October/November 2010 Cover Image

Eudora Welty & the Hidden Music of Gossip

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Marjorie Sandor
Because in the breathless rush of her tale, she occasionally drops her guard, revealing, in brief flashes, the pathos and paradox at the heart of her story: her longing for a dramatic life, and her inevitable fixedness in this hemmed-in place. There is no getting away, finally, for Sister.
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A Poet's Education

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Frederick Smock
In my years of teaching creative writing, I have had the good fortune of learning from many fine students.
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The Paris Review Poetry Purge: Some Ethical & Professional Considerations

Luke Hankins
The most basic assumption underlying my perspective on the ethics of the poetry purges is that an editor is not commensurate with the publication he or she represents.
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Humble Flannery

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Bret Lott
But the problem with Flannery O'Connor is that this battle for humility oftentimes comes off sounding to our ears as pompous, as arrogant, sometimes even rude. Not to mention terribly funny.
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The Guardian of the Gates of Paradise

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Kazim Ali
The sometimes over-performance of narrative voice in these poems is not really melodramatic the way an American ear might hear it, but rather is characteristic of that baroque and nearly overwrought sense of the poetic sublime that is the norm in Urdu poetry.
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An Interview with Patricia Hampl

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Judith Harris
Leisure allows you not to rush. It allows you to let the other person go first. In our world, there's an element of delicious sinfulness in the idea of leisure. I should be working, I should be doing something. In that regard, if you can find leisure, you have participated a little bit in the supposed pleasures of the leisure class.
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An Interview with Ted Kooser

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Judith Harris
Ted Kooser is the author of twelve collections of poetry including Delights and Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
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An Interview with Michael Steinberg

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Faye Rapoport DesPres
The difference between crafting a memoir as a literary work and writing it just the way you remember it depends on the permission the writer gives him/herself to imagine and rearrange the chronology of events. We do this not to cheat or write a more interesting story, but to help us better understand what it is we're trying to say.
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D.H. Lawrence's Etruscan Places: Literary Travel Narrative & Spiritual Testament

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Linda Lappin
Standing at a belvedere in the Italian town of Tarquinia, gazing across a hill of green wheat rippling in the April breeze, D.H. Lawrence remarks in Etruscan Places that it was one of the most beautiful landscapes he had ever seen. Yet it was an adjacent slope—wild, covered with scrub, and dotted with black and white cattle—that spoke more fervently to his imagination for it possessed something beyond mere beauty: "And immediately one feels, that hill has a soul, it has meaning."
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