More Irish Need Apply

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

When it was announced last week that the Irish poet Paul Muldoon was to replace Alice Quinn as poetry editor at the New Yorker, I don't think it roiled the waters beyond the small sea that poets inhabit. For them, the New Yorker "makes the poetical weather in the US," according to the Guardian. And in Ireland, of course, it is always foggy.

Quinn, who has held that post for 20 years, "is resented only by those who had never been published by her, and regarded most warmly by those who had," according to my friend Jess Greenbaum, who has been published in the New Yorker (though not as often as she would have liked). The former group would do well to remember that the magazine receives an average of 600 poems a week - and seldom publishes more than two an issue. You do the math (something which most writers, let alone poets, are famously bad at). It's small wonder that Quinn, who also teaches at Columbia and is editing a collection of Elizabeth Bishop's journals and notebooks, wanted her life back.

The changing of the guard could be good news for Celtic bards. "I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more British and Irish poets in the pages," suggested Muldoon, a professor of creative writing at Princeton who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry in 2003, "as well as more poetry in translation."

In fairness, Quinn published a lot of translated poems, according to Greenbaum. "Granted, many of them were Polish, and one was [the Israeli poet Yehuda] Amichai, and somehow I don't think Muldoon is going to swing that way. If we hear a lot about turf I might get very drowsy."

Yes, but we call it peat, when we're roaming in the gloaming.

by Sean Elder