Muldoon Blooms

Affable Floppy Bunny Poet Paul Muldoon has sent Wicked Witch of Midtown Poetry Alice Quinn packing. The New Yorker has decided to switch Poetry Editor horses this Fall as Quinn goes out to pasture and now Muldoon is handed the distinct honor of placing 3 poems on pages instead of cartoons. A tall honor--to survey all that World Poetry has to offer and then put up the work of 2 pals and a New Yorker intern that someone is banging.

Poetry is the least popular of all in the New Yorker's bag of tricks, coming in somewhere after ads and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' reviews. And Ms. Quinn had iron-fisted her way to a very forgettable legacy of publishing poems that vaguely had something to do with water or were written by people who were born in Poland. The New Yorker publishes bad poems by famous writers and that will no doubt continue. Muldoon seems to favor the goofy over the italicized, something he and I *do* agree upon. And I think Paul Violi and Jennifer L. Knox should be in the New Yorker at least once a month, I do. Sharon Olds has a rifle in her mouth right now, no doubt.

My fondness for fucking with Alice Quinn knew few bounds, and I am sorry to see her go if only because she was an easier target than a pickle in a martini glass (and because she was always fairly good-sporty about it, at least to me). For how she dredged up lost Elizabeth Bishop's half-written poems and published them for all the world to shrug at we should forever be grateful. My favorite recent tale of New Yorker poetry's low standards was that when Ashbery's then-assistant alerted him to another requested poem from the monocled mag Obfuscation's Elder Statesman went to the rubbish and uncrinkled a no-doubt-classic piece from the wastebasket. No doubt many other poets dug deep to find the perfect poem to go unread on their glossy pages.

I pour a 40 ounce lemonade on the grave of Quinn's poetic taste and look forward to Muldoon's reign if only because he looks like he'd make a great cartoon character and you ought to stay tuned here to see how that might turn out.