Pulitzer Winner to Take Over as New Yorker's Poetry Editor

BYLINE: By MOTOKO RICH

SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 430 words

Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, is stepping down after 20 years and will be succeeded in one of the most influential posts in the poetry world by Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

Mr. Muldoon, 56, will remain chairman of the Princeton University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. An Irish-born poet who has published 10 volumes of verse, he will also continue to write and teach at Princeton.

Ms. Quinn, 58, will leave the magazine in early November. She is executive director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She said she wanted to devote more time to those jobs as well as to a collection of Elizabeth Bishop's journals and notebooks that she is editing. ''I had to keep stealing days to get up to the archive during the week,'' she said, referring to the collection of Ms. Bishop's papers at Vassar College. ''I don't want to take five or six years doing this book.''

Mr. Muldoon quickly emerged as the leading candidate after Ms. Quinn announced her intentions.

''It's not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,'' said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. ''It's also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who's not in Alaska.''

Mr. Remnick added that the selection of Mr. Muldoon, who had his first poem published when he was just 16, did not represent ''some sort of radical aesthetic or theoretical shift.''

He added, ''It's not as if we went from a structuralist to a post-structuralist or a Beat to a conservative.''

In her tenure at the magazine, Ms. Quinn, who was also a fiction editor for 14 years, worked with a range of poets that included Joseph Brodsky, Jane Kenyon, Louise Gluck, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Eavan Boland and Mark Strand. Ms. Quinn said she was particularly proud of having introduced so many poets in translation to New Yorker audiences.

The magazine has sometimes been criticized for publishing the same poets repeatedly and playing favorites, but Ms. Quinn said that 85 percent of what she published came to her in the mail ''with little or no notice.'' She said that the magazine regularly received more than 600 poems a week.

Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job, which is a part-time post. ''One would want to be absolutely open to the poem that one simply did not expect to have made its way into the world and somehow suddenly falls on one's desk,'' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: September 21, 2007

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Paul Muldoon will become poetry editor of The New Yorker. (PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA PEDRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper