The Hollins Critic

A leading American literary journal, The Hollins Critic enters its 46th year in 2009 with essays on writers like Kelly Cherry by Casey Clabough, Christine Garren by Allison Seay, and Jason Shinder by Liz Rosenberg.

The Hollins Critic, published five times a year, presents the first serious surveys of the whole bodies of contemporary writers’ work, with complete checklists. In past issues, you’ll find essays on such writers as John Engels (by David Huddle), James McCourt (by David Rollow), Jane Hirshfield (by Jeanne Larsen), Edwidge Danticat (by Denise Shaw), Vern Rutsala (by Lewis Turco), Sarah Arvio (by Lisa Williams) and Milton Kessler (by Liz Rosenberg).

The Hollins Critic also offers brief reviews of books you want to know about and poetry by poets both new and established. And every issue has a cover portrait by Susan Avishai M.A. '02.

Edward P. Jones June 2007 Critic	Dawn Powell December 2007 Critic	John Engels June 2008 Critic	Jane Hirshfield December 2008 Critic

June 2009 Issue Excerpt

"Reminiscences of Donald Hall"
By Lewis Turco

When Donald Hall’s first book of poems Exiles and Marriages was published in 1955 I was a sailor three years out of high school sailing around in the Pacific Ocean aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, an aircraft carrier. I was a yeoman (i.e., clerk), in the Gunnery Office, and a subscriber to Time magazine where I first read about Hall and his new book. I could not recall Time having published anything having to do with poetry — I’m sure I would have remembered because I had been spending my four-year enlistment intensely teaching myself how to write; I had even been publishing in the little magazines for two years. Yet there was Donald Hall’s first book of poetry written up for America and the world to see. Needless to say I was impressed, so much so that I bought a copy of the book as soon as I could, read it, and immediately struck up a correspondence with the author. He was, and still is “my oldest friend in poetry,” as I inscribed in a book of my own poems, The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House, sent to him in 2002.

Hall was the first of a number of formal poets of his era, most of them five or six years older than I, whom I admired and who became friends or acquaintances in the next few years while I was going to school at the Universities of Connecticut and Iowa: James Wright, John Hollander, W. D. Snodgrass, Richard Frost, X. J. Kennedy, Robert Huff, Philip Booth, Donald Justice, and some older formalists as well, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, John Ciardi, and my undergraduate instructor John Brinnin among them. When I began the Cleveland Poetry Center in 1962 I called on a number of these poets to come and read, as I had done at UConn for the Student Union reading series. Many of these people appeared in two anthologies, The New Poets of England and America, first selection, edited by Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, published in Cleveland by Meridian Books in 1957, and in The New Poets of England and America, second selection, edited by Hall and Pack in 1962. The “First Selection” — about which more later — launched the so-called “War of the Anthologies” that pitted the “Academic Poets” of the 1950s against “The Beats” and “The Black Mountaineers.”

LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) wrote in Donald Allen’s response to the Hall-Pack-Simpson collection, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, “There must not be any preconceived notion or design for what a poem ought to be. ‘Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until it’s thar’ says Charles Olson. . .& I follow closely with that. I’m not interested in writing sonnets, sestina[s] or anything. . .only poems.” In Jones’ opinion, obviously, works written in traditional verse forms were not, in fact, poems at all, and by extension, therefore, neither were poems written during several centuries of English literature.

Cover portrait © Susan Avishai 2009

Writer's Guidelines

The Hollins Critic reads poetry submissions from September 1 to December 15 each year. Poetry must be submitted to The Hollins Critic using the link below. There are no rules about style or subject. One to five poems may be submitted.

The Critic pays $25.00 per poem, upon publication. All rights revert to the author following publication, but if the poem is reprinted elsewhere, the Critic should be credited.

Besides poetry, the Critic publishes an essay on a contemporary author in each issue, and book reviews as space permits. The Critic does not accept unsolicited essays. Rarely do we accept unsolicited book reviews. When a review is published, the author receives a copy of the issue, and two copies are sent to the book’s publisher. Only poetry may be submitted through the link below.

The Critic does not publish fiction.

Click here to submit to the Critic.

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