This is the best and simplest reason I know to speak up for continued public arts funding, and it's what makes an organization like the New York State Writers Institute so valuable both practically and as a symbol. For poetry not only tells me who I am, it makes it possible for me to enter into the reality of others, to experience their sufferings and joys, to share their anger and their passion. It confirms the moment and it goes beyond the moment. It gives us a language for what we might otherwise never know we knew so well. It allows me to call Whitman my brother and Dickinson my sister, and as it transcends time, so it transcends the boundaries of race, class, and nation.
Poetry is in fact the original melting-pot.
It is therefore a very suitable medium for New York, the New York we all want to believe and walk around in. For the poet, the act of making a poem is a marvelous exercise in freedom. Disparate elements come together, there is indeed a sense of expansion and the possibility of change. But ultimately, it is the reader's poem. For the reader too there must be the dance of meaning and relationship.