glass-shattering good news
Days after the event, and after receiving an email from a friend with the news that Alice Quinn is stepping down from her centuries-long stranglehold on - I mean poetry editorship of - The New Yorker - I finally catch up to the really interesting part of that piece of news. The new poetry editor at The New Yorker is Paul Muldoon!
Now, this won't make much of a difference to whether you and I will manage to place our poems in The New Yorker, unless of course you have some means of getting them there besides just emailing them into the Slush Box. The magazine receives 600 poems a week, which are read in the first instance by a team of erudite elves with MFA credentials, so that the editor doesn't have to read anything too heartrending about anybody's grandmother's cat; it is hardly likely that Paul Muldoon is going to have more time for dead felines than Alice Quinn did, and this may be the main thing they have most in common. But, you know... and I think the change will make itself felt: Muldoon has said he "does not intend to bring a sharp change of direction" to the magazine, but then the editor, David Remnick, also said Muldoon was an exciting choice because of his "wider appreciation of contemporary poetry." So it may be that the Zeitgeist down at Elf House will be different and different kinds of poems will make it past; the commissioning mood will be different, too. It will have to be, even without a sharp "change of direction."
Quinn (whose achievements are undoubted, and have been much discussed elsewhere) has been famous for her "pick-'em-up-&-drop-'em" style of nurturing, coteries, and a sort of pale blandness that has come to characterise the general tone of "New Yorker poetry." You never see a long, demanding poem in The New Yorker; you never see anything really quirky. I've read little squibs or bagatelles in there and, seriously, not been able to see the point of them at all. I've never cut one out and saved it, which I do sometimes from other periodicals.
The controversial, sainted novelist John Gardner once wrote (in his book "On Moral Fiction," I think) words to the effect that if The New Yorker published real, vital fiction even once it would shatter all the fine glass in the ads.* Now, Paul Muldoon has, I know, been published in the magazine and as such must bear an implicit share of responsibility for not shattering the glass (though for all I know he may have shattered it, because I don't always read the magazine, as it is £3.90 every two weeks in this country, but I do read it sometimes and always check the poetry). But the man has written many, many poems that would be more than capable of shattering it. He has a wonderful quality of play. He will bring a wide-ranging wit, and circle (and district) of poetry contacts, to his editorial practice.
I am entertaining a strong hope that he will smash the Steuben paperweights.** Come on Paul!
* This is unfair, of course; the New Yorker publishes lots of good fiction. I've always thought that the magazine's format is not kind to art - the font is wrong and the paper's too glossy.
** Also unfair. Steuben is a fine old firm that makes beautiful luxury goods. We have a Steuben apple at my mother's house which was a christening present to my brother, which is exactly the kind of thing.
I really won't hear a word against John Gardner.
4 comments:
Wonderful news but what I've come to love about American magazines is waiting for my next rejection letter before I send my next piece. It would be easy to pass a whole lifetime just waiting. I hope this doesn't change.
Dick, you are a star, as of course you know. And you are right - this is absolutely the salient part of the experience! I feel it will NOT change.
A couple of things about the New Yorker--with so few mainstream journals publishing poetry in the U.S. (The Atlantic Monthly comes to mind... and it has better fiction, as a rule, and I suppose some of the older political mags like the Nation, New Republic, and National Review run poems from time to time), the New Yorker assumes a kind of artificial importance. It is, simply, one of the venues for poetry in the U.S. that one's grandmother will know, at least by reputation and one of the few that you can find in the news kiosk of a train station.
But how many New Yorker readers really read the journal for the poetry? I've always read it the way I read Harper's (which doesn't run poetry). That is, if the articles listed on the front page looked interesting, I'd buy it. And maybe read the poems after the articles, reviews, stories, and Talk of the Town. But the poems were, are, and will be a minor part of the magazine for most of its readers.
Quincy, you are so right. I always marvel at how they manage simultaneously to raise poetry to an appearance of more importance - simply by publishing it - and to trivialise it in the same stroke. It is definitely a trick missed, especially as they are almost alone in actually recognising that the stuff exists.
That's exactly the way I read the New Yorker, which is also (as you know) increasingly available in station newsagents over here - I rarely read the fiction and every so often I'm chagrined to discover they've published something I'd have wanted to read... same with poetry. I usually do look at it first, and then feel like a mug. I'd love to see some more exciting & diverse, more real, less coterie-driven stuff in there.
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