Ploughshares is an American literary journal published quarterly by Emerson College. The journal was founded in a bar by DeWitt Henry, a Harvard Ph.D. student, and Peter O'Malley, an Irish expatriate, in 1971. A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense — including the short story, poetry and essay — and also literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews, letters and gossip. ... Emerson College was founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a school of oratory, in Boston, Massachusetts. ... Look up bar and Bar in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Harvard redirects here. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1971 calendar). ...

The story

It started in 1970 at the "Plough and Stars," a pub on Massachusetts Avenue, between Central and Harvard squares in Cambridge. Henry, who had been raised on Philadelphia's Main Line, had edited the undergraduate literary magazine at Amherst College and had attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop for two years. He was finishing his dissertation on Shakespeare, but he was a fiction writer at heart who also had a long-standing inclination for the publishing trade (he'd had his own hand printing press in high school). O'Malley, part owner of the pub, was well-versed in a number of subjects, having studied law at the University of Dublin and music at Berklee and Harvard, and he had been bred in the literary traditions of the Irish Revival. So the idea that was being bandied about in the "Plough and Stars"—that the group should put out a literary publication of their own—not only engaged the two men, but seemed relatively feasible. ... The University of Dublin, corporately designated the Chancellor, Doctors and Masters of the University of Dublin located in Dublin, Ireland, was founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, making it Irelands oldest university. ... Berklee College of Music, founded in 1945, is an independent music college in Boston, Massachusetts with many prominent faculty, staff, alumni, and visiting artists. ...

The question became, What kind of magazine? And who would edit it? With what sort of aesthetic values? Besides Henry and O'Malley, who were designated co-directors, there was a core group that included fellow Harvard students, Iowa Workshop graduates, New York School and Bowery veterans, and experimental Black Mountain poets. It soon became clear that the magazine, as a cooperative effort, must embody controversy, and must in its format involve the question, rather than any one final opinion, of what is good." Thus, they settled on the concept of a revolving editorship, with each member taking a turn as the editor of an issue and the others given a number of pages for individual agendas. Not only was each issue representative of an internal debate over tastes and forms, but each successive issue also spoke to those before it with a new, collective, often contradictory voice.

Peter O'Malley raised $2,000 for the first issue. Ploughshares hung a shingle, invited submissions, and six hundred manuscripts promptly arrived at the pub. Henry pasted up galleys and stripped negatives at a South End printshop, and Vol. 1, No. 1, of Ploughshares—126 pages of poetry, fiction, and line drawings—was published in September 1971, with a print run of 1,000. About six hundred were sold for two dollars each. Over the next three years, three more issues were published, with the round table of editors regularly including Lloyd Schwartz, Ellen Wilbur, James Randall, Thomas Lux, David Gullette, Fanny Howe, Norman Klein, George Starbuck, Robert Pinsky, Aram Saroyan, Jane Shore, Bruce Bennett, George Kimball, and William Corbett. Lloyd Schwartz is an American poet who is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at The University of Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator for NPRs Fresh Air. ... Thomas Lux (1946 -- ) is an American poet. ... Fanny Howe (born 1940) is an United States poet and writer of fiction. ... George Starbuck (1931-1996) was an American poet of the neo-formalist school. ... Robert Pinsky 15 May 2005 Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000). ... Aram Saroyan (born 1943) is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. ... William John Corbett (14 September 1841 – 21 April 1898) was an American author in the late 19th century. ...

Past contributors

Past contributors to the journal have included:

Bookcover of Works and Days in Russian Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: ) was a Russian-born poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992). ... Gillian Conoley is an American poet and a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ... Kevin Goodan is an American poet. ... Linda Gregg is an award-winning poet, currently a writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. ... Edward Hirsch (born 1950) is an American poet and academic who wrote a best seller about reading poetry. ... An image of Li-Young Lee from the press release for a public poetry reading at Abilene Christian University (2001). ... Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. ... Sabina Murray (1968 - ) is an award-winning Filipino American screenwriter, the author of three novels, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ... Gerald Stern (born 1925 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Jewish-American poet. ...

External links

• Ploughshares