A Measuring Worm; The Magic Kingdom; The Saws

By now, as far as I understand, the poetry in the latest issues of The New Yorker is Paul Muldoon's responsibility, not Alice Quinn's. So perhaps it is thanks to Muldoon that one can read this Richard Wilbur poem, "A Measuring Worm", in the February 11 issue (which I have not yet held in my hands, though, thanks to Perlentaucher, I already the poem on-line).

I love Wilbur's use of this stanza, here and elsewhere:

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Each stanza is a haiku, with the first and third lines rhyming.

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After writing the above, I went on to read the next poem on-line from that issue, Kathleen Graber's "The Magic Kingdom." Now (assuming that Muldoon picked that one) that is a poem that, as far as I can tell from years of reading the poems she edited, Quinn would not have chosen.

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And just to make the list complete, here's the third poem from the same issue, Robert Pinsky's "The Saws." Not a bad set of poems for once! I cannot remember the last time there were three poems in the New Yorker and I did not think, about least one of them, "why would anyone want to publish that bland piece of boredom?"