Literary Review

I came across a few periodicals in ODY en route to finding this magazine (it looks more like a book) from October 2008. Its name is simply “Poetry Magazine: October 2008.” It was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. It can also be found on the web at http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/1008/index.html along with many of the past issues and other related links. The Poetry magazine is published by the Poetry Foundation, and currently edited by Christian Wiman. It sells for fewer than five dollars, and by the looks of the cover and the paper, it is a bargain for someone looking to collect poetry. Subscriptions are accessible on the website for $35 per year in the US.
This particular edition features works by three primary poets, but also included works of a dozen other authors. There did not seem to be much of an aligning theme between the authors, however. In addition to the submitted poetry, the second half of the compilation included letters to the editor, literary essays, and suggestions for further reading. So… if you do not find the kind of stuff you wanted to find in this book, you can search for others they have recommended.
Sarah Lindsay’s poem “Tell the Bees” is the first poem in this collection. This is a bit of a pastoral as it describes a bees’ business in the hive, and the interaction is has with other flying insects. The poem has a loose stanza structure, and the lines mostly end-stopped. This poem also describes a bee’s day as cyclical and highly structured - they have a formula for gathering pollen and bringing it back to the comb, and it goes on day after day.
I spent a lot of time reading, and rereading one poem, “Uncouplings” by Craig Arnold. It is a short poem of seven short stanzas. It plays with the saying “there is no I in team, but there is an … in…” For example, “There is no I in teamwork/ but there is a two maker.” It is also cleverly constructed because each letter in the first word – teamwork - is used in the second phrase or word – two maker. Another stanza reads, “there is no we in marriage/but a grim area.”
This magazine provides a space for all kinds of poetry. There are prose poems (yes, Stan, they do exist) such as Eric Ekstrand’s “Appleblossums.” Some poems are just a few lines long, some go on for a page or two. Surprisingly, there does not seem to be any criteria for the style of poetry. Usually a monthly magazine will have a theme for its articles that is consistent for that issue, and then changes for the next edition. This one seems to lack that unique theme.