Live from the pages of The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life, we invited everyone's favorite frenemy to chime in from time to time on various hot topics. That's right, The Underminer has a Gawker column now. But keep trying! You'll get one someday! You trouper!

Late for brunch again!

Don't worry, I already ordered you a ginger mojito. I know how you love to get your drink on in the a.m.! I would LOVE to drink like you do, but I can't now, especially. I'll have clear water.

No worries. It gave me time to finish that seminal article by Dana Goodyear on the Poetry endowment and then David Orr's refutation in the Book Review.

Oh you didn't read it? Here!

The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets....(in addition, many well-known poets don't write what's known in the poetry world as "the New Yorker poem" — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like "water" and "light"). The second issue with The New Yorker's poem selection is ... what you might call "the home job": the magazine's widely noted fondness for the work of its own staffers and social associates....In 2002, for instance, the poet who appeared most frequently in the magazine was the assistant to David Remnick, the editor — that assistant's name, coincidentally, was Dana Goodyear. In fact, since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. She's already equaled Sylvia Plath's total.

Wow, this whole thing is turning into such drama.

Frankly I don't know what the big deal is. Marrying poetry to the market, I mean. Isn't that a dynamic reflection of today's culture?

Wasn't it Jorie Graham who said,

The way things work

is that eventually

something catches.

Well it did for me! Because guess what! I just got another poem in the New Yorker!

My sixth one! Making me pretty much the record-holder for poetry, having had more poems in the New Yorker than Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and Czeslaw Milosz combined!

Well, yeah. I have been writing poetry for a long time, actually. I just wasn't like ADVERTISING it the way you were, with your poetry workshops in college and your little glasses and Columbia Grad School...

By the way, have you paid off those loans yet? Yikes.

Yeah, well, things have a funny way of working out.

Wow that would be a great poem. Hold on I have to make a call. Hello? Alice Quinn? It's me. Heyyyyyy. How are yoooooouuuu.

Listen I have a poem for you. Should I fax it to you? Oh! I can dictate it and you'll just write it down? OK, it goes...no...no that's not the first line, I was just telling you I was about to recite it. Right, OK, here I go.

Eating brunch

I had a thought —

Sometimes things

Have a funny, light, watery

Way of working

Out

Yes a double dash after "thought," and lacunae after "watery." Thanks, Alice Quinn. Hey, is Dana done with her latest Starbucks "The Way I See It": Macchiato Version yet? Good for her! She's on a roll! But I know. I'm so sick of these "The Way I See Its" too. 20k for wordage on a coffee cup—big whoop. But whatever, it's the Poe-biz, right? Yeah. The president of Starbucks said mine was kind of the best since Rumi and John Milton but I still feel like I want it to be better. Maybe you and Dana and I should powwow? Cool. Bye, Alice Quinn!

OK, awesome, so my "Eating Brunch" poem's in the next issue. That's number seven.

So what've you been up to? Really, n+1? That's great. Are you still writing about your disease for them? Your angry period? No, that's really important, the small small small small literary magazines. They're vital.

I mean, The New Yorker, Starbucks and Big Pharma-Poetry and the Lilly Grant have been good for me personally, but like Pound, John Berryman, Walt Whitman, others, probably had to rely more on the n+1 places. And they were more into drinking and diseases like you. So. It's a good match.

You know what? Yeah. Let me get your mojito this time.



Annals of Poetry [NYT]

Earlier: Boerum Hill Heartbreak