The New Yorker Celebrates a Hundred Years as a Poetry and Fiction Tastemaker

Speaker 1 Black Friday, wow, shop, Wayfair now, one funk, big deals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, these are still 70%. Less money spent.
You can't go wrong.

Speaker 1 Check out the song. Fast at the core.
Black Friday's more signal than treats. Saving with ease.
Lights for your house, lamps for your spouse. Save at Wayfair.

Speaker 1 On dining chairs, mattresses, two sheets that are new. Everything home, these things are chrome.
And so

Speaker 1 shipping wall, Wayfair is all. Win the season, win the win the season.
Winfair, Wayfair, Wayfair, Winter, Wayfair.

Speaker 3 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 4 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 1 I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 4 In February, just a couple of weeks from now, the New Yorker will mark its centenary, 100 years of publishing.

Speaker 4 And yet, when we began, the New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, saw the magazine almost purely as what he called a comic paper. Those first issues were light as air.

Speaker 4 But once Ross made the crucial hire of Catherine White, an editor who insisted on bringing the best of fiction and poetry to the magazine, things changed.

Speaker 4 And over a century's worth of issues, we've published an immense body of short fiction and poems.

Speaker 2 I mean, the New Yorker has published in its history close to 14,000 pieces of fiction.

Speaker 1 And so you went back and read every single one.

Speaker 1 And how many poems do we have? Any idea, Kevin? I think you might eclipse us. I think we're at 13,500 or something like that.

Speaker 4 Deborah Treesman and Kevin Young have just put together two anthologies to celebrate the New Yorker Centennial.

Speaker 4 Deborah has been the magazine's fiction editor and my colleague since 2003, and she's just edited A Century of Fiction at the New Yorker. Kevin joined us as poetry editor in 2017.

Speaker 4 He's an amazing poet and the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Speaker 4 And in his spare time, he's edited the new book, A Century of Poetry, at the New Yorker.

Speaker 4 Kevin, you said that when you were growing up, you bought a copy of the New Yorker Book of Poems anthology, which was published in 1969.

Speaker 4 What do you remember about reading that book about who was included and maybe at least as much to the point who was not?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember vividly reading it, and I still have my copy, and it's very neatly underlined in ink, which I wouldn't do now. I think I'm a pencil guy mostly.

Speaker 1 But, you know, just to see like James Dickey's Falling, for instance, which is sort of this Bravura piece. It's pages and pages.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure we would even run something as long as that, but to see it. I would hope that we would.
Okay, well, you've heard it, folks. You've heard it, folks.

Speaker 1 It was actually kind of surprising when you asked me to do this. I think my first response was, I've only wanted to do this since I was 15.

Speaker 1 I've been thinking about this idea. And so it was kind of a dream come true.
And I pulled the book off the shelf and saw my underlines and was so excited.

Speaker 1 And then I realized there's not one person of color in that whole book.

Speaker 4 And then you, who come along so many years later, were only the sixth black poet in our pages.

Speaker 1 You know, 1999. That's a long time.
What accounts for that?

Speaker 1 It was missing a lot of opportunities for the range of American poetry.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't just African-American poets. It's missing Asian poetry.
It's missing the long tradition of Asian poetry or African poetry. You know, it doesn't include that in translation even.

Speaker 1 You know, an anthology is per, we have the advantage of looking back and selecting and saying, well, that's obvious, as Deborah's saying, but it isn't always in the process.

Speaker 1 And I actually, what is interesting to me is I haven't gone through the archive and figured out, is it people didn't send?

Speaker 1 Because there is a kind of level of, you know, if it's not welcoming, why would you send your poem there?

Speaker 4 The deep poets in the 50s, I think they would have found the New Yorker anathema.

Speaker 1 Right, exactly. The New York school often until then Ashbury's in, and then he was in a lot.

Speaker 1 And so that's what's interesting is it isn't one sort of taste only, but you have someone like Sister Sonia Sanchez, wonderful poet. She was taught by Louise Bougain, you know, and that

Speaker 1 connection to the New Yorker was there for her in the beginning. And so in a way, there is this tie, even though it's not shown in the magazine.

Speaker 1 So I think there's a lot of interesting connections still.

Speaker 4 I was over at the New York Public Library yesterday, and one of the archivists showed me some correspondence between the fiction department and Jerry Salinger, J.D. Salinger.

Speaker 4 And the first note is a very curt, no thank you.

Speaker 4 And suddenly it gets a lot warmer. As a fiction editor, even today, do you live in fear of

Speaker 4 missing

Speaker 4 a potential genius?

Speaker 4 When things come in, what are you always thinking?

Speaker 2 Well, I guess the thing to remember is that even geniuses don't always write their best work right off the bat.

Speaker 2 You know, people make a lot of noise about rejection letters from the New Yorker that went to famous writers or later famous writers. And

Speaker 2 they were probably justified those rejections.

Speaker 4 Ann Beattie, 44 rejections before Roger Angel.

Speaker 2 I think it was only 13, but

Speaker 1 44, 13.

Speaker 2 He wrote her very detailed letters about what he was exasperated with in her work and encouraging her to do something different.

Speaker 2 But at least he spotted that she had something fresh and interesting and different, and he encouraged that.

Speaker 4 Dear, there was a period, a long period, where people would refer to the New Yorker story. that there was this thing called the New Yorker short story.

Speaker 4 What was it and how did that reputation develop, fairly or not?

Speaker 2 Well, I think generally the cliché is that it's a story about a working man in the suburbs who commutes into the city and

Speaker 2 cheats on his wife, perhaps, or

Speaker 2 thinks about it.

Speaker 2 You know, that's very much about white middle-class married life. and that it ends with an epiphany, you know, like Erwin Shaw's

Speaker 2 Girls in Their Summer Dresses, which is just a moment of a man and a husband and wife talking in a bar, and he's thinking about

Speaker 2 attractive girls.

Speaker 1 But it's these things happen.

Speaker 1 These things happen, right?

Speaker 2 They were slices of life, not so much narratives.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, and when you went back and read a whole bunch of these, how did you react to them?

Speaker 4 Did you admire them more than you thought you would, or were you bored with them?

Speaker 2 Well, I read them with a different eye because there's so much of their time. And that was also what was interesting in reading for the anthology was

Speaker 2 considering whether it was correct to include stories that feel dated now because they are representative of their time or whether it would be better to simply include stories that continue to resonate.

Speaker 4 What choice did you make?

Speaker 2 I think the latter.

Speaker 1 I hope, yeah. For the most part.

Speaker 2 But, you know,

Speaker 2 then you're not representing a large number of works, which meant something at the time, but mean less now.

Speaker 4 The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treesman will continue in a moment.

Speaker 5 Everybody has a hot take on the economy. And whether you're curious about inflation, trade wars, or the markets, what you need is reporting you can trust.

Speaker 5 Hi, I'm Kai Rizdahl, the host of of Marketplace. Our award-winning reporters talk to everybody from CEOs to farmers to help you understand how the economy takes shape in the real world.

Speaker 5 You'll be smarter every time you listen. And these days, that's priceless.
Listen to Marketplace on your favorite podcast app.

Speaker 4 The thing that seems to date maybe fastest when I look back at old New Yorkers is humor.

Speaker 4 I'll read, you know, the supposedly hilarious Alexander Wilcott, and I don't know what the hell he's talking about three-quarters of the time.

Speaker 2 I think humor is really

Speaker 2 timestamped.

Speaker 1 I mean, I mostly think that, but I think the really funny, you know, like Dorothy Parker feels very modern and crisp.

Speaker 1 And sometimes what you're encountering, in my opinion, is a generic kind of of the time humor, like, you know, at a smoker, you know, in the 50s that, you know, was a hilarious, you know,

Speaker 1 golf joke. You know, it doesn't really really.

Speaker 4 Is it equivalent to a New Yorker poem?

Speaker 4 As it was a New Yorker story?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I think, especially the 20s, a kind of rhyming, clever poem.
quatrains, no doubt, that, you know, comes to a clever conclusion, usually the opposite of what you might have thought.

Speaker 1 You know, so there's a kind of like, I like going out, but I sure like staying home. Or

Speaker 1 like, if only, only, you know, it's just something kind of like that.

Speaker 1 But also, you saw a lot of light verse, Ogden Nash and the like.

Speaker 1 But some of that is so great. It's so playful with language.

Speaker 4 So if you got that today, you thought it was successful, In It Would Go. I would hope.
Do people write it?

Speaker 1 They don't write it as much. Why? I think I, well, I have Auden's view of light verse.
He edited an Oxford Anthology of Light Verse.

Speaker 1 And one of the things he talks about, he includes the blues in there. And one of the things I think is so clever about that is he has this broad view of light verse as a kind of musical.

Speaker 1 What's interesting about looking back then, like there's a lot of, you know, Harlem Renaissance poets who were very formal and could have easily fit in those pages.

Speaker 1 And so that's why it's a little surprising.

Speaker 4 Kevin, you went with a different choice on how you organized this book. Maybe you should explain that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I wanted to kind of give that sense of the time period and move from the 20s and I kind of grouped these decades together, especially at the beginning.

Speaker 1 But I thought if you just marched through it, you'd have a lot of pages of things that might, you know, not talk to each other in the same way as if you think about theme.

Speaker 1 And the other anthologies, the previous New Yorker ones, were thematic in different ways or alphabetical. I think the 69 one is

Speaker 1 crazy. By title.
I mean, crazy.

Speaker 1 I don't know where to navigate this thing.

Speaker 1 So instead, I said, well, what about if it's like a day? And so it starts with the morning, a morning bell, and then, you know, has a lunch break and then it has an afterwork drink and goes like that.

Speaker 4 So you intersperse the time, the progression of the day, and then

Speaker 4 it's ingenious and it really works. You begin the anthology, Kevin, with a poem by a Polish poet.

Speaker 4 Tell me the story of this poem, when it appeared, and maybe after you do, maybe you could read it for us.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagovsky. And it appears in the September 17th issue, which, as you know, was the issue right after September 11th, 2001.

Speaker 1 And to be just a week after September 11th.

Speaker 4 It was the issue right after

Speaker 4 9-11, yeah, with the black cover by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and a long narrative by a lot of reporters about what had happened.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, it

Speaker 1 had to start the anthology. There was no way you couldn't sort of frame our current moment and looking back without that iconic issue in that this iconic poem.

Speaker 1 So, this is Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagovsky.

Speaker 1 Try to praise the mutilated world.

Speaker 1 Remember June's long days and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew, the nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world.

Speaker 1 You watch watched the stylish yachts and ships. One of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere.

Speaker 1 You've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world.

Speaker 1 Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

Speaker 1 You gathered acorns in the park in autumn, and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Speaker 1 Praise the mutilated world, and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

Speaker 4 I remember it happening. I remember Alice Quinn giving me this thing, and I was, like everybody else, a wreck.
I'd had slept in the office half the week and

Speaker 4 I just was I was a puddle.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I was a puddle when I got this thing and we just put it on the back page, which is not normally where we put poems.

Speaker 1 But you know, I'm I'm thinking about this just now because we've had the fires

Speaker 1 in California and we just ran a fire poem the very week we it came in literally the day

Speaker 1 or a few days after and we were able to run it. You know, that poem is not in the anthology, but there are a number of poems about COVID and pandemic and what 2020 was like and

Speaker 1 the murder of George Floyd. I mean, these are things poetry can do and the magazine can do better than anyone and run a week later.

Speaker 4 Tebra, how do you see politics filtering or not filtering into the short stories that you read week after week?

Speaker 2 Well, I was just thinking about 2016 when our slash pile of submissions was full of satires about Trump. And somehow it was just too direct.
It wasn't nuanced.

Speaker 2 They weren't worked as literature. They weren't good writing in that sense.

Speaker 2 But then

Speaker 2 there were quite a few stories, a little bit of time later,

Speaker 2 in which the Trump presidency was a backdrop. And its effects were playing out in families or in relationships.
And

Speaker 2 that was really effective.

Speaker 4 Deborah, I want to ask you about your day-to-day work as fiction editor. How many stories does the New Yorker get a week?

Speaker 2 Probably between 100 and 200.

Speaker 4 It's a lot of stories. It is.
So how do you -

Speaker 4 what's the process of selecting the story? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, there's myself and three other people in the fiction department, and we're all being sent things.

Speaker 2 And then there's an unsolicited section of submissions, which are read by our wonderful fiction readers

Speaker 2 who will pass along to the editors anything they think is promising.

Speaker 4 Aaron Ross Powell, just for the record, we're reading everything.

Speaker 2 We're reading everything. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you and the great Hannah Eisenman, who you work with, how many poems come in each week?

Speaker 1 I more know that annually about 48,000 come in. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 2 48,000? They're shorter than the story.

Speaker 1 48,000 poems. Well, let's say 40, 40.

Speaker 4 And we publish about

Speaker 1 100 a year, yeah.

Speaker 1 So we do read them, but it is a slightly smaller group of people reading. And, you know, we have.
Get a lot shorter.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But, you know, they'll send five.
You know, they won't send just one. So, you know, the I once talked to Alice Quinn about this years ago when I was

Speaker 1 just sending to the New Yorker, and she said, you know, I would feel weird if we had less.

Speaker 4 We have people in a given year.

Speaker 4 Jory Graham is most likely going to publish a poem, and we could name, I don't know, 20 other or more, as it were, regulars that have been publishing poems in the New Yorker for a while.

Speaker 4 Same with short story writers. George Saunders arrives with something, or Laurie Moore, or Edwich Danikut, or whatever.

Speaker 4 But you're always looking for something

Speaker 1 new.

Speaker 4 How does this all work?

Speaker 1 Usually

Speaker 2 between 20 and 25 percent of stories in a given year are by people who are publishing in the New Yorker for the first time.

Speaker 2 So it's quite a high number when you consider that their next story, they're not in that category.

Speaker 2 I guess the goal is really just thinking about a story's ambition, what it's trying to be, what effect it's trying to have on the reader, and taking it if it's successful at that.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, can you remember a time where you've opened an envelope and it's somebody that you hadn't heard of, and you just, by the end of, you know, half an hour later, you're singing, oh, Happy Day?

Speaker 2 Well, can I remember a time when I opened an envelope?

Speaker 1 Touche, and fair enough.

Speaker 1 Or a PDM and closure. Fair enough.
Absolutely, I can.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Yeah.
So,

Speaker 2 you know, one fairly recent case of that is

Speaker 2 the story that went viral and got the most attention online that any New Yorker story has ever got, which was Cat Person by Kristen Rupenian,

Speaker 2 and hit a nerve. And

Speaker 2 she had not published widely at all.

Speaker 2 She did not have a book out, but it was a story that spoke to people.

Speaker 4 The books are a century of fiction Fiction and A Century of Poetry at the New Yorker, Deborah Treseman, Kevin Young.

Speaker 4 And I want a little shout out here to Deborah Garrison, who was so wonderful at Knauf and helping us all out. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary.

Speaker 4 That's the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treesman, along with our poetry editor, Kevin Young. A century of fiction and a century of poetry come out this month.

Speaker 4 And of course, you can always subscribe at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.

Speaker 3 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards with additional music by Jared Paul.

Speaker 3 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

Speaker 3 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 4 Hi, it's David Ramnick. I'd like to ask for your help with something.
We're conducting a survey of our audience and we want to hear from you as a New Yorker Radio Hour listener.

Speaker 4 We want to learn what you value, whether it's a dream guest for the show or thoughts on your favorite episodes.

Speaker 4 We want to hear from you, and as a token of our appreciation, you'll be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. You can find the link in our episode notes.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening.