Armavirumque, Apr 07, 2005 11:45 AM

’What gives with the PSA? Don’t even get me started’

by James Panero

John Jackson writes in:

What gives with the PSA? Don’t even get me started....

While I’ve never had any contact with the Poetry Society of America, I have had plenty of contact with the sort of "closed-world clubbiness" you spoke of.

In 1993 and again in 1995, Joseph Parisi, then editor of Poetry, did me the honor to pluck my submissions from the void and actually print them. Not having chosen an academic path in life, I realized that only by such happy accidents could I ever break into the club that is poetry in America.

And it almost worked. There I was, snuggled up next to the likes of W. S. Merwin! And lo, the powers that be took notice. After my work appeared in ’93 I received an invitation to submit to another substantial journal. I did so, with poems that were certainly of no less quality than the ones Mr. Parisi had chosen. A few weeks later I got a manifestly embarrassed note back from the editor who had invited me to submit. A junior editor, his wiser colleagues had nixed his attempt to bring in outside talent.

Another instance: Until my age made it impossible, I always submitted a manuscript to the Yale Series of Younger Poets. One year I even got an encouraging note saying I had made it to the final rounds. But I never understood my bridesmaid status until the editor of the series published an anthology of his favorite work. In the introduction he said that the only poetry that interested him was the type written by people who had taken pilgrimages to Tibet. (Uh, sorry...I gotta go to work...)

Another manifestation of poetic clubbiness (or perhaps a cause of it?) is the state of perpetual, institutionalized revolution that exists in poetry circles. Just the other day I received another invitation to join the Poetry Foundation (my name must be on a list of old contributors to the magazine). The flap of the envelope was festooned, like the flaps of all the other envelopes I have received, with a fragment of a quote from Ezra Pound: "...ain’t all slush and babies pink toes". This refers, of course, to poetry, and every time I see it I can’t help asking when was poetry--real, durable poetry--ever about slush and babies pink toes? The Late Victorianism that Pound and Eliot led the charge against has long since vanished. But our poetic institutions, like the Soviets under Stalin, are continually warning of the immanent return of the kulaks, forgetting that they have become precisely what they preen themselves on having overthrown.

Thanks for a great post.

John Jackson