Annals of Poetry (by David Orr)

illustration by by Michael Bierut

March 11, 2007
Essay
Annals of Poetry
By DAVID ORR

The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it. Whether it’s Ezra Pound dismissing his benefactor Amy Lowell as a “hippopoetess” or Yvor Winters accusing his friend Hart Crane of possessing flaws akin to a “public catastrophe,” you can count on the occasional bushwhacking in the land of what Horace called “the touchy tribe.”

The most recent such assault — and the most surprising in years — took the form of a 6,500-word article in The New Yorker last month by the poet Dana Goodyear, who is also a New Yorker editor. Goodyear’s subject was the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which received an unexpected (to put it mildly) bequest of roughly $200 million from Ruth Lilly in 2001. The article focuses on the Poetry Foundation’s president, John Barr, but Goodyear also takes on Poetry magazine, its founder Harriet Monroe, the Poetry Foundation Web site, legal proceedings relating to Lilly’s bequest, Ruth Lilly herself, the various objects collected by Ruth Lilly’s father (toy soldiers, gold coins), the price of real estate in Chicago and the stuff rich people wear at parties (a “crisp white shirt” or “coral lipstick,” apparently). It is a very long article.

It is also a slick production whose craftsmanship any critic would respect. Goodyear wants to portray the Poetry Foundation as a culturally conservative, slightly tacky enterprise led by a dilettantish, ex-Wall Street fat cat — “what people these days call a ‘businessman-poet’ ” — who’s itching to sell poems the way Frito-Lay sells Cool Ranch Doritos (and no, not by making them deeeeeelicious). So she fills her piece with references to advertising, buying and selling, and ostentatious wealth — John Barr has “a 25-acre estate in Greenwich,” the charity’s Web site has a budget of “more than a million dollars.” And she quotes many poets making critical remarks about Those People and All That Money (the poet J. D. McClatchy says the Foundation has an “aura of mediocrity”). Many readers might figure that Goodyear has done a fine thing by exposing this bunch of crisp-white-shirt-wearing yahoos.

The instinct wouldn’t necessarily be misplaced. After all, the Poetry Foundation does have big money, and some of Barr’s observations (regarding, say, the alleged careerism in M.F.A. programs) deserve a thoughtful response. But that response already has been made — for months now — on blogs, in print and in the letters section of Poetry magazine itself. (In the interest of disclosure, I’ve reviewed for Poetry.) As a result, Goodyear’s article has a strangely punitive cast — for example, only one poet, Billy Collins, is quoted saying anything remotely positive about the Poetry Foundation’s many enterprises. That’s funny, since those enterprises are hardly uniform. Indeed, many of the article’s critical voices have appeared in Poetry themselves (McLatchy shows up in the February issue); these writers presumably are making judgments about specific aspects of the foundation, not wholesale denunciations. Yet Goodyear doesn’t clarify. On the contrary, she leaves things blurry — at best. In an especially confusing decision, she includes a cutting remark by the writer Joel Brouwer about the marketing of poetry, and claims the comment was “an obvious ... reference” to the Poetry Foundation. But Brouwer, as he confirmed by e-mail, wasn’t talking about the foundation at all. Which makes sense, of course, since Brouwer is a regular contributor to Poetry, a detail Goodyear’s readers wouldn’t know.

Similarly, the article treats a range of sometimes contradictory anxieties as if they were a unified critique. Goodyear quotes “the director of a nonprofit literary group” complaining that the foundation is trying to “take credit for things that are already going on.” By this, the director means that the foundation’s efforts to popularize poetry are only continuing a process begun by the Academy of American Poets (responsible for National Poetry Month) and the Poetry Society of America (responsible for poems on the subway). It’s a reasonable point. But then Goodyear shifts to a series of comments from poets who are upset about the very popularizing the director is describing. In combination, the criticisms become incoherent. You can complain the foundation is late to the party, or you can argue that the party itself is a mistake — but you can’t do both at the same time.

More than anything, though, it’s curious that in an article that purports to deal with the future of American poetry, Goodyear says nothing about actual poems. But maybe that’s to be expected — after all, about a decade ago, The New Yorker essentially stopped covering contemporary poetry. Granted, you’ll see the occasional collection in the magazine’s Briefly Noted section, but you’d have to go back to the mid-’90s to find a full-scale review of a poet under the age of 70. And since the turn of the century, the magazine has limited its review coverage to poets who are, so to speak, dead — with one exception, Richard Wilbur, whose “Collected Poems” the magazine assessed in 2004. Wilbur is 86.

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (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”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

The second issue with The New Yorker’s poem selection is trickier. This is what you might call “the home job”: the magazine’s widely noted fondness for the work of its own staffers and social associates. The most notorious examples were the three poems The New Yorker published by the Manhattan doyenne Brooke Astor in 1996-7 (one more than Robert Creeley managed in his whole life). Some representative lines: “I learned to take the good and bad / And smile whenever I felt sad.” Even more questionable, however, is the magazine’s preference for its own junior employees. 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.

The problem with behavior like this is not that it violates some sacred duty of fairness (The New Yorker is a business, not a charity for whiny poets). The problem, to borrow a quotation from Goodyear’s article, is that this kind of thing “signals a lack of ambition and seriousness that may ultimately be fatal.” Poets may get frustrated with the Poetry Foundation; they may complain; they may disagree with certain projects. But the Poetry Foundation, however misguided or impolitic, hasn’t given up on poetry. The question is: Has The New Yorker?

The Education of a Publisher (by Allen Salkin, the New York Times)

Caption: EXTRA EXTRA Jared Kushner selling newspapers on 42nd Street.


Caption: CITIZEN KUSHNER The new owner of The New York Observer, Jared Kushner, whose journalism experience was limited to one article in college. (Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times)



Caption: J-MEN From left, Peter Kaplan, Jared Kushner and Josh Benson celebrate the new tabloid format. (Keith Bedford for The New York Times)




By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: March 11, 2007

LAST Monday, Jared Kushner, the boy publisher of The New York Observer, was nestled in a wingback chair in the book-strewn office of the newspaper’s longtime editor, Peter Kaplan. They were talking about Mr. Kushner’s latest acquisition, the Web site politicsnj.com. “The more stuff he buys,” Mr. Kaplan, said, leaning back, “the happier I am.”

Happiness can take time to grow, both men know. Back in October, when Mr. Kushner invited Mr. Kaplan to a Yankees playoff game three months after buying The Observer, the gray-templed editor, who has been a mentor to waves of young journalists in New York, wasn’t so confident things would work out with his new young boss.

Mr. Kushner, 26, the scion of a troubled New Jersey real estate family, who is also a full-time graduate student, had dabbled in Boston-area condominiums, not publishing, while an undergraduate at Harvard. The sum total of his journalism experience was writing an article about dorm food for a student magazine. In the short time he owned The Observer, Mr. Kushner had found little time even to meet with Mr. Kaplan.

“It was tense,” Mr. Kaplan, 53, recalled of their early relationship. That October night, there was a rain delay of hours. As other fans sought cover in the tunnels of Yankee Stadium, Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Kushner remained in their field-side seats, drinking Bud Lights and talking newspapers. Mr. Kushner told Mr. Kaplan he had been at a game two weeks earlier and sat next to the owner of another New York news media property, and he was astounded at his disdain for his staff.

“I told him,” Mr. Kaplan recalled, “the only way this is going to work is if you love your product, and you understand people are working here because they see something most civilians can’t see about the importance of journalism, and once you’ve got it, you’ll be a great publisher.”

That is just the sort of “Front Page” romanticism Mr. Kaplan has conjured for young reporters over the dozen years he has run The Observer, motivating them to give their all. For the rest of the night, editor and owner drank and talked enthusiastically about the future of the paper. “We needed exactly what we got,” Mr. Kaplan recalled last week. “Three hours of intense conversation in the pouring rain with a lot of beers.” (The game against the Tigers was called because of the weather.)

With The Observer’s transformation four weeks ago from a broadsheet to a tabloid, Mr. Kushner, who professes to be astonished by how much attention he received from purchasing a small Manhattan weekly, has only been more frontally in the spotlight. Dealing with scrutiny is one of many aspects of an unusual on-the-job education he is receiving from Mr. Kaplan, who has called himself the Mr. Chips of New York journalism, greeting each arriving class of boys (and girls), whose youth never changes.

The question for Mr. Kushner, hardly the first rich man to buy a trophy news media property, is whether, after reading the umpteenth gossip item about whom he may be dating, or staring at the 20th quarterly statement of losses, he will drop his trophy as quixotically as he picked it up.

Mr. Kaplan’s challenge is to besot his young publisher with a love of the ink-and-newsprint business before that happens. “It does come down to that Charles Foster Kane line: ‘I think it would be fun to own a newspaper,’ ” Mr. Kaplan said, slightly misquoting “Citizen Kane.” “Young men are supposed to feel that way and I’m thrilled that he does.”

All most people knew about Jared Kushner pre-Observer was that his father, the real estate investor Charles Kushner, had endured a spectacular fall. Once a major donor to New Jersey Democratic politicians, he served nearly a year in prison in part for hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, then showing a tape of the tryst to his sister, who had instigated a tax investigation.

Jared Kushner is the only one of his parents’ four children to work at the family company, where he is a principal. The Kushner Companies owns about 25,000 residential units in the Northeast, as well as the Puck Building in New York. But its biggest deal was the purchase last December of a skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue, for $1.8 billion. Start to finish, the deal was negotiated in six days, said Arthur J. Mirante II, president of global client development for Cushman & Wakefield, which brokered the sale.

Although the broker had worked for months with Jared Kushner and his father, who was released from prison in August, it was the younger Mr. Kushner who “carried the ball,” Mr. Mirante said.

Mr. Kushner, who has the demeanor of a preternaturally poised politician, or maybe a missionary, deflects questions about his personal life and his family. He does acknowledge that he is single. “I don’t have time to date,” he said, sitting in his sparse office at The Observer, where he spends most of his workdays, often arriving at 7 a.m. “I have six jobs.”

One is taking 17.5 credits in his final semester of a four-year M.B.A./law program at New York University, he said.

Under Arthur Carter, the former investment banker who founded The Observer, which reports circulation of around 45,000, the paper reportedly lost about $2 million a year. But Mr. Carter could afford it and loved the clout and visibility bestowed by the paper, a favorite of New York’s social, political and news media elite.

Finding a buyer was not easy. For about a year, Mr. Kaplan had been helping Robert De Niro, Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal of Tribeca Productions, founders of the Tribeca Film Festival, to put together a bid. Meanwhile, Mr. Kushner, who knew The Observer from shuttle flights to Boston while an undergraduate, was desperately trying to meet with Mr. Carter, who was giving him a cold shoulder.

It wasn’t until July that Mr. Carter agreed to a meeting, Mr. Kushner said. He showed up with a check for his full offer, which was more than the Tribeca group’s. Mr. Carter said the price was “less than $10 million” and that he kept 20 percent ownership. “I felt he personally had the resources to put into the paper,” Mr. Carter said. “And I think his youth and exuberance are very, very important.”

Describing his own philosophy of the art of the deal, Mr. Kushner said, “People respond to speed.”

“I was 25 years old, and my father was probably just out of prison,” he added. “I remember getting off the phone and saying, ‘Wow, you accomplished something you didn’t think you’d have a one-in-a-million chance of doing.’ ”

“Your instincts told you what to do,” he continued, describing his inner monologue. “You’re buying a wonderful brand. You’ll figure it out.”

There were some early missteps. When he arrived at the office in the Flatiron district, he wanted to take a desk among reporters and editors. Mr. Kaplan told him it would be bad for the “chemistry.” Mr. Kushner attended an early editorial meeting, and although he did not suggest assignments, Mr. Kaplan explained there should be a separation between the editorial and business sides.

He was a strange presence for some staff members. Mr. Carter had only rarely visited the paper’s offices in recent years, but Mr. Kushner works many Sundays, a surprise to some reporters and editors. “They would come in to get stuff done in a quiet office and then Jared would be there — ‘Oh, big young daddy’s here!’ ” said Choire Sicha, who worked as an editor at The Observer at the time, and is now managing editor of the Web site Gawker.com.

Mr. Kushner worked with the paper’s printer to determine how to produce the new tabloid format, a change intended to appeal to advertisers and commuters. He has hired two people to report on and one to edit real estate, a beat that is a source of ads and an obsession for the paper’s affluent readership. Mr. Kushner has gone on sales calls with big advertisers.

Within the paper’s tiny newsroom, where reporters’ concerns are sometimes narrower than a publisher’s, one of Mr. Kushner’s most popular improvements is having pizza delivered on Tuesday nights during closings.

He has also made his first addition to what is now the Observer Media Group: he bought politicsnj.com a month ago. Last Monday he hired a new editor; over the next days he signed former Governor Christine Todd Whitman and former U.S. Senator Robert G. Torricelli as columnists; and he went live with the site Thursday.

Will any of his efforts lead to The Observer turning a profit?

“Maybe,” said Mr. Carter, who is skeptical that the paper’s particular passions — New York politics and news media — and its famously snarky voice can appeal to enough readers to be profitable. “We have a very unique audience.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Kushner is pouring in money, at least for now.

“It’s easier to build a business around a first-class product,” he said, sounding like the M.B.A. student he is, “even if it’s a more expensive product to produce.”

For Mr. Kaplan, the motive for switching to a tabloid was in no small part to get a love of black ink into Mr. Kushner’s veins. “I needed to make a paper that Jared could feel was his paper and not Arthur Carter’s,” Mr. Kaplan said.

It seems to be working. “If you had asked me coming into this experience, would I have the emotional attachment to the product that I have now, I would have said ‘no way,’ ” Mr. Kushner said.

Now Mr. Kushner seems to be as invested in Mr. Kaplan as much as the reverse. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t feel he’s going to make this thing make money,” Mr. Kaplan said. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. But that that’s what 26-year-olds are supposed to think. Wisdom is not Jared’s business right now. Energy and enthusiasm is, and that’s something we can use a lot of here.”

Newspaper wisdom can be hard won.

“In real estate, you can work 15 hours a day and get it all lined up with your suppliers, and you can use reason and make that thing work for you,” said Peter Kalikow, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Born into a successful family real estate company, Mr. Kalikow, who had no news experience, bought The New York Post in 1988 and owned it until October 1993 when he declared bankruptcy and the paper teetered into near oblivion. “In a newspaper you can work 300 hours a week and it still won’t make a difference.”

Happy Blitt contributed research.

Campus Exposure (by Alexandra Jacob, the New York Times)

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