In the vast compendium of metaphysical problems, the question of how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin has been at least
temporarily supplanted by the question of how bad The New York Times
Magazine can get. This problem has less relevance to daily life than
the one about angels, but for connoisseurs of fatuousness the
spectacle of the Times Magazine imploding does provide a certain
grisly fascination. Week in and week out, always a bit worse. How
do they do it? Is there a special team of editorial surgeons that
goes to work on each article, ruthlessly extracting every trace of
intellectual substance before publication? Or is it a technological
advance, a new word-processing feature that automatically trivializes
whatever “text” is fed into it? In this month’s “Media” column,
James Bowman anatomizes the February 12 edition of the Sunday New York
Times, paying particular attention to James Atlas’s feeble
Magazine article on thirty- and forty-something conservative
intellectuals, “The Counter Counterculture.”

Vapid though Mr. Atlas’s foray into alien intellectual territory was, the
Times Magazine managed to outdo itself the very next week with an
article by the journalist Dinitia Smith on the contemporary poetry
scene. Mr. Atlas and his editors may have produced an anemic mess,
an article that effectively reduced the whole story of conservative
intellectual life in this country to a matter of haberdashery and
lifestyle. But Miss Smith went even further, turning out an article
of such mind-numbing stupidity that it probably qualifies for some
sort of affirmative- action grant. Entitled “The Poet Kings and the
Versifying Rabble,” the piece purports to tell the story of how
contemporary poetry
is being opened up and “democratized” by such
pop atavistic phenomena as hip-hop, rap, and MTV. Certainly, Miss
Smith’s grammar has been “democratized.” Here she is on poets who win
prizes for their poetry: “The most awarded of all is John Ashbery.”
And her judgment is not far behind: “Ice Cube
[a rapper] and Scarface
[ditto] chant modern versions of Homeric odes, heroic tales
of romance and men at war.”

This is the purest twaddle, of course, but Miss Smith professes to
be made starry-eyed by developments in contemporary poetry. “Never before
has poetry seemed to be in such a vital, healthy state,” she
enthused. “Never before have so many poetry books been
published—1,200 volumes in 1993 alone.” Miss Smith is impressed by
big numbers. Many of our readers will have noticed that snatches of
poetry now appear on panels in New York City buses and subways. So
what? you ask, and rightly. But this cutesy public-relations ploy has
set Miss Smith’s heart aflutter: “five million people a day,” she
exclaims, “exposed to Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost”—as if
poetry were a kind of germ that one could catch by careless
propinquity. It’s the same sort of logic—if logic is the mot
juste—that leads museum curators to salivate over crowds filing
past paintings in their blockbuster art exhibitions. In those
fleeting seconds, they, too, are “exposed” to art.

Miss Smith’s homage to the muse proceeds with a profile of the poet
W. S. Merwin that, considered strictly in terms of sugar content, is
a diabetic’s death warrant. “I’d got lost looking for W. S. Merwin’s
house on the Hawaiian island of Maui,” Miss Smith begins, following
up with a few sentences of “fine writing.” Then this:

It was almost like rain forest here—pink and red
hibiscus, ginger flowers filled with rain from the night.

Then, suddenly, there he was, as if he’d somehow materialized out
of the rain.

No, the magazine did not come with an air-sickness bag, but just
imagine: the Times actually paid to send this woman to Hawaii.

Alas, the very worst part of the article was yet to come. This was a
two-page spread called “The Poetry Pantheon: Who’s Who, From
Kingmaker to Scold,” text by Dinitia Smith, illustrations by Michael
Witte. This little feature was a chart, replete with names
and caricatures, purporting to give readers
the low-down on such things as
“Best-Looking Male Poets,” “Best-Looking Female Poets,” “Top
Editors,” and “Big Guns, Kingmakers.” There was also a box listing
“Main Groups and Schools of Thought,” which featured such important
literary categories
as “Earth Mothers,” “Sex, Gender, Politics,”
“The Neo-Colonialists,” and “Stones and Bones Poets” (“When they
get depressed,” Miss Smith’s “text” informs us parenthetically,
“they tend to use a lot of imagery of the above”). But our favorite
category was “Scolds” (“Trying to uphold the standards!”), partly, we
admit, because Robert Richman, poetry editor of The New
Criterion, was included.

Dinitia Smith’s article is worse than a travesty, it is an insult. And
quite apart from what it tells us about the nose dive of standards at
The New York Times Magazine, we had to wonder about the timing of
the article. Anyone with a shred of feeling for literature will be
alternately repulsed and enraged by the dim-witted philistinism that
the piece exhibits. Yet we note that the Times has just appointed a new
daily book critic and a new editor of its Sunday book review. As
these gentlemen prepare to take up their posts at our “paper of
record,” what can
they be thinking about their employer’s commitment
to literary or journalistic standards?