As I was getting some stitches done in a doctor's office yesterday (don't ask!), the inevitable happened: I was asked what I do. I usually assume that Hoyle's Rules of Bedside Manner require the question, but not much by way of an answer. Ordinarily in such situations, I mumble and stumble in order to avoid saying anything about poetry: it just seems so embarrassing to talk about it in front of people who do things like save lives or make real money (or, in this case, both). I don't know why this should be. I mentioned George Starbuck here the other day - boy, did he hate this kind of shillyshallying. If you were a poet, he believed, you had to say so. Not out of pompous pride, but to face the inevitable; poets are supposed to be good at facing the inevitable, after all. George even made up useful phrases to use if you couldn't bring yourself to mouth the word "poet" - image-consultant, diction-manager, things like that - I wish I could remember them all now.
But the doc, as he was sewing away, really wanted to know. So I told him straight out. "Poetry..." he mused. "You know there's a poet I've always been interested in." I couldn't imagine who this might be.
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The audience for "serious books . . . really doesn't want to be
marketed to. But if you don't market to them, they don't know what to
read."
"The automatic equation of radical style with liberal politics and conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous reality."
I have to admit from the start that I've always wanted to be in the Best American Poetry, so there's something delicious
to me about being here even though I've never actually been in one of the print volumes! Except as an editor, that is. Ambition is no small thing, but surely it shrinks down in the chastening face of each day's news. Given what goes on in the world, why do we think poems are so important? I mean, the folks I work for get about 90,000 of them every year (for which we are extremely grateful), and I imagine everyone who sends poems out, as I do myself, hopes something will come of their work. Why?
