from "How Do You Bottle the Lightning?" Anna Journey sits down with David Wojahn DW: ... I think that in our post-modern, theory-inflected climate, the very notion that self-representation can be authentic and sincere—can in fact be an essential goal of poetry—seems to a lot of people a little passé. I find it maddening when students in graduate workshops write obscurely not for any abiding aesthetic reason, but for mere self-protection. The workshop never gets beyond the rather pointless exercise of trying to figure out the poem’s dramatic situation, and when you finally ask the poet to say something about her work, the answer goes something like, “Well, I didn’t want to tell it like it actually happened because that would seem too ‘confessional.’” And so “confessional” has become an unjustly pejorative word like “liberal” or “community organizer,” so vastly out of fashion that it seems like it’s never going to rise again.  [more] Welcome Laurie Ann Cedilnik Welcome to the new Gulf Coast website! We are proud to finally offer online content, including web-exclusives, just in time for the release of our new issue. As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, and this issue of Gulf Coast is no exception (you'd have to see it to believe it). We're pleased to offer the best from established and emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction and poetry (with some reviews and interviews added to the mix, as always, for good measure). It was important for us to launch this site along with Gulf Coast's Winter/Spring 2009 issue; Volume 21.1 is truly one of our best.  [more] from "You Are What You Like" Alix Ohlin It was typical Dillrod to come to town at a bad time. He’d shown up at Jill and Stefan’s house just after they moved in together, which was just after his first divorce, in need of comfort and a drinking buddy, which for him were the same thing; then he’d visited them right after their honeymoon, to announce his own new engagement, in need of celebration and a drinking buddy, which were also the same thing. Now he was divorced again and seeing somebody new, and he was in town coincidentally on business, and Stefan invited him over, even though the baby was just six months old and half-crazy with colic and neither of them had had a solid night’s sleep since she’d been born, or, in Jill’s case, a couple of months before that.  [more] from "The Octopus Game" Nicky Beer Two people sit side by side And become each other's arms They are forbidden even to scratch their itches Must be teachable in adjusting The pressure from their fingernails To rake the strange, neighboring skin One eases sweet floes of mango Between the other's lips While worrying the reed of a proffered saxophone  [more] from "Dominoes" Kevin Allardice Take the case of the American realist painter Richard Poplar (b. 1938, Chicago, IL), an artist of modest success in that his work garnered him a teaching position and the vague déjà-vu-like recognition of the paint-watching public. [...] But his degenerating Parkinson’s disease later in life provided his days with chronic and suicidal depression and his work with wavelike warbles—the well-ordered precision of his cities beginning to blur and bounce—causing him to be celebrated, of all places, in the abstract community as a reformed genius.  [more]