Ploughshares

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For the agricultural implement, see plowshare, for the anti-nuclear group, see Trident Ploughshares

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.

[edit] 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 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.