1 It’s no coincidence that I use the word riposte here, for that was the title of a book of twenty-five poems published the very month and year Poetry was born: October 1912. Its author was Ezra Pound, who was also the magazine’s first (and only) foreign correspondent, known for bringing to our pages the likes of T. S. Eliot and Rabindranath Tagore. So our riposting has a history as old as we are. As you might expect, Pound himself had a few things to say about the professionalization of poetry. In a 1930 essay called “Small Magazines,” he writes: “The public runs hither and thither with transitory pleasures and underlying dissatisfactions; the specialists say: ‘This isn’t literature.’ And a deal of vain discussion ensues.” You can see that this question of “professionalization” goes back to Poetry’s—and modernist poetry’s—very beginning, and it hasn’t gone away.
1 Isaiah Berlin tells of a 1990 lecture Brodsky gave at the British Academy: “No one understood a thing . . . nor did I. He was speaking English quickly, swallowing his words. And I couldn’t catch it, couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. Listening to him was enjoyable, because he was animated, but I didn’t understand until afterwards, when I read [the text].”