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Poetry (magazine)
Encyclopedia
Poetry published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry
journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation
and currently edited by Christian Wiman
, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately 100,000 submissions. It is sometimes referred to as Poetry--Chicago.
Poetry has been financed since 2003 with a $200 million grant from Ruth Lilly
.
by Harriet Monroe
, who was working as an art
critic
of the Chicago Tribune
. She wrote at that time:
In a circular she sent to poets, Monroe said the magazine offered:
Beginning in 1941, the magazine was published by the Modern Poetry Association. The magazine discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks
, James Merrill
, and John Ashbery
. T. S. Eliot
's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
," was first published by Poetry.
Contributors have included Ezra Pound
, William Butler Yeats
, Rabindranath Tagore
, Marianne Moore
, Charlotte Wilder
, Robert Creeley
, Wallace Stevens
, H. D., William Carlos Williams
, Basil Bunting
, Yone Noguchi
, Carl Rakosi
, Dorothy Richardson
, Peter Viereck
, Louis Zukofsky
, Charles Reznikoff
and Carl Sandburg
, among others. The magazine was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist
poetic movements.
A.R. Ammons once said, "the histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable." However, in the early years, East Coast newspapers made fun of the magazine, with one calling the idea "Poetry in Porkopolis".
Author and poet Jessica Nelson North
was an editor. Henry Rago
joined the magazine in 1954
and became editor the following year
.
Publication in Poetry is highly selective and consists of three increasingly critical editorial rounds.
originally said to be worth over $100 million, but which grew to be about $200 million when it was given out. The grant added to her already substantial prior contributions.
The magazine learned in 2001 that it would be getting the grant. Before announcing the gift, the magazine waited a year and reconfigured its governing board, which had been concerned with fund-raising. The Poetry Foundation was created (replacing the Modern Poetry Association), and Joseph Parisi
, who had been editor of the magazine for two decades, volunteered to head the foundation. Christian Wiman
, a young critic and poet, succeeded to the editorship in 2003. Parisi resigned from the foundation after a few months.
The new board used a recruiting agency to find John Barr
, a rich executive and published poet, to head the foundation.
Since receiving the grant, the magazine has increased its budget. For instance, poets who previously received two dollars per line now get ten.
. The Center, opened in 2011, holds a library open to the public, houses reading spaces, hosts school and tour groups, and provides office and editorial space for the Poetry Foundation and magazine.
for General Excellence.
Wiman has "expressed in print a stern preference for formal poems, and a disdain for what he calls 'broken-prose confessionalism' and 'the generic, self-obsessed free-verse poetry of the seventies and eighties", according to a New Yorker
magazine article.
One of his top goals for the magazine was to get more people "talking about it," he has said. "I tried to put something in every issue that would be provocative in some way." Wiman hired several young, outspoken critics and encouraged them to be frank. In 2005, Wiman wrote in an editorial "Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional and dull [...] We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair."
, titled, "American Poetry in the New Century," which became controversial, generating many complaints and some support. After having heard a talk Barr gave on the subject, Wiman had asked Barr to submit it to the magazine.
"American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today," Barr wrote. He added that poetry is nearly absent from public life, and poets too often write with only other poets in mind, failing to write for a greater public. Although M.F.A. programs have expanded greatly, the result has been more poetry but also more limited variety. He wrote that poetry has become "neither robust, resonant, nor — and I stress this quality — entertaining."
Barr suggested that poets get experience outside the academy. "If you look at drama in Shakespeare's day, or the novel
in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time."
Dana Goodyear, in an article in The New Yorker
reporting and commenting on Poetry magazine and The Poetry Foundation, wrote that Barr's essay was directly counter to the ideas of the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, eight decades before. In a 1922 editorial, Monroe wrote about newspaper verse: "These syndicated rhymers, like the movie-producers, are learning that it pays to be good, [that one] gets by giving the people the emotions of virtue, simplicity and goodness, with this program paying at the box-office." Monroe wanted to protect poets from the demands of popular taste, Goodyear wrote, while Barr wants to induce poets to appeal to the public. Goodyear acknowledged that popular interest in poetry has collapsed since the time of Monroe's editorial.
Wiman says he agrees with a lot of what Barr says about contemporary poetry.
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is a Chicago-based American foundation created to promote poetry in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly....
and currently edited by Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics...
, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately 100,000 submissions. It is sometimes referred to as Poetry--Chicago.
Poetry has been financed since 2003 with a $200 million grant from Ruth Lilly
Ruth Lilly
Ruth Lilly was an American philanthropist. She was the daughter of Josiah K. Lilly, Jr., and Ruth Lilly, and the sole living heiress to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical fortune built by her great grandfather, Colonel Eli Lilly.Lilly made headlines in November 2002 when she pledged stock...
.
History
The magazine was founded in 19121912 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore takes a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they impress William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others...
by Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry Magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S...
, who was working as an art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
. She wrote at that time:
"The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."
In a circular she sent to poets, Monroe said the magazine offered:
- "First, a chance to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine. In other words, while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty."
Beginning in 1941, the magazine was published by the Modern Poetry Association. The magazine discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.-Biography:...
, James Merrill
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
, and John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
. T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...
," was first published by Poetry.
Contributors have included Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
, Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
, Charlotte Wilder
Charlotte Wilder
Charlotte Wilder was an American poet and the eldest sister of author Thornton Wilder, Janet Wilder Dakin, and Amos Wilder.-Life:...
, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
, H. D., William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
, Yone Noguchi
Yone Noguchi
Yone Noguchi, or Yonejirō Noguchi, born 野口 米次郎 / Noguchi Yonejirō , was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He was the father of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.-Early life:Noguchi was born in the town of Tsushima, near Nagoya...
, Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...
, Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Miller Richardson was a British author and journalist.-Biography:Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883...
, Peter Viereck
Peter Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck , was an American poet and political thinker, as well as a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for five decades.-Background:...
, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
, Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
and Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
, among others. The magazine was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist
Objectivist poets
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
poetic movements.
A.R. Ammons once said, "the histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable." However, in the early years, East Coast newspapers made fun of the magazine, with one calling the idea "Poetry in Porkopolis".
Author and poet Jessica Nelson North
Jessica Nelson North
Jessica Nelson North was an American author, poet and editor.- Early life and family :Jessica Nelson North was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the daughter of David Willard North and Sarah Elizabeth "Elizabeth" North. She grew up on the shore of Lake Koshkonong near to what later became St...
was an editor. Henry Rago
Henry Rago
Henry Rago was a poet and editor of Poetry Magazine for 14 years from 1955-1969. He was also a Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago jointly in the Divinity School and in the New Collegiate Division. His seminars and research explored the relations between poetry and...
joined the magazine in 1954
1954 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Robert Creeley founds and edits the Black Mountain Review...
and became editor the following year
1955 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaum's flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith...
.
Publication in Poetry is highly selective and consists of three increasingly critical editorial rounds.
Foundation
In 2003, the magazine received a grant from the estate of Ruth LillyRuth Lilly
Ruth Lilly was an American philanthropist. She was the daughter of Josiah K. Lilly, Jr., and Ruth Lilly, and the sole living heiress to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical fortune built by her great grandfather, Colonel Eli Lilly.Lilly made headlines in November 2002 when she pledged stock...
originally said to be worth over $100 million, but which grew to be about $200 million when it was given out. The grant added to her already substantial prior contributions.
The magazine learned in 2001 that it would be getting the grant. Before announcing the gift, the magazine waited a year and reconfigured its governing board, which had been concerned with fund-raising. The Poetry Foundation was created (replacing the Modern Poetry Association), and Joseph Parisi
Joseph Parisi
Joseph Parisi may refer to:*Joe Parisi, Wisconsin politician*Joseph Parasi , former editor of Poetry...
, who had been editor of the magazine for two decades, volunteered to head the foundation. Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics...
, a young critic and poet, succeeded to the editorship in 2003. Parisi resigned from the foundation after a few months.
The new board used a recruiting agency to find John Barr
John Barr
John Barr was an Ontario-based Canadian physician and political figure. He represented Dufferin in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1875 to 1879, from 1890 to 1894 and from 1898 to 1904 and in the Canadian House of Commons from 1904 to 1909 as a Conservative member...
, a rich executive and published poet, to head the foundation.
Since receiving the grant, the magazine has increased its budget. For instance, poets who previously received two dollars per line now get ten.
Poetry Center
Part of the Lilly grant was used to build the Poetry Center in Near North Side, ChicagoNear North Side, Chicago
The Near North Side is one of 77 well-defined community areas of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is located north and east of the Chicago River, just north of the central business district . To its east is Lake Michigan and its northern boundary is the 19th-century city limit of Chicago,...
. The Center, opened in 2011, holds a library open to the public, houses reading spaces, hosts school and tour groups, and provides office and editorial space for the Poetry Foundation and magazine.
Wiman's editorship
Since Wiman took over, and partly thanks to direct-mail campaigns, the magazine's circulation has grown from 11,000 to almost 30,000. The look of the magazine was redesigned in 2005. In 2011, Poetry won a National Magazine AwardNational Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City...
for General Excellence.
Wiman has "expressed in print a stern preference for formal poems, and a disdain for what he calls 'broken-prose confessionalism' and 'the generic, self-obsessed free-verse poetry of the seventies and eighties", according to a New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine article.
One of his top goals for the magazine was to get more people "talking about it," he has said. "I tried to put something in every issue that would be provocative in some way." Wiman hired several young, outspoken critics and encouraged them to be frank. In 2005, Wiman wrote in an editorial "Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional and dull [...] We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair."
Controversial article by John Barr
In September 2006, the magazine published an essay by John Barr, head of the Poetry FoundationPoetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is a Chicago-based American foundation created to promote poetry in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly....
, titled, "American Poetry in the New Century," which became controversial, generating many complaints and some support. After having heard a talk Barr gave on the subject, Wiman had asked Barr to submit it to the magazine.
"American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today," Barr wrote. He added that poetry is nearly absent from public life, and poets too often write with only other poets in mind, failing to write for a greater public. Although M.F.A. programs have expanded greatly, the result has been more poetry but also more limited variety. He wrote that poetry has become "neither robust, resonant, nor — and I stress this quality — entertaining."
Barr suggested that poets get experience outside the academy. "If you look at drama in Shakespeare's day, or the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time."
Dana Goodyear, in an article in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
reporting and commenting on Poetry magazine and The Poetry Foundation, wrote that Barr's essay was directly counter to the ideas of the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, eight decades before. In a 1922 editorial, Monroe wrote about newspaper verse: "These syndicated rhymers, like the movie-producers, are learning that it pays to be good, [that one] gets by giving the people the emotions of virtue, simplicity and goodness, with this program paying at the box-office." Monroe wanted to protect poets from the demands of popular taste, Goodyear wrote, while Barr wants to induce poets to appeal to the public. Goodyear acknowledged that popular interest in poetry has collapsed since the time of Monroe's editorial.
Wiman says he agrees with a lot of what Barr says about contemporary poetry.
General references
- Peter Jones (ed.): Imagist Poetry (Penguin, 1972).
- Historical note at the magazine Web site
- Boston Globe article on grant
External links
- Poetry magazine website
- Poetry Foundation website
- Poetry Magazine (1911-1962) Records at the University of Chicago
- Poetry Magazine (1954-2002) Records at Indiana University
- Poetry magazine at the Modernist Journals Project, vols. 1-21.3 (1912–1922)