Parnassus is finally closing shop. Herbert Leibowitz, literary critic and former college professor has thrown in the towel on Parnassus, the poetry journal he founded in 1973.
What has distinguished Parnassus has been a commitment to intelligence and beautiful writing, prose designed not for academics or even for poets but for the mythical common reader beloved of Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf. At a time when the world of poetry is full of coteries, back-slapping and back-stabbing, friends reviewing and awarding prizes to friends, Mr. Leibowitz and his young co-editor Ben Downing, who came to the magazine after a stint at Columbia's MFA program, insist upon passion, honesty and clarity. Like all good editors, they are curators, assembling things and people they like into interesting groupings (issues on Poetry and the Movies or Words and Music, for instance).
Volume 30, the big last issue, will come out later this year.
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