Last Spring, friend Dominika Kretek said that she started subscribing to The New Yorker for the poetry—which sounds to me something like subscribing to Playboy for the articles, except that with Playboy the articles are supposed to be good. (Oh, but I don't think Dominika would appreciate this metaphor; barb sunk, I retract!) More to the point, she notes, and rues, the narrow selection, & rightly.

To be fair, I often read and sometimes enjoy the poems in the New Yorker, but I rarely love them. One such exception is "There Is No Time, She Writes" by one D. Nurske in the August 6, 2007 issue. I hope you'll read it, Unknown, as it is so good. When we get together (if!) then we can talk about it and lead lives like it describes.

UPDATE: Some years ago I tried to articulate what I think is the problem in The New Yorker's poetry selection. David Orr, it turns out, said it better in the Times this year:

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”).

—David Orr, "Annals of Poetry." New York Times, March 11, 2007.