Before the New Yorker was swallowed by Conde Nast, people like John Updike could do brilliant double-tongued light verse about bottled water (e.g. eschewing the “quencher from Croton”) that rattled away with carbonated glee and a subtext of unusual subtlety. That one, in my youth, got me to boil up a thingamabob on shoes that was published in the good old Mella-edited hardcopy “Light.” Now, everything is corporate. A magazine designed by a committee of one hundred dromedaries and an uncertain number of llamas. The New York Times Sunday Magazine now publishes “poems” that are mostly boring. SPOWs on the whole: Short Pieces Of Writing. The New Republic now has a poetry policy of remarkable gerrymandering: I couldn’t get published there again (I’ve tried) even if I’d submitted something identical to one of their recent items, but had submitted it first. Enough for this post.
PS: Not enough. I also think (a) that poetry is seen by many on big magazine staffs as elitist, and (b) that signed poems are seen as a constant reproach and threat by the faceless, anonymous advertising people on mags and elsewhere who went into copywriting and continuity creating, instead of into our art — as I almost did for WSBT-TV, South Bend, Indiana. Unacknowledged jealousy is a subtle venom that can rule many selection choices at editorial confabs.
Last edited by Allen Tice; 03-15-2019 at 09:02 PM.
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