Just kidding. I’ll send one of Muldoon’s books to any reader who writes in to challenge the fundamental truth of the necessity of poetry (and reading poetry, for you philistines) in civilization, especially a civilization whose mantle, as last night’s dinner companion suggested, is thinner and closer to barbarism than we might have supposed.
Anyway, here are some responses to the recent news.
Dean Olsher (“The Next Big Thing”): “Can it be a coincidence that her departure comes on the heels of the magazine’s decision to publish this poem by Joni Mitchell?”
Joseph Campana for the Kenyon Review: “Quinn presided over the magazine’s controversially uncontroversial slate of poems often referred to as ‘New Yorker poems,’ which espoused less an aesthetic school than a cult of personality.”
Eyewear: “He’s the Auden of his generation (with perhaps some different habits) in terms of precocious ability, verbal style, intellectual vigour, and expatriated address. Hopefully he will get the magazine to publish more poems and more poetry reviews.”
Paul Muldoon, quoted in the Guardian: “I sincerely hope that every poem I publish there will have it in it to make a profound change in the reader,” he said. “That’s certainly my aim.”
New York magazine’s Vulture: “In other news, Paul Muldoon doesn’t want to publish your sestina, either.”
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
(Also, unrelated: Here’s a brief Q. & A. with Seymour Hersh in the Jewish Journal.)