Ploughshares Spring 2016

When I started reading the Spring 2016 edition of Ploughshares I thought it would be a quick read before I sunk my teeth into Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton - a book I've promised myself I would finish prior to seeing Hamilton on Broadway June 10. Typically Ploughshares is something I can devour in a couple days - five at most. But apparently that was not to be this time around.

Ploughshares has given me so many delightful editions over the past three years of my romance, subscription. It was bound to fall short sooner or later. I can't really explain why I couldn't get excited about this edition. Both guest editors, Alan Shapiro and Tom Sleigh are great poets, and their ideas about poetry - as noted in the profiles of the editors at the end of the edition (one of my actual favorite parts of the edition) - jive a lot with mine. 

The issue of Ploughshares is dedicated to four poets, Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013), Philip Levine (1928 - 2015), Mark Strand (1934 - 2014), and C.K. Williams (1936 - 2015). Perhaps the fact that I don't know any of these men started me at a particular disadvantage. Shapiro and Sleigh note in their introduction that the poems chosen for this edition were a "lament for the makers . . . praise of the highest kind, an affirmation of enduring value." Shapiro and Sleigh write that in each poem they were looking for a "simultaneous reckoning with life and language, innovation and tradition." Seen from this perspective, they were successful, because the poems, and the limited short fiction included, all touch on the sense of the abnormal within the normal. It makes the reading slow going and thoughtful, but not necessarily something I connected with. 

That said, there were, as always, poems and stories I absolutely adored:

Catherine Barnett - Lyric and Narrative Time at Cafe Loup
I absolutely loved this poem's exploration of time. Time as a relative concept, time as a tangible object. "Time is one part of the body that never gets washed." Is going to be a line that sticks with me for a long time.

Katherine Damm - The Middlegame
This short story also explored time. Time as a concept of what happens when our mind wanders. It starts out with the question of whether you can have two thoughts at once. In the story, the narrator is playing a chess game while simultaneously thinking of her family life, and our own attention wanders with hers back and forth from the game. It's a really brilliant way of showing narrative control and the passage of time without observation.

Kirby Gann - The Obscening of Engine Kreuter
I appreciate any story that uses a made up word in its title. This was a really fun story about a rock-n-roll guy finally selling out after eeking by. 

Mary Karr - Psalm for Riding a Plane
This poem delved into the experience of flying in a plane and the sort of ridiculousness of the concept of being inside a contraption that then lifts into the air and flies us somewhere. 

Michael Ryan - Three Days Flu No Shower
Some of the rhyming in this poem just really made me happy. And it painted such a grungy picture I could really smell and feel. "Between the showroom and the shop, he leans his push broom and he stops. Beef Barley soup as it plops out of the can into a thin tin pot." 

Jason Sommer - Grudge
Also a poem I really liked because of the way the rhyming worked, but also because of the concept of having the last word in a late night argument. 

Helen Schulman - In a Better Place
This story, about a woman who sees her supposedly dead father while on vacation in Normandy, France was entertaining and an interesting play on the concept of saying someone who has passed on is "in a better place." Her dead father certainly was, galavanting at outside cafe's with a young new companion.

Other poems I really enjoyed:
Christopher Merrill - The Red Umbrella
Honor Moore - Night Cafe
Katie Peterson - Note to Self
Paisley Rekdal - Astyanax
Maurice Riordan - Fleet
David Wojahn - Two Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger

I did enjoy the end of this edition more than the first half. The majority of the stories and poems I really liked came toward the end, but overall my own appreciation of the poems was uneven and this edition was not my favorite.

3/5 Stars.