Dang it.

I realize this is early. I downloaded the wrong assignment. *sighs*

This is my Literary Magazine review:

I read the October 2008 edition of Poetry literary magazine (Christian Wiman, Editor) for this assignment. It advertised Robert, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sarah Lindsay as featured poets on the cover which seems to imply that its readers are familiar with the poetry scene and that the featured poets are well-known. The cover is simple: a white background with a small burning house on the lower left side, the flames and smoke invading the center in a soft diagonal line.

Inside, I found the website for the magazine: poetrymagazine.org

The site featured a poem from each poet from the latest edition of the magazine which online audiences could read in addition to pictures of each poet. When I googled the poets, numerous results appeared and reinforced my assumption that to be in this literary magazine, poets have to be fairly well known and established.

What I first noticed while reading the magazine was the diction the poets used. It is stunning and effectively descriptive but very sophisticated. Some poems strayed from this but for the most part, each word seemed to be worth more than the word I would has used in its place. The poets are all older than I am and versed in the English language on a much higher level than I. A few poems mentioned characters that I did not recognize and I got the sense that you would have to be somewhat educated in the subject of history (or older literature) to understand them fully. Still, the mystery of the characters’ identities, I think, made them just as interesting if not more interesting. One poem depicted a young Amish girl stepping into a pile of snow outside of a fast food joint. It was short and simply put. In another poem by Eric Eckstrand (who I have fallen in love with), the speaker asks his sleeping audience if he or she has been visited by insects. The variety of content coupled with varying styles and structures made the poetry fascinating to me.

The second part of the magazine was a story/article titled “Bishop & Lowell: Words In Air” which detailed the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell through letters and poems they exchanged. I found the second part less interesting than the first. Then there was a discussion about “Why the Great American Poem” is so hard to write.

The magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. I did not find a common theme in the issue or any evidence that each issue has a theme.

I loved the poetry portion of the magazine (the first thirty-two of its seventy-six pages). I will definitely read it again, the poems made me want to scrap all of my work and start over…we’ll see if that impulse pans out.