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Muldoon to Take Over as New Yorker Poetry Editor


PUBLISHED: September 20, 2007

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon has been named the new poetry editor for The New Yorker. The Irish-born Muldoon (who also edited the Best American Poetry anthology in 2005) joins the ranks of English-born Glyn Maxwell at The New Republic and Yugoslav-born Charles Simic at Paris Review. And Simic is also now the Poet Laureate of the United States. Has anyone spoken to Lou Dobbs about this? Should we be concerned that Europeans are taking jobs away from American poets? Or is editing the kind of work that Americans are no longer willing to do? All kidding aside, this seems another example of the healthy internationalization of American literature that has been going on recently. Maybe it’s time to put away ideas like Best American this-and-that in favor of publishing the best work, period—regardless of where it appeared or where the writer was born or lives now. Maybe we can also hope that an Irish poet such as Muldoon will have an eye for harder-hitting, more topical poetry than we’re used to seeing in mainstream American magazines.

3 Comments

Rus Bowden's picture
The poetry boards are discussing this topic also. Here is a link to one, that links out to the others: FreeWrights Peer Review: Shouldn’t American poetry be internationalized?: http://freewrights.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=152 Some of the forums you can simply click and read, some need signing in, and some are member only, the latter in the rarest case. .
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Mitchell Geller's picture
Mitchell Geller · 16 years ago
I think it is disingenuous to suggest that most literature written in English is not already internationalized. All of our major (US) publishers have London offices and corporate lines continue to blur. Whereas at one time there coul be a solid year between the publication of a book in the UK and in the US, and vice-versa, there are more and more simultaneous launches going on. the media – movies, TV, and the Internet have made New York and London slang which used to take months to filter from one country to another virtually simultaneous; especially via email. Our literature has never been especially isolationist since WWl, when Remarque, Barbusse, Sassoon, Owen and the like saw publication fairly quickly on this side of the pond. The fact is is that poetry, for anyone who travels or uses the Internet, has been internationalized for years. Richard Vallance has been publishing sonnets from Canada, the US, the UK, and points much farther flung for years now in “Sonnetto Poesia,” his Ottawa -based print journal. I was buying my Duffy and my Emberson and Green twice a year at John Sandoe, off the King’s road, for 25 years. We are already internationalized; this needn’t impinge on any type of endemic regionality at all, in any country. mitchell geller
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S. Thomas Summers's picture
Good poetry is good poetry. American or European, good poetry will rise to the top - as it should and must.
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