Comments on: Changing of the Guard

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:45:29 +0000

Delmore Schwartz said way back in 1950 that the pages of The New Yorker “are paved with good intentions.” He remarked that if its literary influence “is pernicious, it is… because there does seem to be a kind of periodical style at work in it from week to week.” (He was mostly talking about the fiction and criticism; notably he doesn’t mention the poetry at all.) Though not being completely negative, he worried that if you could say of something funny that it’s just like a New Yorker cartoon, you can end up “finding all existence New Yorkerish.” He also felt that if the magazine could afford such things as the “luxury” of Edmund Wilson’s criticism, “it ought to be able to encourage in its gifted authors a greater cultivation of their own originality.” That’s as fine an articulation of editorial responsibility as I’ve seen, and not just for the editors, past and present, of The New Yorker: writers and editors alike will want to live up to it.
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By: Robert Vasquez

Robert Vasquez — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:31:10 +0000

Thank you for sharing was is indeed good news.
I recently noted in my blog a comment about the lack of poetry by people of color in a certain metropolitan magazine (could it be the same one?) published in a city that has over a million people of color within its limits. Does this mean that poetry by white poets isn’t important? No, of course not; however, if a magazine is going to name itself after the inhabitants of a certain city, such a publication should be eager to promote the voices of diverse literary artists, including those of color. Let’s hope The New Yorker of the future gives readers a more representational tableau of the poets and writers in our world.
Above all, any magazine that publishes poetry should have a poetry editor who’s a poet (and a talented one at that). Thus, the late Howard Moss, whose own poetry merits attention, has finally been replaced as poetry editor by another talented poet.
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:27:41 +0000

“Meet the new boss,
Same as the old boss…”
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By: Robert J. Clawson

Robert J. Clawson — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:48:13 +0000

I began reading The New Yorker in the 1950′s, when I was in high school. I gravitated to the cartoons and the humorous verse. I’ve still got a subscription. In the Howard Moss years, I met him for lunch at the Algonquin with my buddy Anne Sexton. He asked me to send him some poems. Damn, I hadn’t written any. I wasn’t even a “desperate poetling” (love that!). During his time, powerful poems appeared from time to time, plus a good sprinkling of poems by Howard Moss.
I’ve had the good fortune to know Alice Quinn from the late Sixties, when she attended an Anne Sexton and Her Kind concert at Jordan Hall. You know how people who just barely know you repeat something each time you meet after elapsed years? Whenever I met Alice, she always said, “I’ve never attended anything since that Jordan Hall concert that so absolutely reeked of reefer.” (I was busy and didn’t really notice.)
After I actually began writing poetry and publishing it in fine journals such as The Southern Review and Beloit Poetry Journal, each time I ran into Alice she asked me to “send her a few.” I did, but she published none of them. So, even having had such luck, contacts at the pub don’t always work.
As is Alicia, I have been at best luke warm about 97% of what appears. As so often happened with Playboy, which paid good money for literature (I knew McCauley too), fine writers who’ve been solicited, couldn’t have sent their best work to The New Yorker. I read, for instance, the most padded tanka I’ve ever encountered in The New Yorker. The writer? Richard Wilbur.
I think it’s good news that Paul Muldoon has taken on the job. He won’t be publishing bad tankas. It’ll still be difficult to publish a poem in The New Yorker, whether you’re a pro or a desperate poetling. The main thing is, it’s still a great magazine. Although its fact-checking and proofing, like most other printed journals, have degraded since the era of William Shawn (John McFee’s even wordier), its editorials and reportage are courageous. When poets send work that achieves the daring of Jon Lee Anderson, George Packer, and Jane Meyer, I’ll bet Muldoon will feel obliged to publish it.
Bob Clawson
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By: Nick T.

Nick T. — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:09:20 +0000

This discussion reminded me of Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry,” found in The Dance of the Intellect. Perloff uses the occasion of the New Yorker’s publication, in 1981, of “Ill Seen Ill Said,” a non-lineated piece by Samuel Beckett, to talk about the zone between prose and verse. Perloff analyzes the literal layout of the piece–is it a poem? a short story?–in the magazine, which is presented as prose in columns–at one point Beckett’s piece frames a poem by Harold Brodkey–and offers a nifty, if unsurprising critique of the New Yorker’s predictable approaches to genre.
But the essay’s larger aim is to reframe Beckett as a poet, or at least to argue that he never really stopped writing poems, even if he wasn’t breaking lines, after his initial efforts in his 20’s (including a packet of poems he sent across the Atlantic to Poetry; these were swiftly rejected). To that end, Perloff argues that “Ill Seen Ill Said” is as much a poem as the Brodkey piece, and scans both. Though Beckett’s piece isn’t lineated, it scans beautifully, its metrics far more interesting and ambitious than those in the Brodkey poem. But you’d have to go to the essay for specifics; it’s been some time since I’ve read it.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:58:36 +0000

It’s not an aesthetic I object to in magazines so much as an anaesthetic. But I’m sure I contradict myself, and will again!
Dana, I’m glad to know I’m not the only one!
Shoot–I knew it had won the Yale Younger (judged by Auden), but somehow thought Some Trees also won the Pulitzer that year. I guess I am mistaken. Thanks…
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By: Matt Cozart

Matt Cozart — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:08:24 +0000

“It is hard to imagine a first book nowadays winning the Pulitzer, as Some Trees did.”
Some Trees won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, not the Pulitzer.
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By: Dana Levin

Dana Levin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:30:20 +0000

A.E., this is really nothing about nothing, but I read the New Yorker in the EXACT SAME sequence you do!
Thanks for the post.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:14:45 +0000

Is the argument that editors should not decide what their aesthetics are? And do only “mainstream” poetry publications do this??
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By: Alicia (A. E.)

Alicia (A. E.) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 08:13:21 +0000

Thanks for commenting. Well, it is true that any publication has an aesthetic, and major publications often have a stable of writers. I am not sure why it is the New Yorker that particularly disappoints me. Perhaps, as Steve suggests, I expect too much–that its importance to poetry is so out of proportion with poetry’s importance to it. You hear stories, I guess from Moss’s time, about a young poet like X.J. Kennedy sending off and getting their first poem published there, and I just do not think that would happen anymore, at least under the current climate. To a certain degree I wonder if this does not in some way intersect with Brian Phillips’ essay on Taste–which resonated with me on many levels though I found it disappointingly abstract and without concrete examples. That is, one gets the feeling that some editors are afraid to go out on a limb and “discover” someone, perhaps distrusting their own taste, and prefer to pick a known “brand”, as Christian puts it, even if the poem in question is a relatively lackluster effort. This seems to be the case for a lot of prizes too. It is hard to imagine a first book nowadays winning the Pulitzer, as Some Trees did.
I had originally tried to post another comment to Steve too, though I guess that vanished into the aether. That was to say that I’d be thrilled to see sharp and witty light verse in the magazine (a la Parker or Nash); if the poetry is going to be filler, I had rather it be entertaining. And even McGinley has her charms (“Portrait of Girl with Comicbook”). I think there’s room for verse inspired by the Graces as well as their terrible sisters, the Muses Nine.
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By: dwayne

dwayne — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:56:50 +0000

A.E.,
Your posts have been really interesting. I wonder, what you say to people who argue that the same criticism, more or less, that you aim at the New Yorker, applies to Poetry, the Gettysburgh Review, the Atlantic, Callaloo., etc .. that is most mainstream poetry publications.
It seems like journals decide what their aesthetics are and seek those out in writers, whether it is subject matter or form. Do you think that’s a fair criticism?
Dwayne
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By: Christian Bök

Christian Bök — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:03:31 +0000

The New Yorker has always struck me as a magazine that regards poetry as a kind of spackle to fill up the cracks in the brickwork of the page—spaces where no other kind of copy (like stories or adverts) might otherwise fit. The attitude of the editor in your anecdote also suggests that poetry has become a kind of afterthought in our appreciation of literature (and in an effort to stave off the onslaught of desperate poetlings seeking publication in such a venue, the editor, of course, has no choice but to accentuate the marginality of the genre in her magazine by handpicking the brand of caulking that she uses to fill the page).
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By: Alicia (A. E.)

Alicia (A. E.) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:16:04 +0000

PS–Yes, if I were an editor, I’d love to get a poem from Seamus Heaney too. But you can appreciate the demoralizing effect that had on aspiring poets given as a typical example of how an editor acquires a poem!
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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:49:02 +0000

There’s a good history of the New Yorker by a professor from Delaware, Ben Yagoda– it’s called About Town, and the Google people have excerpts.
If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that your suspicions about “poetry’s status within the magazine itself” go back decades, long before Alice Quinn arrived. Before the Fifties it was a venue for light verse, mostly, more Phyllis McGinley than Wallace Stevens (McGinley was closely identified with the magazine). When Howard Moss (not to be confused with Harold Ross) took over the poetry selection, the New Yorker became far more important to poetry than poetry has ever been to the New Yorker. Or at least more important than it was circa 1994 or so, when Yagoda’s history cuts off.
What editor wouldn’t ask Seamus Heaney for new poems?
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