E-Mail This Article to a Friend Poetry gets rich ... and the "little" magazine’s editor makes daring moves with his millions BY WILLIAM CORBETT
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National Poetry Month is upon us again. Will it be "April is the cruelest month ..." or "Make me over mother April/Now that spring is here"? It will be both, and more. Poetry’s readership may be small — this being America, not Pegasus, the PR muse rides to the art’s rescue — but poetry’s scope is wide. April will see new books by John Ashbery, Anne Winters, and Kevin Young; Ron Silliman’s six-day-a-week blog; countless poems workshopped in creative-writing classes; and the April issue of Poetry magazine.

Surely the biggest national poetry news recently was Ruth Lilly’s bequest, first announced in 2002, of more than $100 million to Poetry. (Since the gift came in the form of Eli Lilly stock, an accurate figure is impossible to determine.) This coincided roughly with Christian Wiman’s being named editor of the magazine and presiding over what, I imagine, may become a far-flung empire. I know little about Wiman and nothing about his overall duties. My one contact with him came some years ago, when, as poetry editor of the magazine Grand Street, I chose a poem of his out of the slush pile and the magazine published it. At the time of his ascendancy, Wiman was not a well-known poet, and that hasn’t changed. Of his editing background I also am ignorant; however, last April it became clear that Wiman meant to light a fire under Poetry. He did so in two ways: he put a photograph of a shouting female singer on the magazine’s cover, and he packed its pages with prose.

Since then — which was when I first signed on as a subscriber — a photograph has decorated the cover of every issue. The overall design is clean and clear. While sprucing things up in an unfussy way, Wiman has kept the magazine’s distinctive oblong format. It is the old Poetry made new.

Wiman’s attention to prose is radical, and just what the doctor ordered. Because the old Poetry filled most of its pages with poems by a variety of poets, this reader read it (rarely, I admit) and put it down and picked it up, only to put it down again. The problem is that so much poetry by so many different poets either clashes or turns to mush. Since few readers can enjoy a cover-to-cover reading of poetry in this way, the magazine got set aside, hardly read, and then the next issue arrived. Wiman has turned Poetry into a magazine that gets read for news — reviews, debates, essays, letters. The poetry can be dipped into, as it must be, because he has largely stuck to the policy of publishing many poems by many poets. Wiman might have taken his credo from Frank O’Hara: "It’s even in/prose, I am a real poet."

Last April, Wiman announced his intentions by pitting Dana Gioia, American arts czar, against poet August Kleinzahler on the topic of Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems anthology. The overmatched Gioia had his lunch handed to him by the funny, tart, and ... well, Kleinzahler’s opening with the US military’s attempt to rock Noriega out of his Panamanian sanctuary by blasting Van Halen tells you that Kleinzahler did not play fair. Regardless of how the exit polls came out, the pot got stirred, and poetry was talked about in public as if it mattered as much as the movies do. Usually, poets are down and dirty in private, and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth in public. The art, so many glowing reviews suggest, might suffer if naysaying were allowed. On this diet of praise, poets and general readers — if there are any — become stuffed but unsatisfied and logy. As Kleinzahler pointed out, feel-good merchandising such as Keillor’s can never solve poetry’s problems, whatever they are thought to be.

Now when my copy of Poetry arrives, I turn to the back of the book first, as it appears I’m meant to. The figures for this January are 34 pages poetry, 38 prose; for February, 29 poetry and 33 prose; and for March, 27 and 34. Of course, some of the prose is Wonder Bread, such as January’s "The View from Here," in which five civilians — museum director James Cuno and jazz musician Patricia Barber among them — tell why poetry builds their spirit in 27 ways. But this is to be expected, and such journalistic stunts are worth trying because you never know what you’ll get. Still, the best prose in the first three months of this year came in traditional forms: Michael Hofmann’s essay/review of the too-little-known English poet W.S. Graham; translator Clare Cavanaugh’s "The Ending of Czeslaw Milosz"; and W.S. Di Piero’s essay on Basil Bunting are all high grade.

Wiman is aware that acres of poetry are published for the few feet that are reviewed, and he’s done something about it. He has recruited new (to me, at least) critics Brian Phillips and D.H. Tracy to write "Ten Takes," short reviews of 10 new books. The opinionated Phillips takes this beyond coverage, writing the sort of reviews with which you take issue — stimulation rarely delivered in poetry magazines.

In addition to Di Piero’s Bunting and Tracy’s "Takes," the March issue carries the magazine’s best journalistic stunt to date: a "conversation" among poets Thomas Sayers Ellis, Daisy Fried, Adam Kirsch, and Jeredith Merrin. Their topic: "Who Cares Anymore About Being ‘Great’?" Of course, this is a question seldom asked outside freshman composition classes, but their responses provide intelligent diversion, which is where any worthy magazine ought to start. The fun is in seeing Kirsch, American poetry’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, face off against Ellis and Fried, who will say shit if they have a mouthful. Kirsch and Merrin think "there’s something not quite right about calling them (Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop) great." Ellis and Fried dismiss that judgment and refuse to look up to the mountaintop from which it was delivered. I’m on their side.

One other feature Wiman added is "Letters to the Editor." It’s not in every issue, but he’s had the wit to see that, for not one Lilly dime, Poetry might get a few first-rate sentences laced with vitriol — sentences such as this, from poet and translator David Hinton: "I’m confused. Is Dana Gioia the head of the NEA or Undersecretary of Defense for the Arts?"

No magazine, not even one titled Poetry, can possibly serve the whole art. The virtue of Wiman’s Poetry is that it broadens and deepens the mainstream and that it publishes some life-giving pages that are, in the words of Frank O’Hara, "at least as alive as the vulgar."

William Corbett can be reached at Bevcobett@aol.com