Democracy needs her poets, in all their diversity, precisely because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another's lives. We nod yes and say, That is just how I felt when my father died, or when I spied the first crocus parting the snow, or when the maple withered outside our breakfast-room window, or when waking from surgery I looked into my wife's eyes, or when I took my new grandson's hand into mine. Poetry is the most honest language I hear today. It can be unbearably honest. The poets I have met would be incapacitated if they did not write from a place of truth.
Revelation is their reason for being.
Revelation comes hard. It's a struggle because words get tired. We use them. We abuse them. A word is a utilitarian tool to begin with, and we have to re-create it, to make it magical.