the Greater Nomadic Council

Amen!

Johnathan Mayhew points out the obvious—that Poetry, once the journal that published T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Sylvia Plath (among many other luminaries), now sucks. I cancelled my subscription years ago for precisely this reason. Mayhew, however, does more than just bitch about it; he makes suggestions for how the magazine could be revitalized. Although I don't care much for the specific themes around which he proposes organizing issues, the basic idea appeals to me. Of course, for the concept to work, the editors would need to start choosing good, challenging poetry, not the boring stuff they seem to love. Without changing editors I'm not sure how they could fix that problem.