MARGIE – 2005

Margie’s slogan is “strong medicine.” If you’re looking for a shot of poetry, this is the place. In this fat volume you’ll find over 400 pages of poetry by over 100 poets.

Margie’s slogan is “strong medicine.” If you’re looking for a shot of poetry, this is the place. In this fat volume you’ll find over 400 pages of poetry by over 100 poets. Published annually, Margie’s generous offering appears as a cross-section of the poetry landscape. Well-known poets such as Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Linda Pastan, Molly Peacock, Charles Simic, Tom Sleigh, and James Tate act as mile markers as the reader moves through this expansive journal’s wilderness of new voices—a wilderness in the sense of wild, new, and unexplored. The poems are arranged alphabetically by poet, which give the volume a certain democratic editorial feel, putting the new and emerging poets on the same level as some of the more prominent poets mentioned above. Despite the arbitrary arrangement by last name, the journal has a cohesion based on a sense of fun and serious examination of language. In Khaled Mattawa’s “In Praise of Praise,” he defines praise as “To give what is deserved, to polish / what had never dimmed or been allowed / to slip away from luster.” In that sense, I am certainly praising Margie, which continues to provide the strong medicine of eclectic poetry that it has since its first issue without fail.
[Margie: The American Journal of Poetry]