The State of American Poetry

The Virginia Quarterly Review reviews it.

From the piece...

I have an additional, more immediate professional reason for trying to keep up with the poetry scene. It is part of my job. I edit a magazine. For a little more than a quarter century, I have looked at all the poems that have come in over the transom of my office at the Southwest Review, now the country’s third oldest, continuously published literary quarterly. We are in our ninety-seventh year. Sewanee and Yale have us beat by a hair. My elevation to the bad eminence of literary magazine editor-in-chief dates back to 1984; its story deserves retelling. Out of Dallas during the summer, I was minding my own business when the phone rang and the university provost called to ask whether I might consider taking over the helm of a magazine that had fallen upon—if not exactly evil days—a kind of torpid desuetude. He wanted to return the Review to faculty supervision. I firmly believe that if one is a sensible, rational person, one should make all of life’s important decisions impulsively. Because I have an interest in contemporary literature, and because the appointment came with a slight lessening of my teaching course load, I said yes, perhaps foolishly.

Returning to Dallas in the brutal dog days of mid-August, I went to my new office, the previous staff having responded to my appointment by resigning in a fit of pique, and I surveyed the scene. Literally hundreds of unread manuscripts had piled up on bookshelves, desks, and floor. I hired a managing editor. A secretary was—thank goodness—already in place, and knew about the business end of things. We had, of course, no Internet, no computer (that came two years later), nothing but a telephone, stationery, and stamps. I began sorting the manuscripts; I made my way through the obvious chaff and remained on the look out for the wheat. Slowly, things came into view. Slowly, I made my choices. Slowly, I began to understand my tastes and preferences. As an unintended consequence, editing has certainly had its effects on my teaching: because I can now articulate clearly what appeals to me, and why I have accepted or rejected a certain work, I can use my standards—which I never hold up as universal—to show my students how to develop theirs.