Alice Quinn Bids Farewell to PSA
tony gale
21 POETS & WRITERSTRENDSQ &^ A^
This summer Alice Quinn will step down
as the executive director of the Poetry
Society of America (PSA), a position she
has held for the past eighteen years. Dur-
ing her tenure, the PSA launched multiple
new poetry prizes, organized hundreds
of events across the United States, and
expanded the Poetry in Motion program,
which brings poetry into U.S. transit sys-
tems. Previously, Quinn was the poetry
editor at the New Yorker for twenty years
and an editor at Knopf for more than ten
years. She also teaches at Columbia Uni-
versity and is the editor of a book of Eliza-
beth Bishop’s writings, Edgar Allan Poe &
the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts,
and Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2006), as well as a forthcoming book of
Bishop’s journals. A few months before
departing the PSA, Quinn, accompanied
by her dachshund, Daisy, talked about her
work at the nonprofit organization.What are you most proud of achieving
at the PSA?
I’m proud of Poetry in Motion, which
recently celebrated its twenty-fifth an-
niversary in New York and its twentieth
in Los Angeles. We have a new tran-
sit initiative in partnership with San
Francisco Beautiful that is a wonder-
ful variation on the program involving
local artists and poets. I’m also thrilled
with our PSA Chapbook Fellowship
program, founded in 2003, which has
launched the careers of sixty-four new
poets selected and introduced by major
figures. We also have two splendid new
prizes to add to our distinguished ros-
ter of annual awards, the Four Quartets
Prize for a unified sequence of poems...
and the Anna Rabinowitz Prize for an
interdisciplinary project involving po-
etry and any other art.Why did you choose to step down now?
I thought I might stay until I’d reached
the twenty-year mark, but eighteen-
plus seems just fine. And I’ve beenmuch more excitement and openness
about the field, and it just keeps getting
better and better. –DANA ISOKAWAworking on the journals of Elizabeth
Bishop for too long. I have a new home
in the Hudson Valley not far from
where Bishop’s papers are lodged at Vas-
sar, and I’m so excited about that. The
archive is closed during the week, so for
years I’ve had to use my vacations and a
day here and there to access the archive
for Bishop projects. I’m sure there will
be programming in my future because
I have a talent for it, and knowing an
audience has been swept up by poetry
in a lasting way matters to me. But new
leadership can be galvanizing, and I
know the PSA will find someone great
for this position.There are a number of organizations in
New York City that support poetry,
such as the Academy of American
Poets and Poets House. What has
distinguished the PSA?
I think the PSA has always had a special
focus on enlightening people about the
power of poetry and the special space
it can have in your life—how if you
encounter it alone or by surprise in a
public place, you can be affected and re-
minded of actually how powerfully you
are able to receive the wisdom and force
of poetry. Our programs build on that
and send a message that poetry is not
too difficult or that it belongs to only
one moment in college or to a fervid
moment when you were a child.In a Q&A for this magazine in 2008, you
said poetry had gotten “swervier.” Do you
think it has continued to get swervier?
I think poetry has gotten more tradi-
tional as well as swervier. There’s a lot
of white space. There are many more se-
quences that hearken back to traditional
poetry. There’s a lot of going back and
rediscovering and recontextualizing and
learning from moments when the voice
in literature sounded different and the
use of argument was more profound. Ar-
gument matters in poetry. There’s also