Ploughshares Winter 1990-91: The Literature of Ecstasy

by Gerald Stern (Editor), Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Li-young Lee

Overview

An issue of Ploughshares from Winter 1990-91, guest-edited by Gerald Stern. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This classic issue, guest-edited by award-winning poet Gerald Stern, explores the "literature of ecstasy." In his Introduction, Stern writes, "Ecstasy not only means to be 'placed outside,' that is, to be 'placed outside the body,' but it means—also—to be displaced; and an understanding of the ecstatic mode, in all its sense, would take into account both of these meanings. Thus it denotes a state of exaltation in which one transcends oneself and, as well, a kind of dislocation."

The writers exploring this theme include Philip Levine, Li-Young Lee, Jerome Rothenberg, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Jean Valentine, and Stanley Plumly.


INTRODUCTION
Gerald Stern, "Approaching the Ecstatic"

PROSE AND POETRY by

Richard E. Miller
Arthur Vogelsang
Martha Ronk
Jane Miller
Stanley Plumly
Robert Antoni
Kerry Shawn Keys
Kathryn Rhett
Brenda Hillman
Connie Hales
Jean Valentine
Peter Waldor
Patricia Goedicke
Mark Jarman
May Ann Taylor-Hall
Jack Gilbert
Li-Young Lee
Jerome Rothenberg
Deborah Brass
Alessandra Lynch
Jill Gonet
Tomaz Salamun
Mark Levine
Christopher Davis
Len Roberts
Robert Pinsky
Edward Hirsch
Stephen Berg
Lee Meitzen Grue
Mark Rudman
Larry Levis
Lynn Emanuel
Marvin Bell
Philip Dow
Allen Grossman
Deborah Digges
Sharon Olds
Laurie Kutchins
Terese Svoboda
Rosalind Pace
Robin Behn
Jeanne Foster
Patricia Traxler
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Lia Purpura
Jack Driscoll
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Philip Levine
Kenneth Fifer
Stuart Dischell
Elizabeth Dietz
Hayden Carruth
Maggie Anderson
Patricia Henley
T. R. Hummer
Myra Shapiro
Eric Rawson
Walter Knupfer
James Baker Hall
Susan Mitchell
William Kittredge
David Ignatow
Ed Ochester
Ron De Maris
Chard deNiord
David Kirby
David Gullette
Richard Jackson
Shirley Kaufman

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014594981
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	12/01/1990
Series:	Ploughshares , #164
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	623 KB

About the Author

Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925. His recent books of poetry are Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010), Save the Last Dance: Poems (2008); Everything Is Burning (2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.

His other books include Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rejoicings (1973).

About his work, the poet Toi Derricotte has said, "Gerald Stern has made an immense contribution to American poetry. His poems are not only great poems, memorable ones, but ones that get into your heart and stay there. Their lyrical ecstasies take you up for that moment so that your vision is changed, you are changed. The voice is intimate, someone unafraid to be imperfect. Gerald Stern’s poems sing in praise of the natural world, and in outrage of whatever is antihuman."

His honors include the Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

Stern was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.