A speech might be a visionary explanation of goals that would make everyone's life better, but if it's an hour and 35 minutes long, that's all that gets noticed. But we're a long way from making poetry a mass art. For me, a really key issue is still rhetoric. I come from an avant-garde that reads Stein and Williams and tries to do new things formally with poetry. But I'm also interested in what people who haven't read all this stuff hear in poetry.
Rhetoric concerns the present.