Works-In-Progress Issue

An issue of Ploughshares from Spring 1991, guest-edited M. L. Rosenthal. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This “Works-in-Progress” issue is guest-edited by the poet, translator, and literary critic M. L. Rosenthal. “The work collected here,” Rosenthal writes in the Introduction, “is indicative of where much of our best poetry now stands: its capacity for expressing ‘life immense in passion, pulse, and power,’ its often playful formal eclecticism, its painful concern over what is happening to our lives: in short, its utterly self-contradictory desolation and boisterous zest, both in affect and in artistic morale.”

This issue includes work-in-progress from William Arrowsmith, Frederick Feirstein, Tess Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Brenda Hillman, Galway Kinnell, Thomas Kinsella, Louis Simpson, and many others.