Raymond Hammond is editor of the poetry journal New York Quarterly and the related book imprint New York Quarterly Books , as well as being an esteemed poet in his own right and the author of a lively polemic, Poetic Amusement. I recently had a wide-ranging conversation with him over email about the state of affairs in the poetry world.
Shivani : There are countless literary journals out there--ranging from the staid and traditional in print, to avant-garde online journals. What is distinctive about The New York Quarterly? What will readers of poetry get from your journal that they may not easily get somewhere else?
Would Rolling Stone --assuming they were still interested in poetry, which might be a stretch--still think that? Hammond : I would hope that they would not call us the best. My hope would be that they would call us the most eclectic, or most inclusive, or most read by the average person, but "best" implies a superior condition and we all know that making that decision is a matter of taste of the individual reader, or at least should be.
With that said, I do think that we still, as in the days of that quotation, rank right up there with the top tier literary journals. Most of the journals I ran across at the magazine stand all seemed the same, and I found the poetry pretty flat and dull.
So for me, it clearly was the best. Since becoming the editor of NYQ , I strive for two objectives: eclecticism and straightforwardness. First, I want the magazine to remain different from any other journal out there. One of the things that I noticed about NYQ the first time I picked it up was how there could be a language poem on one page, a visual poem on the next, a lyric poem after that, etc.
