The March 2021 issue of Poetry magazine arrived. I sat right down with it, on the principle that onerous duties should be tended to right away.
If you’re following the field you have to read Poetry, of course. With its handsome packaging, lavish endowment, and century’s worth of accumulated prestige, it enjoys an unequaled authority. Its associated Poetry Foundation website, open to all, is a wonderful resource. An ongoing collaboration with the PBS NewsHour connects prominent voices in the field to millions of viewers.
What’s not to like? Well, for me, the lion’s share of the verse that is being printed.
I read each issue carefully. I read many poems twice and some out loud. I read in the hope of pleasure, which of course sometimes I get. I read as an editor—would I print this? I read as a student of the scene—what do these poems and essays tell me about trends and preoccupations in the poetry world today? I guard against rejecting something just because it is unfamiliar.
That’s just the problem with March 2021 Poetry: far too much of the language in it is absolutely familiar. Predictable. Lazy. Sentimental. Off the shelf in some poetic dollar store.
The first piece, Jennifer Woodson’s “Weight,” sets the tone. “When I was a kid,” it begins, “there was this song that played on the radio all the time.” The song ( “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” as sung by The Hollies) mentions “a long and winding road.” Musing on recent political and cultural troubles, the poet picks up the theme. “And still—ahead of us, the road keeps winding into a place we cannot yet see.”
A poem, or an editorial? I had to check twice to see that it was in fact billed as a poem.
And so it goes through 80 more pages, the linguistic level often dropping to that of a Hallmark card. A red-crowned crane is “wondrous white.” Nathalie Handal tells us: “I’d like to be a poem, to reach your heart and stay.” Michael Simms, teaching a daughter to swim, says: “Watching you I grew stronger—/your courage washed away my fear.” In the issue’s final piece, Margarita Engle instructs us: “Children and poetry were born to love each other”—and yes, this too is part of something published as a poem.
There is a certain amount of labored wit. Chen Chen writes, “One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.” Linda Sue Park has a stanza: “Walk./Bike./Walk some more./Recycle.” And then: “(See what I did there, bike—recycle?)” Even this tiny foray into play with words, it seems, requires a self-deprecating elbow-nudge.
Reviews are supposed to be balanced. I did nod at a very few lines by Chen, by Kara Jackson, by Mahogany L. Browne. Elizabeth Acevedo is at least doing something different from most of the rest. But this reader can bend over backwards no farther than that.
As I worked my way through the issue, a complaint made by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in an exhibit critique looped around in my brain: “It seems that we’ll never be permitted to graduate from the university of the obvious.”
Certainly not in Poetry magazine, March 2021.
I am sorry to have to admit I completely agree with this post. But I am 56 and not 24 or even 34. My standards of what constitutes a well-crafted poem or even a entertaining poem are very different from that demographic. And that demographic rules right now. I have been a subscriber to Poetry Magazine for over twenty years. The magazine seems to have lost its way and is operating under the fear regime of cancel culture. I try very hard with each issue to read and appreciate where they are coming from. To see if they are striking a balance. It is very hit and miss. The work does not touch me or fascinate me as it used to. Perhaps I have changed as well. It is no longer the pinnacle it once was as far as the printed poem goes. Perhaps that in itself makes things more egalitarian? Hard to say. I just know for me the issues in the last year or two have been disappointing. But I am no longer their demographic. I am still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and see where they go in the next five years. Perhaps perspectives will change again. Thanks.
I came across one of Adam Zagajewski’s poems while reading Facebook reactions to the war in Ukraine. I liked it quite a bit. His work has appeared in Poetry. What do you think of him?