gresham
Alan Prendergast
On September 14, 1962, a tall, slender, pockmarked man checked into Manhattan's Dixie Hotel, a gone-to-seed gathering place for "show people" on the edge of Times Square. He registered as Asa Kendall of Baltimore, retired to his room, and took an overdose of sleeping pills.
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A Pulitzer Prize for a Chapbook?
Elaine Sexton
Largely obscure and essentially privately traded, the lowly chapbook has seized the literary publishing world's attention, casting this onetime off-the-grid art form into the limelight.
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The Words & the Bees: Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing
D.W. Fenza
I doubt that I can tell you anything profoundly new about the writer's life. I'm sure your teachers and classmates have already given you enough advice, especially since such advice is provisional at best. What works for one writer may not work for another. In a writing program, the best advice is often contradictory, because each story or poem should be different in the creation of its own zone of expectation and surprise. Ultimately, you must find your own way.
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"People with Curiosity Are Always Right Out There" An Interview with Jim Harrison
Nancy Bunge
The things that get people going-that's very strange. So-and-so has to have seven sharpened pencils and somebody has to have a Bic rolling writer, needle point. It's all very crazy.
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