"Annals of Poetry"

Well, the fashionable debate over the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation continues with David Orr's essay, "Annals of Poetry," appearing in this Sunday's NYTBR.  The essay comes in response to the lengthy New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear ("The Moneyed Muse") that criticized the policies, or public manifestations, of the Poetry Foundation in view of the $200 million donation it received from Ruth Lilly in 2001.  Orr cites some interesting facts not mentioned in Goodyear's article, namely that Goodyear's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker more often than a bucketful of venerated masters (Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, and "every living American poet laureate except for W.S. Merwin").  This would speak volumes for Goodyear if one ignores that she was David Remnick's assistant.  While that can stand as is, Orr raises issue with the poems themselves:

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

In general, I never turn to the New Yorker for the what's new in poetry.  They were keen enough to run a few of Herbert's poem--were they some of his stronger ones?--I'm not qualified to comment.  Orr sees no reason to relent, however, and ends with the following question:

Poets may get frustrated with the Poetry Foundation; they may complain; they may disagree with certain projects. But the Poetry Foundation, however misguided or impolitic, hasn’t given up on poetry. The question is: Has The New Yorker?

Comments

[Dan Schneider]

The New Yorker has not published any good poems, much less great ones, since the mid 1970s. And Jorie Graham a Master? Here's a poem the New Yorker rejected, and one which Grajam, or any of the others mentioned, could not write in a thousand lifetimes.

http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm#THE%20TWIN%20TOWERS%20CANON

[Robert Peake]

Does anyone still turn to the New Yorker to take the pulse of poetry? These kinds of debates about "misused influence" run counter to the fact that even established magazines are vulnerable to having their reputations eroded by consistent mistakes.

[Jessica Schneider]

"First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets".

Last time I checked Donald Hall was far from being an 'excellent poet'. Also, this brings me to my next point:

"This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names"

Why? No one outside the poetry world/universities would even know who Jorie Graham is. I thought the whole purpose of the magazine (at least they did this back in the 50's and 60's when quality poets like Plath and Sexton appeared) is to give 'new writers' more exposure. Everyone knows that in the publishing world, a publication in the New Yorker is like a free ticket for a book deal. Ok then, why would Donald Hall, who has already published many books, need another publication? And a Pulitzer Prize winner already has an "in". Let new writers have a chance. But they don't. So to me, that defeats the whole purpose to why they publish creative work in the first place. Not to mention that the work they are publishing by these so called 'big names' is not anything worth reading.

[Mike]

Perhaps "master" was the wrong word. Maybe I'm just hyping Graham's new collection out from Ecco next year! Perhaps I was careless.

I agree with each of you. Much of what's been said goes for the New Yorker's fiction as well, which seems to lose page-space each month.

I'm not sure what the motivation behind the artless "fluff" that has been appearing in the New Yorker. The editors seem to want the readers to feel smart. What would their tagline be? "Read the New Yorker. Understand the greatest poetry ever written. The modernists were schizophrenic hacks!" Or something like that, I don't know.

It looks like we're on the same page, anyhow.

[Dan Schneider]

Since fiction is easier than poetry, the crap they write is even more shameful. I've sebt a few NY based tales- one based on 9/11, that is far better than the shit tale by Sherman Alexie (oo la la, an American Indian), yet they publish crap, like a tale last year, translated from the French, about a guy digging through his sewer line. Apt metaphor.

[David]

"in their reach for the sun, to cast upon it, its Light,
which reveals, to its makers, a vision to benight"

Dude, that's horrible writing, like a hack Victorian poem. Good thing you copyright all your poems on the site you linked us to, otherwise the ghost of some retarded 18th century poet might come along and steal your lame, tin ear, trite poems.

And by the way, Donald Hall is a great poet, and our current Poet Laureate.
I do, however, agree that most of the poems, 90 percent, published in The New Yorker are crap.