[A. E. Stallings]

Dear Poet Lariat,

Could you (and Alan) talk a little about how <u>Set the Ploughshare Deep</u> evolved? At what point did you realize the different verse and prose elements were coming together into a whole? Was there any resistence to publishing a "mixed-genre" volume?

sincerely,

Curious

[Tim Murphy]

Dear Curious,

Resistance? Dick Davis and Tim Steele read the final draft and favorably compared it to two other 'prosimetra,' Dante's La Vita Nuova and Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy. I pitched this line to David Sanders, director of Ohio University Press, and he chuckled "Those were probably the last two commercial successes in this forgotten genre." But it wasn't insuperable resistance, David's being only the third house to read it through.

I started it in 84, two years after I started farming and right after reading Norman Maclean's little masterpiece, A River Runs Through It. At the time, and for a decade thereafter, I believed there was no audience for contemporary formal verse, but I thought that if my little lyrics were set in a prose narrative stitched out of anecdotes that didn't lend themselves to verse--then hunters and farmers would read such a book. So I wrote it for the the folks who people my stories. And it worked. Last summer it was Amazon's 13th-ranked book in Minnesota.

I'm frankly baffled by the motivations of many poets on Peter's "Who Are You Writing For" thread,i.e., "I write to amuse myself, it's fun." Or Mark Strand's "I write for a few close friends." Unlike my broader collections of verse,
Ploughshare is written to and for my tribe, fellow denizens of the High Plains. I only wish I'd finished it in time to send it to an ageing fly fisherman in Missoula.

[graywyvern]

entre nous, i have sometimes wondered if the
prosimetrum isn't the only way for a poet to
reach a wide audience in our time...

[Tim Murphy]

A print run of 5000 copies hardly constitutes a large audience. Vikram Seth's "Golden Gate" sold fifty times that, and Wendy Cope's collections sell 60,000 copies in Britain. So I don't want to recommend the prosimetrum as any way to get your name up in lights. Now a movie made of a prosimetrum, that would be something! Anthony Hopkins playing my Dad, Jeremy Irons playing me, and for my brother--Brad Pitt. I'm joking, but Ms. Streep sold a lot of Housman when she recited "Dying Young" at Redford's grave in Out of Africa. Metrical speech is the most powerful speech ever devised by man, and the trick is to get folks to listen. Next week I tape a Ploughshare reading for Prairie Public TV, and there I'll reach the listeners who missed me on the radio.

Gray, I apologize for striking your posting of Winfred Townsley Scott from Mastery, a board which is now being overrun by lineated prose. You were a week ahead of your time.