The Village Voice reports that a national queer slam has grown out of the need to create a safe space for gay and lesbian poets to slam. And poet laureate Joseph Brodsky's American Poetry and Literacy Project distributes thousands of copies of 101 Great Poems in truck stops, supermarkets, hotels and train stations across the country every April. He holds hour-long poetry workshops for employees four times a month. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great poet and essayist who believed that all men live by truth, the poet is a vessel, a receiver of the ultimate truth with the ability to impart it. It speaks most deeply to and of the silences, and resonates with the music of thought.
All poems are maps of interior journeys, and poets are cartographers of the soul.
The more intensely evocative the map, the greater the poet. The poet names the gods, and names all the things in that which they are. . . The truth of experience that poetry evokes awaits our readiness to hear it. We memorize poetry as children without understanding, so that when our lives fill in the spaces with experience, we will be able to graft some fragment of poetry onto them. And in this way, we give our world and the world meaning.