Literary Magazines

To explore the edges of literature, one must look at contemporary literary reviews and journals. The themes and styles of writing in these reviews and journals reveal new ideas and trends in the literary community. These edges are often rough and not polished, they may present more extreme points of view or they may introduce new subjects. The latest issue of Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, exemplifies this. The theme of the Winter 1993–94 issue is “Borderlands,” edited by Russell Banks and Chase Twichell. In his introduction, Banks says: “But as Doris Lessing says ‘Things change at the edges,’ and insofar as I myself want things to change, and I do, for this world as presently constituted is intolerable, then my ongoing affection for work written ‘on the edge’ is political. I am still sufficiently optimistic to believe that if enough decent people see how bad things are on the borders, they will begin to change things there…The stories and narratives (include) white voices, black voices, male and female, with narrators speaking African‐American English, Hispanic‐American English, and Anglo‐American English, talking high church and low, downtown and up‐: these are the voices that daily surround us; and because they come to us, not from some dreamed‐of center where no one in America lives anymore, but from the inescapable borderlands, they speak for us all.” Chase Twichell reflects in her introduction on what she looked for in deciding what literature to select for this issue. “In terms of the task of editing, this means I now look hard at poems that carry the flags of outrage and grief, even if their surfaces are ‘rough.’ In fact, I've come to value highly some kinds of roughness because I believe they carry their cargos more honestly, in fact more precisely, by refusing to try to smooth unsmoothable edges.” These thoughts fascinated me and seemed to express the new directions and new ways of looking at literature. Many of the contemporary literary reviews and journals attempt to do just this.