Let's see if I can post to this board successfully....
Elsewhere (on Accomplished Members) there's been both congratulation and complaint about the most recent issue of
The Raintown Review. Some of us see especially strong poems by people we know from these boards; others of us see too many poems that treat the same subjects. It's clear there are differences of opinion, and they're not just differences about the worth of individual poem, but about balance and choice and what makes a good issue or grouping of poems.
I've been thinking about this lately because I just bought the 2007 offering in the
Best American Poetry series, and I see that opinions are starting to be offered in public about it as well. For example,
Choriamb led me to these two takes, one decidedly acid and one more detached and number-oriented:
Greatest Living Poet blog --scroll down to see the cartoons
Whimsy Speaks blog
While everybody seems to agree that nepotism and other favoritisms are nasty, other questions about the goodness or badness of a grouping are less clear. "Too much about the same subject" sounds like a valid complaint--yet we want unifying themes, both in magazine issues and in things like chapbooks.
What examples of really good issues or collections can you point to? What made them good? Can you point to examples that could have been good but had some identifiable flaw?
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