The esteemed Paris Review recently got a new editor, Lorin Stein, who in turn appointed a new poetry editor. Stein and the new poetry editor started retroactively rejecting poetry submissions that they had previously accepted. This is a big deal because The Paris Review has published any and every poet you've probably heard of like T.S. Eliot and Philip Levine.
“Aw, no they didn't!” was the collective reply from the poets to The Paris Review. So they took up laptops and blogging platforms and started an upheaval in all iambic pentameter. No, just kidding, it was free verse. But as we all know, there ain't no riot like a poet riot.
The hub for all the rioting is at We Who Are About To Die, led by Daniel Nester, most recently the author of How To Be Inappropriate. Nester talked to one of the shelved poets, Joshua Corey, who said this:
“Ordinary rejections don’t bother me, and I never complain about them.
I’ve been extremely fortunate to publish in as many places as I have.
But this felt personal in its impersonality, if you follow me—like I was
being declared an un-poet or an un-person. It struck me as an extremely
unwise and unprofessional solution to a problem that the editors
themselves had created, and I said so. So yes, I was quite angry about
it.”
Personal in its impersonality. Like the guillotine slamming down on Joshua's poem. Just cut out.
Adding insults to severed poems is that Stein told the NY Observer that he would have a “holy sh*t” poetry section. No one thought this was what he meant.
Just like in any good revolution, there is a new regime. Poet Michal Schiavo is creating something called The Equalizer that will publish the retro-rejected Paris Review poems. A new estate has been established. Long live poetry!
