Archive for January, 2006

According to sources like The Boston Globe, Josh Corey, and Chicago Magazine, there is a new editorial agenda at Poetry Magazine. My recent interest in the Imagism ideas published during the formative period of that publication has put the magazine at the top of my wish list, mostly out of curiosity. It seems that a century has done a lot to change the magazine, for better or for worse.

According to the Globe,

Three years ago, a pharmaceutical heiress made Poetry magazine, the venerable monthly that discovered T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, the richest literary journal in the history of the world. The sum of $175 million, given by Ruth Lilly, made the subject of poetry into news fit to print in just about every newspaper in America.

The question on everyone’s mind, then, is: what ever will they do with all that money. Luckily, when a large sum of money is at play, the use of if it is generally documented, or justified somehow.

The Poetry Foundation, the entity created by and entrusted with that money, and its president John Barr have a stated agenda to put poetry “back into the mainstream of American culture”

It also happens that the president of the foundation is a former Wall Street Executive, in addition to having written whatever poetry bears his name. Perhaps this is why the Globe reports: “some critics of the foundation’s initiatives wonder whether poetry can, or should, restore its cultural authority by way of a marketing campaign. . . The Poetry Foundation’s posture as a kind of heavily endowed insurgency trying to shake up the poetry world has drawn two kinds of critics: those who think the foundation is addressing an illusory crisis and those who think the foundation’s approach is misconceived.”

Indeed, Barr doesn’t hesitate to use the language of corporate marketing to talk about his outreach efforts, speaking of “demographic groups” and “poetry users.” With annual budgets that should range from $5 million to $10 million a year, Barr says, the Poetry Foundation’s ultimate goal is to create a general readership for poetry large enough to make it possible for more poets to succeed in a commercial marketplace rather than rely on academia to make a living.

Now, that would be nice, wouldn’t it – if poets could succeed with the commodification of their art. Then again, art is inherently not commodity.

Oh, and get a load of this! These are the words of Christian Wiman, an editor of Poetry Magazine

More poems should rhyme. More poems should have meter. More poems should tell stories in accomplished ways. More poems should do the things that people like poems to do.

Poems should do whatever they were created to do! I’ll venture a guess about those people who expect poems to do such things as rhyme, etc.. They are the same people who haven’t read very much from the centuries and centuries of poetry that does those things, and that lack of reading is what caused their expectation in the first place. Those expectable poems are published, already.

(I wonder, if a poem fully ought to do whatever it was created to do, does that justify the poems that were created to please the alrgest possible audience, to be sold, or published in order to sell magazines. . .)

Nevertheless, if this organization is hiring, I’ll apply for a job. It sounds like they might benefit by having someone like me behind one of their desks. I know I would probably learn a thing or two, even as their janitor.