New Yorker may soon publish first decent poem in more than 20 years

Okay, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but Alice Quinn's 20-year tenure as The New Yorker's poetry editor has, in the opinion of this reader, been characterized largely by a penchant for poems that manage to be both staid and trite. Or as the poet and critic David Orr has put it, the typical New Yorker poem has come to be regarded as "an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like 'water' and 'light.'" It's a formula that gets old very quickly, even in the pages of America's self-proclaimed best magazine.

But all that is, fingers crossed, about to change. Enter Paul Muldoon. He's been selected to replace Quinn as poetry editor, and one would hope he will be bringing the full force of his knowledge, wit and erudition with him to the job. The magazine's editor David Remnick, in a statement that can hardly be called surprising, is already trying to take the wind out of such optimistic sails. From the New York Times:

Mr. Remnick added that the selection of Mr. Muldoon, who had his first poem published when he was just 16, did not represent “some sort of radical aesthetic or theoretical shift.”
He added, “It’s not as if we went from a structuralist to a post-structuralist or a Beat to a conservative.”

My guess is that Remnick is just saying that to be nice. I hope so, at least.

Read the whole story here.