All I have to say about the hiring of Paul Muldoon as the new poetry editor for The New Yorker, now that Alice Quinn is ending her 20-year tenure in the position come November, is that if it spares readers from enduring such godawful train wrecks as Joni Mitchell's rejected song lyrics ever again, it will all have been worth it.

(Seriously, though, I'm hardly a poetry expert, but I really dig Muldoon's stuff—for one thing, nobody else had written an alternate history science fiction epic poem before Madoc, and I don't think anybody has since. So I'm thinking he'll do okay in this new gig, as long as he still has time to bust out the electric guitar.)