[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Counting TNC, there are now two journals I don't submit to (though it never occurred to me before to submit to TNC, so I can't claim it to be entirely a matter of principle). I have met and continue to respect both their poetry editors.

May I ask what the other is?

[Roger Slater]

Sure, I guess. It's been discussed here. First Things. Mike Juster is the new poetry editor and my stance toward the magazine is no reflection on him whatsoever. I also know and like many poets who continue to submit there. It's just not for me.

[R. S. Gwynn]

I have sent a Facebook PM to the poetry editor:

"Please consider resigning from The New Criterion.

[David Rosenthal]

“There has to be a better way than this,”
is often what one says when what one means
is that they can’t account for what’s amiss
without discomfort, so they put up screens
to blind them to the hells some others live.
But sometimes emperors are all striptease,
and you can’t just ignore it when they give
their followers a list of enemies
and wink that they should all be taken down.
It isn’t something cured by conversations.
And call it what you will, by any noun,
a thorn is still a thorn, the variations
are all equally bloody, cold, and rough.
In times like these, "enough" is not enough.


--David R.

[Aaron Novick]

(you're missing a "the" in L5)

[Jim Moonan]

x
Don't ignore Julie's perspective and rationale. It is the antidote to polarization and stalemate. Constructive activism can't happen without understanding the things she illuminates in her post.

Oh, and tend your own garden.
x

[David Rosenthal]

Originally Posted by Aaron Novick

(you're missing a "the" in L5)

(thanks, fixed)

[Aaron Novick]

Jim, Julie's perspective is valuable, and much of what she says is admirable. Improving flawed organizations from the inside is noble work. I am not at all convinced by her implied point: that publishing poems in magazines that stump for fascism contributes, in any meaningful, effective way, to that sort of work.

"Tend your own garden" is fine advice much of the time, though when the owner of the neighboring garden has a gun and is coming for yours (this is a metaphor for fascism), you might want to start worrying about what's going on in the gardens around you.


David, your poem is an apt improvement on the original David R's.

[Roger Slater]

Julie writes, "Likewise, I will continue to submit certain poems to venues with whose viewpoints I strongly disagree, because that is the only way to reach the audiences whose minds and hearts I would like to change." That may be true of Julie's poems, but my own poems don't engage on subjects that directly involve the objectionable viewpoints of these venues. If they did, I see that it would be valuable to have my poems stand in contrast to the objectionable viewpoints expressed elsewhere in the magazine (though even then, I don't think of my poems as being written to change minds and hearts). But since they don't, they would only help to decorate a package that I don't approve of, or failing that, lend support and implied endorsement to the publication.

[Orwn Acra]

I don't understand (I understand too well) how otherwise decent people think this is about conversing with the other side. The other side--in this case Bolsonaro and Kimball's support of him--is literally--and I am using literally literally--calling for the deaths of: gay people, indigenous Brazilians, trans folk, socialists, and others.

Oh, and writing a poem never stopped anyone from calling me a fag. Your poem ain't gonna do shit.

BTW, you can't edit First Things and not be a homophobe; you are being paid by a homophobic institution that regular publishes anti-gay bullshit, giving that institution agency and an audience, an institution that just this August ran a piece equating homosexuality to pedophilia.