I haven't put a single poem in the mail. It's been hard trying to decide how to put the 44 of them in groups of 3 to 5, and I've been looking at markets. For the first time in 25 years I've thought of sending some to The New Yorker, since twice in that long ago time I got a hand-written rejection, and I've got the first 80 years of the magazine on searchable DVD so I can try to get a sense of what they're printing this century. But the research has been pretty depressing. Take the year 2000 — not a single poet made a New Yorker debut (only 6 debuts since 1998); of 93 poems, 7 were metrical, and 2 of those newly discovered drafts by Elizabeth Bishop; more than half of the poems were by less than a third of the poets. Here are the metrical pieces and the dates they appeared:
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2/21 — Elizabeth Bishop, drafts discovered at Vassar: "Florida Deserta" and "The Street by the Cemetery."
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3/20 — Seamus Heaney: "The Augean Stables," a sonnet.
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5/22 — Kay Ryan: "Crown," metrical by courtesy. It does rhyme.
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11/27 — John Updike: "Optical Hypertension," 14 pretty-much pentameter lines, sometimes rhymed. Not a sonnet.
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12/18 — Joseph Brodsky, translated by Seamus Heaney: "Flight to Egypt" and "Nativity Poem."
And here are the poets alive in 2000 with more than one poem in the magazine:
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Seamus Heaney, 5 (2 of them translations of Joseph Brodsky)
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Eamon Grennan, 4 (Who is this person? The poems don't impress me.)
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Louise Glück, 3
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Kay Ryan, 3
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Donald Hall, 3
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Rosanna Warren, 3
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Sharon Olds, 2
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Anthony Hecht, 2 (His other poem was free verse.)
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Charles Wright, 2
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Franz Wright, 2
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Galway Kinnell, 2
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W. S. Merwin, 2
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Charles Simic, 2
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Debora Greger, 2 (One of these is "typewriter formal": centered lines in stanzas shaped by typescript length, not syllable, words, or feet.)
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Eavan Boland, 2
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Philip Levine, 2
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Robert Mazzocco, 2
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Mary Oliver, 2 (Centered lines, both. I find the practice annoying in free verse.)
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James Lasdun, 2
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Major Jackson, 2
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Philip Schultz, 2
Do they still reply quickly? Cause with those stats I ain't sending nothing to them that will sit for months. But I'm close to sending. It'll be a week or two.
1:29:53 AM 
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