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May142005

The less mysterious Ms. Quinn

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: ,

In this archived interview with Alice Quinn from the Christian Science Monitor's good series, Quinn tackles these questions, among others:


How did you get started at The New Yorker?

What is the mission of The New Yorker, and how does poetry contribute to that mission?

How do you know when you are on track with readers? And when you are trying to reach a range of readers, how do you also set a standard in poetry?

What's the selection process like for poetry at the magazine?

Poetry used to have a much larger audience (for example, the military sent thousands of copies of a Robert Frost book to soldiers). Can you shed some light on this?

What are some of the most significant trends in poetry that you've seen during your time at The New Yorker?

Have poets accepted the mistaken notion that poetry is a dying art form?

Should a poet have a public role other than teacher or ambassador?

A lot of people like old poetry more than contemporary work, which they feel is self-absorbed and has no universality. How would you respond to that?

What is the one issue that people need to be discussing but aren't?

For a more skeptical perspective on the magazine's poetic tone, here's an interview with the editor of Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse. I see it all around me, this need to put "serious" and "funny" poetry at odds. I don't see the conflict. Poets who never write anything silly might want to try it—I find it cheers me up; schticky "funny" poets (let's say Billy Collins as a popular example) are usually writing about serious things (comedy and mortality—hasn't this connection been proved to...death?). So poets divide and conquer themselves for fear of crossing genre lines. If we're going to take back the world, people, we'd better start by agreeing that what we're doing isn't all that different.

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