I’ve never played fantasy baseball, but wouldn’t it be a kick to join a Fantasy Poetry League? Competitors could draft a list of poets for a year, and then receive points based on appearances in each of a set series of magazines. A home run of 4 points might be, say, an appearance in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine and…part of the hot stove discussion would be which magazines deserved 4 bases (points). The New Republic, maybe, Paris Review? Not more than a short handful. Hudson Review, Threepenny Review and Iowa Review might be triples — see all the editors I’m incensing right now? Cold day in a hot place before I sell to them after this blog! ;-> Does Nimrod deserve to be a double? Does Atlanta Review count for a single or a double? What of the honorable magazines with small press runs like Plainsongs? Do we define a single to include them? Or does any mag deserve a single? I would probably have a bottom end limit, but I don’t know where. Speculative magazines and haiku magazines have very good press runs, but maybe shouldn’t count as highly as smaller-press-run-but-more-competitive joints. Or maybe they should (it ain’t so easy to crack Asimov’s either). ;->
Obviously, one could not draft oneself, nor would selections from one’s own magazine count. So Paul Muldoon is doubly at a disadvantage there.
Wendell Berry would surely be a reasonably high draft choice. In the Fall Threepenny Review he has a poem, “From Sabbaths, 2013” talking of himself, perhaps, in the third person: “This is a poet of the river lands…where gravity gathers / the waters, the poisons…” An effective, interesting start. Or heck, maybe it’s a reworking of Dante: “His grazing animals look up / to watch in silence as he departs…without even / a path or any guidance…” A plain, straightforward poem that I like for the underwriting it contains. “…by luck or grace he will be given / another day to try again…”
Gaetan Brulotte has written a poem, “Directions for Use,” about which I’m sure many of us will immediately feel: ‘wait, I wrote that myself. Or something very similar.’ When a poet taps a well that essential and deep, where the reader gets such an immediate frisson, it’s a good thing: “Human being. All-purpose. Keep in a cool, dry place. Do / not freeze.” Well done!
Philip Levine has been hitting lots of triples and home runs recently. Here he bangs “Urban Myths” off the wall: “Slow learner though I am, it took me one night / to discover rain in New York City / is just like rain in Detroit.” He develops that theme, a comparison between the feel of the two cities: “as for midnight walks in the rain, in Detroit / they’re regarded as urban myths like dance halls…” There’s a lot of humor here. I certainly chuckled at the last line.
And, of course, the poet I would draft first, Kay Ryan. She gives us “Erasure.” “We just don’t / know…much about / the deep nature / of erasure.” As always, a great poem, with a lot to think about, and a twisted word at the end for fun.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
poetrycommentary 