[New-Poetry] Re: Changing of the guard

[David Graham]

I'll have to pay more attention to Muldoon's picks to see if I think  
there's any shift of taste going on, but even if there is, I kind of  
doubt it'll be seismic.

And yes, The New Yorker's range is narrowly mainstream, if one wants  
to think of it in that oxymoronic way.  As Tad has noted, that's sort  
of a given--it's a glossy mag, after all.

Still, I've been hearing the complaint that the New Yorker publishes  
nothing but bland, safe, mindless, perfume-ad-friendly poetry for  
decades now.  (Sam's right to single out their history as a purveyor  
of smart light verse--who was it wrote the annual Christmas doggerel  
for them for many years?)  I just wanted to worry that claim a bit.   
In other words, I wonder if we tend to remember more of the  
quietudinous stuff precisely because it's sandwiched between the  
perfume ads, while we forget the poems by, say, Milosz and Syzmborska  
that have also appeared as often as Deborah Garrison's.  It seems to  
me that every time this discussion pops up, people tend to  
conveniently forget Milosz and remember Oliver P. Flutterheart's ode  
to his bird feeder.

And has the NYer really been blander than equivalent mainstream  
outlets such as The Hudson Review, say?

They certainly publish a fair number of poems that do nothing for  
me.  Merwin's later work fairly reliably hits my snooze button, for  
example.  But so does every other journal in creation print work that  
fails to dazzle.


========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================




On Mar 4, 2008, at 5:26 AM, Bob Grumman wrote:

> I think the complaint against the New Yorker is not that they  
> publish bad poems but that the range of poems they publish is  
> extremely limited.  Yes, all mainstream, but my impression is that  
> they don't even publish a very wide range of mainstream poems.
> What I least understand about the mass media with regard to poetry  
> is why it seems so seldom to so much as refer to adventurous poetry  
> much less publish an example or two of it once or twice a year.
>
> --Bob G.
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080304/ba455bd4/attachment.html