September 20th, 2007
Alice Quinn, 58, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, is stepping down after twenty years and will be succeeded by Paul Muldoon, 56, who will remain chairman of the Princeton University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.
The magazine has sometimes been criticized for publishing the same poets repeatedly and playing favorites, but Ms. Quinn said that 85 percent of what she published came to her in the mail “with little or no notice.” She said that the magazine regularly received more than 600 poems a week.
Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job, which is a part-time post. “One would want to be absolutely open to the poem that one simply did not expect to have made its way into the world and somehow suddenly falls on one’s desk,” he said.
Paul Muldoon’s poems appeared in Smartish Pace, Issue 8.
