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Phillip Lopate, considered by many to be one of the most important essayists of our time, discusses the controversies surrounding creative nonfiction, his own essay-writing process, and the ultimate quality he looks for in nonfiction—an interesting mind at work on the page.
Ander Monson’s fourth book, the poetry collection Our Aperture, was published in January by New Michigan Press. It’s a short thirty pages, but it further extends the reach of the author’s genre-bending work. Poets & Writers Magazine recently asked Monson about his predilection for playing with genre.
Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford.
Throughout his long career, Philip Levine has established a reputation for poems honoring the working class, beginning with the people he encountered as a young man laboring in the factories of Detroit. Though he has taught in writing programs nationwide since the 1950s, his poetry has maintained a stronger identification with the autoworker than the academic. Poets & Writers Magazine asked Levine, who turned eighty in January, how his writing is going these days.
The author of four poetry collections talks about his obsession with the unknown and the poem as a descendent of God.
Cathy Park Hong is a poet interested in the porous boundaries between languages and cultures. In her newest collection, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Hong creates a poem sequence that takes place in a future city called the Desert. It is in this tourist town, modeled on the likes of Las Vegas and Dubai, that Hong introduces the Guide, an amalgam of new and extinct English dialects, Korean, Latin, Spanish, and other miscellaneous pidgins. Acting as the reader's escort, Hong uses the Guide to address the issues of identity, both personally and geographically, in an increasingly globalized world.
