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From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.