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Meet
the New Editor:
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Meet
the New Editor:
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Allow me
to introduce myself. My name is Ernest Hilbert, and I am the new editor of
the Contemporary Poetry Review. Garrick Davis, founding editor of
this magazine, has passed the tiller, as he will assume the coveted
position of Specialist for Poetry and Translations at the National
Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. Since he has decided to absent
himself from the public arena of American poetry and criticism, I will
take up and preserve the mission he began nearly a decade ago. As editor,
Mr. Davis encouraged honest, disciplined criticism and persistently
avoided critics who massaged colleagues or influential personalities. He
always resisted boilerplate ideological jargon, superficial or blinkered
reviewing, and the academic parochialism that has submerged and nearly
drowned the serious art and practice of poetry in recent decades.
At the mouth of the Tiber, Mr. Davis emphasized: “If Brooks Adams was
correct that ‘all civilization is centralization, and all centralization
is economy,’ then literature is not well served by the continued
subsidization of little magazines by our universities and libraries. That
has merely led to the Balkanization of poetry in print.” Mr. Davis
developed an early appreciation for the influence of the Internet and an
allied belief in the democratizing power of the online journal. Long
before the gaseous swell of the present blogosphere, he identified the
need for an organized, professional, yet non-academic critical presence in
the poetry world, and he understood that only a new journal such as the Contemporary
Poetry Review could achieve this aim. He recognized the Internet as a
simultaneously unifying and liberating force for poetry criticism, and in
this he has been redeemed. While the Internet has added somewhat to the
existing background chatter of amateur poetry opinion, it has also
aggravated the need for a central, focused forum amid the ever-flattening
red shift of online sprawl.
The Contemporary Poetry Review enjoys an especially large audience, and it remains the world’s most widely read
magazine dedicated exclusively to poetry criticism. It also enjoys several
new supplements this year. Long-time contributor Sunil Iyengar will
captain the recently launched quarterly CPR Book Club, which will present
first editions (some signed) of new books and entertain community
discussions. Marc Pietrzykowski
has taken the helm of the Archive of Classic Criticism, which will feature
criticism from Plato to newly published books by major contemporary
critics. I continue to offer my free weekday poetry newsletter, E-Verse
Radio, which has gone out without interruption since 1999. I am also
negotiating with West Chester University Press to create a CPR imprint. We
plan to issue one book annually on variety of topics, such as Chinese
poetry in translation and interviews with poet-critics. I admit to a creditable, though at times motley past as an editor. My first serious editorial position was as head of the Oxford Quarterly, from the mid to late 1990s. A student at that august ancient university, I published dozens of established American poets who had not yet developed British audiences. I also persuaded several of the great and good to join the magazine’s advisory board, including Seamus Heaney, Lord Plant of Highfield, Marjorie Perloff, Iris Murdoch, and her husband John Bayley. After six issues, the magazine (as sometimes happens) flew apart when I returned to New York City, where I promptly joined the insurgent and sometimes hair-raising staff of Long Shot magazine. After a crazed year’s tour of duty (Danny Shot and I remain close friends), I left to become poetry editor for Random House’s online magazine Bold Type, which involved gossipy uptown gallery openings with Kenneth Koch, smoky New Yorker parties with Franz Wright, and boozy editorial evenings with a cast of dozens at the W Hotel lounge, the Half King, and other Bright Lights, Big City-style hangouts. I later worked as literary editor for the online magazine nowCulture.com, which went the way of similar Dodos not long before 9/11. Afterward, I presided over the first two editions of the print manifestation, NC1 and NC2. A long-overdue NC3, my last issue with the franchise, will appear this year. I co-edit the issue with G. Nicholas Myers, who will succeed me as editor. Always prepared for a fresh challenge and for a chance at a black eye, I now will guide the Contemporary Poetry Review through what I hope will prove another decade of successes.
The upcoming year will see many entertaining and informative reviews from
our crew. Katy Evans-Bush will issue a biannual Letter from London; Aaron
Baker will jump in the trenches to discuss Brian Turner’s book Here,
Bullet and the role of the war poet; Kathleen Rooney gets us backstage
with Rock Star Poets; Kwame Dawes reviews the Oxford Anthology of
African-American Poetry; Jan Schreiber will offer further observations
on Robert Lowell’s reputation; Carol Bere will bring us a profile of
popular British poet Carol Ann Duffy; Alfred Corn will take on the
malcontent August Kleinzhaler; Adam Kirsch will survey younger American
poets; and the ever-popular James Rother will begin installments in his
ambitious book-length study “A Thumbnailer’s Guide to the Galaxy:
Major American Poets 1965-2005.”
I plan to provide quarterly editorials, briefly and casually addressing
recent activities and trends in American poetry. By way of an inaugural
address, I offer a few modest comments.
Poetry remains an incredibly powerful art form. It is the most ancient and
universal of the literary arts. Individual poems can endure for centuries,
even millennia. They have the strength to offer solace in times of
emotional urgency and suffering, spur a smile at parties, memorialize
momentous events in private and public life. They can delight and edify.
They may be silly, easy, and mischievous, but they should be taken
seriously. Poetry is an
idiosyncratic art, but so are film, sculpture, opera or photography.
While it may be swayed by other media, and occasionally blur the lines
between genres, it holds a distinct station within the world of literature
for several reasons. Poetry has its own traditions and techniques. It is
read and heard, or at least ought to be read and heard, differently than a
novel, a restaurant menu, a sheet of statistics, a garbled bit of spam
e-mail, reality television gossip, sermon, political manifesto, or
newspaper article. Consequently, the Contemporary Poetry Review
holds that poets themselves should take their art form and its attendant
skills seriously, even when playing a jester, Caliban, or mad scientist.
As critics, we write for general readers, not for professionals, insiders,
or other poets. While our role as editors necessarily involves some
separation of sheep from goats (it would be worthless otherwise), our
larger mission is not to discourage but to clarify the world of
contemporary and historically recent American poetry for a diverse,
intelligent audience of poetry readers, some of whom may have found
themselves confused or astonished by the sheer volume of choices available
to them.
American poetry seems to have entered a new era, one that thrives in ways
unimagined by previous generations, but which likewise suffers ills and
crises of its own. The mass-media buzz of spoken word poetry has simmered
down from its boiling point in the mid-1990s, when MTV began showcasing
entertaining stand-up poets like Hal Sirowitz. Internet blogs and the
“Billy Collins phenomenon” have since taken their place in the public
imagination, alongside belated editorial remarks on the poetic
possibilities of hip hop. The last poetry “boom,” announced by pundits
not long before 9/11, has failed to produce much of a bang, though there
are more hopefuls than ever before frenziedly throwing hats into the
already cluttered ring. While general readership of poetry has made a
moderate recovery from its century-long slide, the actual number of
“trained” or “professional” poets in the US has risen to
extraordinary numbers, probably in the hundreds of thousands if not
millions. Poetry remains an aspirational art, as it has been for at least
a hundred years, but increasing numbers of Americans have decided to make
a go of becoming a “poet” rather than depositing slyly scribbled
verses in desk drawers as they did in previous generations.
While many academic poets—who, frankly, have overpopulated to the point
of stripping their ecosystem bare—continue to bewail the long-standing
neglect experienced by poetry in bumpkin America, the art form continues
to hold a public place and to roost in the old, obvious places. In the
past two months, a poem swooped up to perch in the number-five slot on the
New York Times best-seller list: Maya Angelou’s “Amazing
Peace,” an optimistic, dedicatory poem read at the lighting of the White
House Christmas tree. Oprah Winfrey’s staunchly devoted (and
preternaturally earnest) audience enjoyed a preview when Angelou recited
it on Winfrey’s December 9 program (sharing the playbill with
Faith Hill and George Clooney). True to tradition, the Random
House-published book shifted an enormous volume of units in the following
weeks. The poem itself is a characteristically sincere message (or mess of
pottage, depending on one’s outlook), and appeared on Winfrey’s
website, typos intact: We, Angels and Mortal’s [sic], Believers and Non-Believers,
Far from speaking for the heavenly host, David Orr, in a daring maneuver,
served up a mixed review of the latest Billy Collins book, The Trouble
With Poetry, in the form of a parody of Collins’s lackadaisical free
verse. The New York Times Book Review gave over an entire page to
the hybrid “poetreview” in the January 8 issue, which also contained
D.H. Tracy’s fine review of the latest Tupac-style posthumous collection
of Charles Bukowski’s poetry. The January 22nd issue saw a
rejoinder by Collins’s editor, Daniel Menaker, offered in the same
lazily lineated free verse. If nothing else, this leaves us to wonder just
how hard it could be to write a Collins poem, given that assorted
concerned parties may so easily spar with each other in editorial columns
using the same “technique.”
Poetry magazine continues to deliver superb issues, a fact noted by
many observers. Adam Kirsch wrote in the New York Sun: “Under its
new editor [Christian Wiman], Poetry has done what long seemed
impossible: It has reclaimed its place at the center of American
poetry.” One peculiar side-effect of this makeover is what I call
“prose creep.” The first issue of January 2006 contained 33 pages of
new poems against 40 pages of prose. The scale has dropped in favor of
prose in the very magazine named for poetry (almost as bizarre as the
special prose issue of Verse magazine). Given the excellence of the
commentary and reviews in Poetry’s newly enlarged prose section,
this development is quite welcome. While earlier incarnations of the
magazine consigned prose to a petite paddock of reviews in an issue’s
back forty, Mr. Wiman has encouraged a lively and invigorating open range
that includes a variety of engaging debates, reviews, essays, and letters.
The condensed trough of poetry also befits close reading, as opposed to
the phone book approach taken by so many “smaller” poetry magazines,
in which hundreds of poets are programmed into a gigantic volume and consulted only by friends and business associates. Sometimes, as with
certain cuisines, less is much more.
The Garrison Keillor/August Kleinzahler title bout resulted in a sweaty
clinch and break, and public attention ultimately fizzled for lack of a
judges’ decision. Each warrior bagged a consolation prize: greater sales
from the ensuing publicity. In Poetry magazine, Kleinzahler
hurled a roundhouse right to Keillor’s anthology Good Poems and
followed with a combination of ad hominem body shots: “If
it were up to me, I’d suggest we borrow the US military’s tactics and
lock Mr. Keillor in a Quonset hut, crank up the speakers, and give him an
industrial-strength dose of, say, Albert Ayler saxophone solos until this
‘much beloved radio personality’ forswears reading poems over the
airwaves every morning.” The New York Times picked up the
live feed and the battle spread. The phalanxes of sunshine and darkness
that rallied behind each challenger hurled their Internet javelins, and
now everyone is securely back in the fortified camps from which they
emerged in the first place.
As long as the punches are clean, such sparring remains sport, even if it
looks like street brawling from time to time. It’s good to get the blood
pumping a bit over poetry, even if the major contenders tend to be
opportunists gunning for a shot at the title themselves. As Ovid observed
two millennia ago (in Metamorphoses
IV.428): “Fas est et ab hoste doceri,” which we may read
today as: “it’s okay to learn something from your enemies.”
So Happy New Year, and all best wishes until next time, Ernest Hilbert
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