Even for those of us who don’t have to be convinced to read poetry in the first place, it can be a challenge to “keep up” with poetry. If you’re reading new books, you’re not reading old favorites, and vice versa. I’ve heard poets I admire say with guilt (or sometimes with a kind of pride) that they can’t (or won’t) “keep up” with poems in journals and magazines. While some of this sentiment certainly smacks of dismissiveness and elitism, I’d like to give other readers the benefit of the doubt. There are only so many hours in the day, and we do live in a kind of golden age of the proliferation of literary magazines. That said, flip that feeling on its head and now–there are hours in the day! And we live in a golden age of literary magazines!
There’s something incomparable about the thrill of reading a poem that takes the top of your head off and knowing that you’re one of the first people to have that experience with the poem, but not the only person; across the country and the world, there are other readers in bedrooms and offices, on buses and benches, who are experiencing the same involuntary shiver of wonder as they read the same words.
Austin Allen just wrote about the 100th anniversary of the publication of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which appeared in Poetry in November 1915. Allen delves into the poem in the beautiful depth that it deserves, but I love to imagine flipping the magazine itself open in 1915 to read the first version of the poem (sans a few familiar stanzas cut at Harriet Monroe’s request, which Stevens later returned to the poem for its publication in book form in 1923). Complacencies of the peignoir? Yes, complacencies of the peignoir. Before November 1915, there were no words for this, and now there are.
Five months earlier, in June 1915, T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appeared in Poetry: “In the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo.”
Five months ago, in June 2015, D. A. Powell’s poem “Not Overlooking the Kum & Go” appeared in Poetry: “Up above the Kum & Go / I’m reading Maya Angelou.”
With heartbreaking, Berryman-esque cadences (“The universe I fear to be crashing. / No painkillers for Doug. Ugh. / It’s just autumn come. Electrical storms. / The brave fire of the leaves and everything”), Powell references or alludes to Angelou, Whitman, Frost, Eliot, and Mr. Owl (the Tootsie Pop mascot, that icon of questioning and desire): “So many licks to get to the polished moon.” Powell writes, “All words have been charged with electric bodies / ever since I wandered into my first poem.” Wandering into Powell’s poem for the first time in the pages of Poetry magazine this past June was one of those incomparable moments in my reading life.
This month, the shivers came reading Tracy K. Smith’s “Ash” in the November 23 issue of The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/ash-poems-tracy-k-smith
and Graham Foust’s “Poem to My Daughter” in The New Republic:
https://newrepublic.com/article/123292/poem-my-daughter-poem
and Marcus Wicker’s “Taking Aim at a Macy’s Changing Room Mirror, I Blame Television” from the November issue of Poetry:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/251240
I’m also working my way through the newest issues of Prelude and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, both of which I highly recommend. Check out Sixth Finch, Memorious, The Offing, jubilat, Pinwheel, PANK Magazine… the list goes on.
To state the obvious, these magazines don’t come into being in a void; as I read a poem I love in these publications, I know I have editors to thank–Cathy Park Hong, Paul Muldoon, Don Share, Robert C.L. Crawford, Cal Bedient, David Lau, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Katy Didden, Rob MacDonald, Morgan Parker, Caryl Pagel, Kevin González, Stephen Danos, Dolly Lemke, Holly Amos, to name just a few–who stay excited about wandering into poems and leading us in as well. Each of these editors “has at heart your getting lost,”* and I’m happy to follow them.
*“The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost“ is a quote from Frost’s great poem “Directive,” which first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review in the winter of 1946. (Later: “And if you’re lost enough to find yourself / By now, pull in your ladder road behind you / And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.”) The Winter 1946 VQR was edited by Charlotte Kohler, who was hired in 1942 as VQR‘s managing editor, a de facto editorial position, as editor Archibald B. Shepperson was called to military service. She was selected for the position in part because, as a woman, she wouldn’t be drafted; she was formally named editor in 1946, and she continued to lead the publication for three decades, making her VQR‘s longest-serving editor. Out of an estimated 90,000 manuscripts she read as editor, the poets she published included a college senior named Adrienne Cecile Rich in the Summer 1950 issue. The manuscript of Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is in the VQR archives at the University of Virginia:
