There's something wrong with everything

In my never ending quest to find things to complain about I find no complaints with The New York Review of Books, in which I learn something new, something valuable, something I hadn't known before and am grateful for--the novels of Robert Menasse for instance or a non-fiction history of Catalonia--everytime I pick it up.

Conversely, I am once again cancelling my subscription to The New Yorker. It's sad to have seen the project drift in the 20+ years I've been reading from journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Jon Lee Anderson and George Packer to fluffy gloves-off profiles of mega-businessmen and women, fashion, chefs, artists'-de'jour. The New Yorker has become a celebrity bumper sticker of a magazine. The shift was gradual--first detected when the Newhouse family bought it in the 1980s--but is now complete (though I'll miss the music writer, Alex Ross, and the cartoons, though even the cartoons aren't what they once were). I wonder if this dimunition of content has anything to do with the Newhouse corporate model, or the even more disturbing trend of the celebrity-driven boom-box the media's become in the Age of Trump.

Poetry Magazine, 'Founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe', as the back cover of every issue reminds a subscriber, is also on the chopping block.

I recently spoke to a young poet friend of mine, a man with an MFA in poetry, an accomplished reader and writer of poetry whose wife had given him a subscription to Poetry as a Christmas gift.

 "What do you think of the magazine?" he asked me.

"Well, I've subscribed to Poetry for 4 or 5 years now and have yet to find a poem in it," I said.

He looked at me as if he agreed, though I can't be sure, knowing how poets somtimes are.

Poetry arrived in the mail yesterday (November 2019, Volume 215, Number 2). I always open it with some expectation & even reverence--the magazine that published Pound, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Hart Crane, a magzine that once seemed to me like a great-grandmother or grandfather who'd once done something great, had been appointed to an Ambassadorship in the Canary Islands or something, and was allowed to live on the oxygen of that achievement forever--and am always, always crushed. The stuff's as close to being unreadable as it can possibly be. I try, I do try to read the poems in Poetry, presuming that these are the best poets in the world writing for a magazine with a sterling reputation, a reputation for discovering great new talent, but I always give up reading 2 or 3 poems in.

Is it the money that's ruining everything? Poetry Magazine is ultra-flush, having received $100 million in 2002 from Ruth Lilly, heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune. The same goes for The New Yorker, which received no such bequeathment, but is part of a corporate entity that owns Vogue, Vanity Fair, and newspapers in 25 U.S. cities. Record profits at media outlets have been reported since Trump got elected by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC--all big winners! Poetry Magazine doesn't have to make a profit; it has $100 million of the heiresses' money, a woman who submitted poems to the magazine in the 1970s and was always rejected.

Question: when Trump shrivels up and goes away will the poems in Poetry Magazine get any better?

There's something wrong with everything now, even the magazines that reportedly report on what's wrong with things. Discouraged by the poetry I read in Poetry Magazine, I'll write my own poems and submit them to The New Yorker.