The University Record, October 1, 1996
MQR features poetry, essays, fiction in part one of special fall issue
By Bernie DeGroat
News and Information Services
The pages of this fall’s Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) will “provide a showcase for the vitality of mind and the originality of language we associate with the vocation of poetry,” says MQR editor Laurence Goldstein.
Part one of The Poet’s Voice, a special MQR double issue, provides a forum for poets to speak in different voices—as essayists, reviewers, fiction writers, interviewees and authors of verse.
“The point is not to seek some kind of consensus about any topic, least of all poetry,” says Goldstein, who notes that a similar issue five years ago was one of MQR‘s most popular. “It seemed reasonable to take another sounding of the poetic sensibility in our time—to view the world through a certain kind of imaginative lens, to take stock of what poets are saying these days, not only about poetry, but any number of topics.”
Among the works included in this special issue are an essay on “Rhyming Action” by English Prof. Charles Baxter, the poetry of English Prof. and MacArthur Fellow Thylias Moss, and Goldstein’s review of books by Donald Hall, a former U-M English professor. Also, alumna Anne Stevenson, one of the most distinguished poets in Great Britain, contributes an essay on Elizabeth Bishop.
In addition, the writings of Diane Ackerman, Charles Bernstein, Tess Gallagher, George Garrett, Sandra M. Gilbert, Louise Gluck, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Muske, Charles Simic, James Tate and more than a dozen others are featured in the fall issue of MQR.
“Special issues like this one help to sustain the reputation of MQR as a leading academic journal attractive to essayists and creative writers, and therefore, to readers,” Goldstein says.
MQR, he adds, was recently given an Alternative Press Award by the editors of UTNE Reader for the best feature writing in a national publication this year.
The special fall issue is currently available in local bookstores and in the MQR office in Room 3032, Rackham Building. For more information, call 764-9265.
