Poetry is still decorating its covers with this ‘100 Years’ thing to celebrate their centenary. Though the cover art, which includes a picture of a pegasus, is by Art Chantry, it can’t help but draw one’s mind to Andy Warhol’s appropriation of the Mobil logo.

The issue is subtitled ‘The Q&A Issue.’

After every author’s poems, is a question and answer session, if you will.

I understand the conceit and the goal, but I don’t think it works very well. Poets have never seemed very good at explaining the meaning of their poems. In the Howl trial (memorialized in the movie of the same name), one of the defense witness says something to the effect that, you can’t put poetry into prose sentences; that’s why it’s poetry. Invariably, a good poem has an ineffable quality of transmitting something which could not have been transmitted any other way. That’s why you’ll see poets speak well about process or about other people’s poetry, but not so much about their own. Kind of how it is here.

The issue also has four poems by Mary Karr. When I saw Mary Karr read at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I found her a bit of an attention grabber, stealing the spotlight from the more interesting and better poet on stage with her. So… not a fan. Maybe if I could start afresh, but the very name puts a bad taste in my mouth. And, frankly, her bits in the Q&A suggest to me she wasn’t just having a megalomaniacal moment, but is actually that annoying all the time.

The highlights are a series of poems by Richard Kenney, a poet I was not familiar with. Included were a series of math and science inspired poems with short, abrupt lines and sometimes startling enjambments. At first glance, they can seem to be a driven by dream logic/surrealism, but actually are merely adopting the poetic forms associated with it to carry along a more traditionally logical progression. It also helps that this progression makes Kenney’s explications in the Q&A much more interesting than the rest.

Marilyn Chin’s excerpt from a long poem, a elegy to boyfriend who died too early, is not great. I don’t know whether it suffers from being taken out of the whole or what, but one feels bad not liking because of the sensitive, personal subject but… I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s very good.

Eliza Griswold’s poems were a bit of a revelation. They were in correspondence with the classical world (including a bit of the non-western world), with politics… great stuff. The style is flat and declarative, but still eminently poetic. I’m going to look her work up in the future, I’m sure.