Skip to main content

Why Brownlee Stayed

Good news. The New Yorker is going to get a truly world-class poet to be its poetry editor. Paul Muldoon will take over the famous magazine in the world's greatest city, confirming his decision to move there as the right one. Muldoon did a good job editing the Best American Poetry anthology a few years ago, has won a Pulitzer, and his last book, Horse Latitudes, was brilliant. 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. Meanwhile, London, apparently laying claim to New York's fabled status as greatest city, cannot point to one major mainstream general interest magazine of international standing that publishes major poetry, other than the TLS (which is not quite the same thing) - and, while New York poetics, poets and poetry continues to be vibrant, celebrating a variety of styles, influences, and formal options, English poetry seems all-too-often stuck between an us-and-them trad-or-avant position, which is very 90s - and publishing of new dynamic poets is somewhat lax. Get with it, and follow Muldoon's lead, I say: poetry can be quicksilver and many-faceted, open to various positions.

Comments

Eloise said…
London is the greatest city in the world. Fact.
It's greener than New York, more exuberant than Paris and knocks somewhere like Rio into a cocked hat.
We have the hottest clubbing, the finest restaurants and the tube was recently voted the best underground system.
Our museums are free, you can walk 5 miles through the centre without ever touching tarmac and I have never been to another city in the world (and I've been to a few) where there are so many distinctive and different boroughs; places like Camden just don't exist anywhere else.
EYEWEAR said…
I respect your love of London, but your logic fails to wow me. You use only one catageory to compare London and New York: the greenery. You then move on to Paris, saying London is more exuberant than that city - but what of New York's exuberance? The finest restaurants are in Tokyo, Paris, and New York, merely the most expensive and over-hyped are in London. Having dined in many of them, I can attest to that. As for distinctive boroughs - New York has it all. Have you been to Harlem? The main points of comparison: New York is more friendly, more culturally open and diverse, more exciting, and, indeed, less expensive.

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".