Yale the Younger no longer Glücked

The Yale Herald would like you to know about its prestigious poetry prize that Louise Glück is no longer judging:

There might be a revolution going on in American poetry, but like most things that happen in American poetry, nobody really knows about it. It won’t make CNN, and definitely not Newsweek, but this spring, after the publication of Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry, Louise Glück, Adjunct Professor of English and the Rosencranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale, will step down, after nearly a decade, as the judge of the Yale Younger Series of Poets.

It’s really not surprising that this isn’t a big deal. It’s poetry, which no one reads anyway, and it’s a first-book competition, so none of the winners are famous. It doesn’t come as a shock for anyone with a subscription to Publisher’s Weekly—or any other magazine, for that matter—to hear that poetry is, generally, no longer news in American culture.

And yet the fact is that an astonishing number of poets who went on to great prominence and lasting influence began their careers as Yale Younger Poets. Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, James Tate, Jack Gilbert, Robert Hass—any “Who’s Who” of American poetry over the past century would have to mention at least a handful of the contest’s winners . . .