As Shakespeare would say (and did in Act I, Scene 5, of his 1606 play, Antony & Cleopatra) alas for the “salad days” of poetry.
No, he didn’t mention the poetry part, just the salad days part, through the mouth of the beautiful Cleopatra reminiscing about her foolish, younger (read: greener) days.
Over time the foolish part has fallen off the salad, leaving the younger part, so the expression “salad days” (the green of youth, which we have a tendency to worship) now indicate only a good thing.
But alas, when it comes to poetry, the salad days are behind us — at least if you use The New York Times Magazine, a Sunday staple for many readers, as an indicator. During Trump’s first administration, poetry enjoyed an explosion of voices, many minority and under-represented ones previously unheard from. Each Sunday you could find a poem in the Times Magazine, too, curated by a rotating editor. The last was Anne Boyer, who resigned in November of 2023 to protest the war in Gaza.
Despite Trump’s second administration and its push against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) on all fronts, minority voices and identity poetry have remained as strong as ever in Poetry World. Not so in the bigger landscape of journalism. Though the New York Times remains a bastion of truth against Trump & his sycophants’ frequent lies, they decided against continuing the poetry column after Boyer’s political resignation. Thus ended a creative stretch in a highly-visible market, one once edited by the likes of Terrance Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, Matthew Zapruder, and Rita Dove.
It appears that poetry is being pushed back toward the ivory tower of its undoing. No more will you see sweet little poems like this one about a couple in the Puerto Rican countryside, which once appeared in the Magazine‘s Sunday pages. It reads like a side of salad, I think, and was written by the very cooly-named poet Blas Falconer. I leave the dressing to you:
“A man and a woman touched”
by Blas Falconer
at night under stairs,
pinball machines ringing, and,
Sundays, he drove her to
the springs of Coamo, the chapel of
San Germán. Had she ever known
happiness? The road
littered with mangos seemed
to go on
forever. She thought,
The people can’t eat
them fast enough,
as if she were not
one of those people.
Ah, love and sadness. And sweet mangos. And the salad days of our youth. Foolishly, we thought the good times were here for good. In Poetry World — and in the dark countryside surrounding it, now run by corporations, greed, and corruption — I guess we should have known better.