What's the most prestigious American poetry journal?
At 05:04 PM 1/1/2005, you wrote:
>"It was contemporary North American poetry that I now
>found wanting. Compared to the British, a lot of what
>I saw in our magazines and books struck me as
>formulaic. The favorite kind of poem was a
>first-person, realistic narrative that told of some
>momentous or perfectly trivial experience. It was
>written in free verse often barely distinguished from
>prose. Audacious flights of the imagination and use of
>metaphor were rare. In the age of political
>correctness and the evr-growing lists of forbidden
>words, topics, and attiftudes, irony and wit became
>suspect. And so did humour. The chief strategy of
>these poems was to conceal that they were poems by
>avoiding anything taht seemed too imaginative or
>irreverent. . . ."
>
>I agree 100% with every syllable of the above, and I don't see how anyone else
>couldn't after examining the following passages taken quite at random from the
>2004 issues of the most prestigious American poetry journal:
>
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>
>Crow school
>
> is basic and
> short as a rule—
> just the rudiments
> of quid pro crow
> for most students.
>
>========
>
>Egg-white house, old
> ache in the rafters,
> small as a button but
> yearning for zero:
> a sparrow parts the chimney
> and veers for my face.
>
>========
>
>While the man is away
>telling his wife
>about the red-corseted woman,
>the woman waits
>on her queen-sized bed.
>
>========
>
>Twilight folds over houses on our street;
>its hazy gold is gliding on our front lawns,
>delineating asphalt and concrete
>driveways and shadows.
>
>========
>
>At the skating park
>ice-sheathed twigs observe
>my ex-husband loosing our son on the ice
>like a hurling champion.
>
>========
>
>Minnesota
>snapping turtles
>clutched by little cities
>are wet bursts of moonstone
>wreathed in scum,
>
>========
>
>Like Gorky I sometimes question my doubts
>outside to the yard and question the sky,
>longing to have the fight settled, thinking
>I can't go on like this
>
>========
>
>That September in Positano
>the sky with its washed out palette
>furnished a finely calibrated counterpoint
>to the exhaustion of our quaint, cheap pension
>
>========
>
>Not Delft or
>delphinium, not Wedgwood,
>among the knickknacks,
>not wide-eyed chicory
>evangelizing in the devil strip --
>
>========
>
>
>=====================================
>Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
>
> www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
>=====================================
>
>
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