Poems Newly Appeared: Silence Is Golden

Should you be a writer of complex formal poetry developed by French troubadours in the Middle Ages, you may think that McSweeney’s would be a good place to publish your work. But you would be mistaken. We find on the submissions page of mcsweeneys.net that “Sestinas are no longer being accepted at this time.”

This indeed is a blow. The superfluous formal rigor of the sestina would seem to have been tailor-made for McSweeney’s, a journal that has distinguished itself as much for its formatting as for its content. The sestina, briefly, is a 39-line form with six repeating end words that are positioned in varying sequence according to a set formula. John Ashbery was once at the vanguard of the sestina’s resurgence, going back to his 1956 poem “Poem” (end words: top, lamps, peace, hair, waiting, sky). More recently, though, he has said about the sestina: “you’re thwarted every time you try to write the next line. The form is always there, menacing you.”

For a time, sestinas were welcome to menace the readers of the McSweeney’s website. There was a special section set aside for the poetic form. Many writers contributed original works in the form, including interesting pieces by Meghann Marco (omg, lol, wtf, hahaha, stfu, rofl), Florence Cassen Mayers (form, form’s, formalist, form, from, form) and Jon Stone (Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, Monica). Perhaps there were too many good submissions to read, for the gates have been closed. Should you have a sestina now that demands to be read on the Internet, the easiest course would be to start your own web journal.

Indeed, if you write any kind of poetry, it is not welcome at McSweeney’s. The submissions page for their print quarterly informs us of this policy with the following line:

Poetry can be wonderful, but is not something we publish.

The “can” is excellent. Literary journals can of course publish whatever they wish, but it is not often with such well mannered condescension toward unwelcome art forms. It would have been far more to the point to write that poetry can, sometimes, be terrible; but it is difficult to say just what one means.

Meanwhile, McSweeney’s is actively promoting its next print creation. In a further twist on its formatting experiments, this will be published as a broadsheet, to appear in December. A detailed press kit about the $55 newspaper has been placed online, and for the discerning reader who scrolls down patiently, and does not mind reading small type, it will be discovered that this publication includes poems by Robert Haas, Rae Armantrout, and John Ashbery.

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But McSweeney’s is more than a literary journal: it is a flag. Under this flag, a legion of different programs are in action, including child literacy workshops, ironic store-fronts, human rights advocacy, DVD compilations, and a general interest magazine called The Believer.

The Believer, in a shift of policy from the main office, does accept poetry submissions. There are detailed guidelines on its website, and its masthead includes a “Poetry Editor” named Dominic Luxford. This editor must have a remarkable amount of reading to do, given the popularity of the magazine and the rare opportunity of being published in a journal read by non-poets. Such a slush pile looming on his desk, we sympathize with his apparent decision to read none of it and simply publish Derek Walcott.

There was one poem in the previous issue of the The Believer, and it was by Walcott; a new issue has just appeared, and the situation is repeated. It is remarkable that a monthly magazine should publish only one poet in two consecutive issues. It is equally remarkable that The Believer, whose readership skews young and quirky, should choose a 79-year-old Nobel-laureate as its poet-in-residence.

Then again, what are years when the artist’s heart is young? The Believer’s most recent poem by Walcott begins with these lines:

I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning

in huge green meadows above the indigo sea,

amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing

with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.

The astonishment and amazement of this poem bespeaks a man who is perfectly at ease with the credulous magazine in which he is published, and with the spirit of young people in general. Actually, Walcott’s comfort-level with his students was partially the subject of Poems Newly Appeared last week. Based on certain poems in the New York Review of Books, we inquired if he was on a mission to explain the recent Oxford affair through verse.

Our suspicions return. Walcott’s poem “Li” in the new issue of A Public Space includes the following:

            … where all that matters

is understanding the errors I have made and the errors

still to come, here is a list of what would be lost:

the gentle slope of sleep into vast terrors,

my cowardice at the scale of each undertaking,

my withering gift, the degenerative process

of any organism, down to a crouched old age,

my astonishment at the pettiness of envy,

of comradeships whose greed I could not gauge,

whose pretty poetry I ended up hating.

The above poem, the pieces in The Believer, and those in the New York Review of Books, will all be included in Walcott’s next volume of poetry, White Egrets, forthcoming in 2010 from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also included in White Egrets will be a poem called “The Mongoose,” which has not yet been published, but which Walcott has read at literary festivals. In it, he inveighs against V.S. Naipaul.

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A look at the New Yorker. This week we find a poem by Linda Pastan in which the dominant metaphor is silverware (“our table set // only with memories, tarnishing / even as we speak”) and one by Dave Smith in which it is insects (“desire of things as subtle as what fireflies mean”). Pace our own suspicions about the magazine’s predilection for rhyme, neither of these use that device.

Instead, the New Yorker’s Poetry Editor, Paul Muldoon, is left to do the rhyming himself. He appears this week in the New York Review with a poem entitled “A Second Hummingbird.” It is a variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, the variation being short lines. The sestet riffs on both the hummingbird’s wing-pattern and the form he is writing in (the sestet representing the volta, or “turn”), for a playful melding of imagery:

… now being to make such rounds

and roundelays as mine, to touch

what I’ve come to see

as the raw nerve

in each of us, each

doomed to think of himself ever so

slightly behind the curve.

Muldoon and his rhyming (e.g., “slab/Ballymacnab," “see/so”) continue to astonish and amaze. A new book of his, Maggot, will also appear in 2010 from Farrar, Straus.

—T.K.              

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.