February 1994 Cover Image

Loaves and Oranges: Who Was Hai Zi?

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Neil Shepard
In February of 1991, I went to China to serve as exchange professor of English for Shanghai International Studies University. During the semester, I also hosted a Poetry Club at my apartment every Wednesday night which drew students and professors from surrounding universities and which eventually put me into contact with some of the better-known writers in Shanghai.
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The Lesson of Creative Writing's History

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D. G. Myers
There are two distinct ways to account for a literary text: first, as determined by the large impersonal forces of history, economics, language, the unconscious, ideology, gender, race, class, etc.; second, as created by an individual human mind. The first is the way of the literary scholar; the second, the way of the writer.
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Workshops & Solitude

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Mary Oliver
A workshop can help writers in a number of important ways. Let us look at some of the possibilities. First, a workshop can, in an organized way, make sure that members of the group learn the necessary language of their craft. Without this language, useful discussion is difficult and slow-members of the workshop cannot talk about poems with any ease and specificity.
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An Interview with Rosellen Brown

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Alexander Neubauer
Rosellen Brown began writing poetry at age nine and stories (her first, a murder mystery) at ten, enjoying "the power of words deployed on the page for my own delight." At Barnard College she took an early and influential writing class, a poetry workshop with Robert Pack, and in 1962 received an MA in English from Brandeis University. She has lived since in Mississippi and New Hampshire, and currently teaches creative writing in Texas at the University of Houston.

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Remarks to a Poetry Workshop

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Clayton Eshleman
Many creative writing students put too much of their energy into defending what they write, forming a resistance to change which occurs while attempting to write in a way that depends on change as its primary characteristic. Rimbaud tells us that I is another. He means by this that the I one brings initially to writing poetry is at best a chrysalis for incubating an imago, an imaginatively mature, or monstrous I whose life is in the poem.
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