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

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
In February, just a couple of weeks from now, the New Yorker will mark its centenary, a hundred years of publishing. 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.

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.

And over a century's worth of issues,

we've published an immense body of short fiction and poems.

I mean, The New Yorker has published in its history

close to 14,000 pieces of fiction. And so you went back and read every single one.
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.
Deborah Treisman and Kevin Young have just put together two anthologies to celebrate the New Yorker's centennial. 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.

He's an amazing poet and the director

of the Smithsonian's National Museum

of African American History and Culture.

And in his spare time, he's edited the new book,

A Century of Poetry at the New Yorker. 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.
What do you remember about reading that book, about who was included, and maybe at least as much to the point, was not. 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. 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.
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. It was actually kind of surprising when you asked me, you know, to do this.
I think my first response was, I've only wanted to do this since I was 15, you know? Like, I've been thinking about, you know, this idea, and so it was like kind of a dream come true, and I pulled the book off the shelf and saw my underlines and was so excited. And then I realized there's not one person of color in that whole book.
And then you who come along so many years later, we're only the sixth black poet in our pages. But you know, 1999, that's a long time.
What accounts for that? It was missing a lot of opportunities for the range of American poetry. 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. You know, an anthology, we have the advantage of looking back and selecting and saying, well, that's obvious, as Deborah is saying.
But it isn't always in the process. 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? Because there is a kind of level of, you know, if it's not welcoming, why would you send your poem there in the start? The big poets in the 50s, I think they would have found the New Yorker anathema somehow.
Right, exactly. The New York school often until then Ashbery's in and then he was in a lot.
And so that's what's interesting is it isn't one sort of taste only. But you have someone like Sister Sonia Sanchez, a wonderful poet.
She was taught by Louise Bogan and that 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. So I think there's a lot of interesting connections still.
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.

And the first note is a very curt no thank you. And suddenly it gets a lot warmer.
As a fiction editor, even today, do you live in fear of missing a potential genius? When things come in,

what are you always thinking?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that even geniuses

don't always write their best work

right off the bat.

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 they were probably justified,

those rejections.

And Beatty, 44 rejections before Roger Angel took them. I think it was only 13.
Well, 44, 13. He wrote her very detailed letters about what he was exasperated with in her work and encouraging her to do something different.
But at least he spotted that she had something fresh and interesting and different,

and he encouraged that. Debra, 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.

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

Well, I think generally the cliche is that it's a story about a working man in the suburbs who commutes into the city and cheats on his wife perhaps or thinks about it. You know, it's very much about white middle class married life and that it ends with an epiphany.
You know, like Irwin Shaw's Girls in Their Summer Dresses, which is just a moment of a husband and wife talking in a bar and he's thinking about attractive girls. But it's – These things happen.
These things happen, right? They're slices of life, not so much narratives. And when you went back and read a whole bunch of these, how did you react to them? Did you admire them more than you thought you would? Were you bored with them? 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 considering whether it was correct to include stories that feel dated now because they were representative of their time or whether it would be better to simply include stories that continue to resonate. What choice did you make? I think the latter.

I hope, yeah.

For the most part. But you know, then you're not representing a large number of works, which meant something at the time, but mean less now.
The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, will continue in a moment. WNYC Studios is supported by Pulitzer on the Road, the official podcast of the Pulitzer Prizes, now back with its second season.
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Quince.com slash Radio Hour. The thing that seems to date maybe fastest when I look back at old New Yorkers is humor.
I'll read, you know, the supposedly hilarious Alexander Wolcott, and I don't know what the hell he's talking about three-quarters of the time. I think humor is really – it's time-stamped.

I mean I mostly think that. But I think the really funny – like Dorothy Parker feels very modern and crisp.
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,

golf joke, you know, it doesn't really resonate. Was that equivalent to a New Yorker poem as it was a New Yorker story? Yeah.
I mean, I think especially the 20s, the 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, you know? So there's a kind of like, I like going out, but I sure like staying home or like, if only, you know, it's just something kind of like that. But also you saw a lot of light verse, Ogden, Nash, and the like.

But some of that is so great.

It's so playful with language.

So if you got that today, you thought it was successful, in it would go.

I would hope.

Do people write it?

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.

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. 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.
And so that's why it's a little surprising. Kevin, you went with a different choice on how you organized this book.
Maybe you should explain it. 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.
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. And the other anthologies, the previous New Yorker ones, were thematic in different ways or alphabetical.
I think the 69 one is alphabetical by title. It's crazy.
What is going on? You don't know where to navigate this thing. 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 after work drink, and goes like that.

So you intersperse the time, the progression of the day, and then it's ingenious, and it really

works. You begin the anthology, Kevin, with a poem by a Polish poet.
Tell me the story of this

poem, when it appeared, and maybe after you do, maybe you could read it for us. Yeah, this is Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagievsky.
And it appears in the September 17th issue, which, as you know, was the issue right after September 11th, 2001. And to be just a week after September 11th.
It was the issue right after 9-11. Which I remember getting.
Yeah, with the black cover by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly and long narrative by a lot of reporters about what had happened. It 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 and this iconic poem.

So this is Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagayevsky. Try to praise the mutilated world

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.
You watch 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. You've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered aches. together in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

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

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. I remember it happening.
I remember Alice Quinn giving me this thing, and I was, like everybody else, a wreck. I had slept in the office half the week, and I just was, I was a puddle.
I was a puddle, and I got this thing, and we just put it on the back page, which is not normally where we put poems. But, you know, I'm thinking about this just now because we've had the fires in California and we just ran a fire poem the very week.
It came in literally the day or a few days after and we were able to run it. You know, that poem is not an anthology, but there are a number of poems about COVID and pandemic and what 2020 was like and, you know, 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. Deborah, how do you see politics filtering or not filtering into the short stories that you read week after week.

Well, I was just thinking about 2016 when our slush pile of submissions was full of satires about Trump. And somehow it was just too direct.
It wasn't nuanced. They weren't worked as literature.
They weren't good writing in that sense. but then there were quite a few stories a little bit of time later in which the Trump presidency was a backdrop, and its effects were playing out in families or in relationships, and it was really effective.
Deborah, I want to ask you about your day-to-day work as a fiction editor. How many stories does The New Yorker get a week? Probably between 100 and 200.
That's a lot of stories. It is.
So how do you, what's the process of selecting the story? Well, there's myself and three other people in the fiction department, and we're all being sent things. And then there's an unsolicited section of submissions, which are read by our wonderful fiction readers, who will pass along to the editors anything they think is promising.
Just for the record, we're reading everything. We're reading everything.
Yeah. And you and the great Hannah Eisenman, who you work with, how many poems come in each week?

I more know that annually about 48,000.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

They're shorter than the story.

48,000 poems.

I want to say 40, 40.

And we publish about 100.

100 a year, yeah.

So we do read them, but it is, you know, a slightly smaller group of people reading. And, you know, we have a lot.
And a lot shorter. Yeah, but, you know, they'll send five.
They won't send just one. So, you know, I once talked to Alice Quinn about this years ago when I was, you know, just sending to The New Yorker.
And she said, you know, I would feel weird if we had less. We have people in a given year,

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.

Same with short story writers.

George Saunders arrives with something

or Laurie Moore or Edwidge Danicetta, whatever.

But you're always looking for something new. How does this all work? Usually 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.
So it's quite a high number when you consider that their next story, they're not in that category. 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.
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? Well, can I remember a time when I opened an envelope?

Touché and fair enough.

Or an email, yes. An enclosure, fair enough.
Absolutely, I can. Absolutely.
Yeah, so, you know, one fairly recent case of that is 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, and hit a nerve. And she had not published widely at all.
She did not have a book out, but it was a story that spoke to people. The books are A Century of Fiction and A Century of Poetry at the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, Kevin Young, and I want a little shout-out here to Deborah Garrison, who was so wonderful at Knoppen, helping us all out.
Thank you so much. Happy anniversary.
Happy anniversary. That's The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, along with our poetry editor, Kevin Young.
A century of fiction and a century of poetry come out this month, and of course, you can always subscribe at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick.
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us, and see you next time.
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