New Yorker Poetry Editors
Tea Rochlitz
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In addition to teaching in the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing, I also serve as Series Editor for the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press, and as Poetry Editor for The Paris Review.
This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a manuscript of poetry 'make it' onto the list of a literary publisher, and from there to the bookshelves of the Seminary Coop? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Visits with literary editors and authors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.
How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review, or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. We will begin with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry and poetry in translation as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the production of literary magazines in the second half of the term. Visits with magazine editors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include researching and soliciting work from contemporary poets for The Paris Review. Note, "Means of Production I: Books" is not a prerequisite for this course.
A strange life, maybe, but also a pretty good one, even with a few tragic moments, and it's recounted in My Mistake (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Menaker's memoir captures a pair of lost worlds: the old lefty Greenwich Village, where he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, and the byzantine kingdom of The New Yorker, where he worked for 26 years, mostly during the peculiar editorship of William Shawn. Although the book paints its author as a slightly aloof figure, armoring himself with ironic detachment, Menaker is friendly and easy to talk to. One of his five earlier books is about the art of conversation, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
So it was back to New York, where, in 1969, he landed at The New Yorker, working first as a fact checker, then a copy editor. William Shawn was never exactly a fan: When Menaker had been at the magazine perhaps five years, a top editor pulled him aside to say, "We're not going to make you leave, but we do want you to find another job." He tried to do so, but nothing panned out, and Menaker soon found a mentor in William Maxwell, the magazine's fiction editor, who helped ease him out of purgatory, publishing his short stories and helping with the interoffice politics. Throughout the book, "my mistake" is a recurring meme, almost a punctuation mark, as he recounts various moments of iffy judgment, ill-conceived social interactions, and bad career moves. Those mistakes gradually became less frequent, and Menaker ultimately stayed at the magazine for 26 years, editing the likes of Alice Munro (very happily) and Pauline Kael (less so). In 1995, he moved on to the book world as executive editor-in-chief at Random House, and, apart from a brief interregnum during which he went over to HarperCollins, he stayed till 2007.
The book recounts what a lot of publishing people would consider a golden career, but Menaker's was not a life led effortlessly. Along the way there were panic attacks and episodes of despair. Underneath it all lay pernicious guilt over the death of his brother, which occurred after an injury that Menaker had, indirectly and inadvertently, helped cause. (Psychoanalysis helped a lot, he says, though he stopped therapy many years ago, once self-examination became "a habit of mind.") And then, a few years ago, came an especially nasty surprise: A lung cancer diagnosis led to surgery and chemotherapy and, eventually and fortunately, remission. "Everything is different," he says, about what the experience changed in him.
Yet some of that old stuff from the academy did actually linger as he managed his illness. "I wish everyone had to concentrate on poetry as much as I did," he says, adding that it was "against my will at first. I was a semi-athlete, and I was always eschewing academic pride. It doesn't save lives, but it does give your life a richer context. And I wouldn't be talking about this if it weren't for the cancer diagnosis, which is of course in some ways awful and frightening, but also renewed my interest in bigger answers, questions of faith. Poetry is a real solace." Much more than kale. Or coffee. We finish, and I head to the office to write, buzzing.
This fall, join novelists, poets, editors, writers and a physician for the Russell House Series on Prose and Poetry. The series is presented by Writing at Wesleyan and sponsored by the Center for the Arts.
The series kicked off Sept. 11 with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa is author of 20 books of poetry. He received a bronze star for his service as a journalist in the Vietnam War and is a professor and senior distinguished poet in the graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.
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