“The Great Poetry Purge of 2010″: Daniel Nester Investigates the Poetry Scandal at the Paris Review
by Ernie on 23/07/10 at 9:56 am
Daniel Nester rakes some muck over at We Who Are About to Die:
Picture this: you have your poems accepted by The Paris Review. Such an acceptance can mark the start of a great career, lead to a book deal or to be anthologized, or perhaps solidify a reputation in the small world this correspondent and others call Poetryland.
After all, these are the same pages that were and are inhabited by T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Robert Bly (too many to count), W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov and Philip Levine, Charles Simic–in short, nearly every poet invited to the Big Poets Table in the past half-century.
You have this acceptance. Months, even years pass. You wait for the issue with your poems to appear.
Then you get an email from Lorin Stein, the new editor of The Paris Review. With perhaps the memory that there had been an announcement, written about in New York Observer, about a change at the Poetry Editor desk.
Dear XXXX,
Recently I replaced Philip Gourevitch as editor of The Paris Review and appointed a new poetry editor, Robyn Creswell. Over the last month, Robyn and I have been carefully reading the backlog of poetry that we inherited from the previous editors. This amounts to a year’s worth of poems. In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted by Philip, Meghan, and Dan. We have not found a place for your [poem/s], though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration. I am sorry to give you this bad news, and I’m grateful for your patience during the Review’s transition.
Best regards,
Lorin Stein
In my 20 years of small press involvement–journals, books, websites–I have never heard of a literary journal, let alone one of a world-class reputation as The Paris Review‘s, rescind publication after at first accepting it. Publishing it years later, sure; tucking it away in a double-issue, quite often. But this is not the same as killing a profile or story for a magazine. Accepting a poem or short story, part of “news that stays news,” in a world where so many things are interrogated or made ambiguous, is just that: an acceptance.
Scratch that. Asking around today, it turns out such a practice is not unheard of; thing is, the only case of un-publishing I heard about, from a couple poets and editors, is another are many of the other former Paris Review poetry editors, who allegedly un-accepted work–when he they took over for his their long tenure years ago.
I pitched this story today to sever
al web and print outlets and, some out of deference to their relationship with the Review, passed on it. Good for them, I guess. I’ve also asked to interview some of the poets who have been affected by the purge, as well as Lorin Stein and the new poetry editor, Robyn Creswell. I hope to hear back from them.
Consider this post part 1. If anyone has any information about The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010, please do email me at danielnester at gmail dot com. I’d like to get to the bottom of this. I plan on stopping by their offices on Thursday, when I am in town to see Brian “Is God” May lecture on stereo photography in Tribeca. So stay tuned.
Follow Nester through the looking glass of this scandal in the next installments, here.
Dionysus
Jul 23rd, 2010
The PR did exactly the same thing some years ago: issued “kill poetry” notices when Simic and O’Rourke took over the poetry editorship from Richard Howard.
Howard had accepted several year’s worth of work that was simply liquidated….and the letter I received was remarkably similar to the one quoted above.
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Michael Mezalick
Jul 23rd, 2010
Ugly politics ???? so sad !!
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Ms Baroque
Aug 23rd, 2010
It’s crap for the submitting poets, but I can really see why they did it. But you can’t help thinking that what these places need is a poetry ACCEPTANCE policy… I mean, having over a year’s backlog when you’ve only been in for a while just sounds a bit incontinent, doesn’t it?
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