An Open Letter to Poetry from Charles Ries

Mr. Christian Wiman
Editor
Poetry
Post Office Box 575
Mt. Morris. IL 61054-9982

Dear Mr. Wiman,

I recently received my renewal notice to POETRY and because you are a fine publication, I want to take a moment to tell why I will not be renewing. Take this feedback and do with it what you will, I realize it is impossible to please all the people all the time.

I subscribe to about twenty small press poetry magazine or zines as we like to call them. Some are so tiny they are nothing more the stapled zerox pages with a subscriber base of one hundred and others are perfect bound and with a circulation of over two thousand.

A few years ago I felt it was my duty to subscribe to POETRY. I was curious. I wanted to see the top of the mountain. I wanted to see what the best writers wrote. And for two years I read most or all of the issues you sent me. I looked into their pages and asked, "What makes this poem great?" "What makes this writer unique--exquisite?"

That said; I struggle to feel engaged with most of the work you publish. It does not blow my mind, frighten me, shock me or confound me. Yes, you have published writers who have touched me. But I find them so seldom in POETRY, that I wonder, why are they in POETRY?

I don't begrudge you the audience you have decided to serve. I'll call them purists for lack of a better word. After all academics need their journals too, but why have you chosen to serve such a tiny sliver of poetry? With an endowment in excess of one hundred million dollars, you can now fly where ever you like. You can safely spend five millions a year and never touch principle. You can champion and magnify this gift of poetry. Instead I see you doing so much for so few. What a shame!

But with the $35 I will not be sending to you, I will subscribe to Free Verse, Lummox, Bathtub Gin, Iconoclast, FUCK, Zen Baby and Poesy and maybe two or three other magazines because in them I find voices that shock me, move me, surprise me and make me proud to be a poet and reader of poetry. In them I find a collision of voices and views that I don't not find in POETRY. Will you please take time to formally talk to the editors of these small magazines? Listen to them.

If you like I will send you the names of twenty such editors. Editors who, like you, love poetry but who have been called to a vastly different river of words. They may not change how you orient POETRY or its content, but you will learn something you don't know now if you listen to them. At least you must listen.

Sincerely,

Charles P. Ries
charlesr@execpc.com
http://www.literati.net/Ries/