[New-Poetry] When Quinn the Eskimo gets here...

[TheOldMole]

Are these the questions you would have asked Alice Quinn? (from PW)


*Who do you perceive to be the audience for the /New Yorker/'s poems?
*I feel that /New Yorker/ readers are people who were profoundly 
connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to 
touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The 
/New Yorker/ gives poets access to an international audience of 
literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.

*What changes have you noticed in poetry?
*Poetry's a little swervier now. There are a lot of leaps being made, 
and an enjoyment of humor, playfulness, mystery—a certain ebullient 
spontaneity. I feel that in the work of the younger poets, and I love 
it. Of course, I'm still a great believer in Robert Frost's dictum that 
a good poem should be like a piece of ice on a hot stove; it should ride 
on its own melting. I feel there's more openness to the work that Jean 
Valentine and Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe are doing, and some of that 
derives from the enjoyment that the poets in their twenties and thirties 
take in that work. They don't enshrine it in a totally academic and 
fierce and somewhat defensive, even belligerent, way. They don't feel 
they have to argue for it; they just enjoy it.

*Where will poetry take you next?
*First I would like to produce a very good book of Bishop's journals. I 
will have time in which to go to the Houghton Library in Boston and to 
the archives at Vassar, and St. Louis, where they have the May 
Swenson–Elizabeth Bishop correspondence, and to really get in a little 
bit of that dreamy investigative time that you get when you're at a 
rare-book library. Will I pursue other book projects or will I want to 
become an editor-at-large at a poetry house I admire? I'm not sure. For 
the time being, I really see PSA as an important focus of my devotion. 
But I can't pretend that it is in any way easy to leave the /New 
Yorker/. There's nothing that's going to take the place of people in 
[my] apartment building and people in London saying, "I loved that poem 
in the /New Yorker/ last week." The /New Yorker/ is a magical place.



-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford