He also had advice for poet-performers. The whole issue of having a National Poetry Month is itself an indication of a problem. Ultimately, poetry at its most vital can t rely upon national media attention and a response that is simply not likely to happen, because poetry's not a commercial proposition. Right now the Internet provides a very important tool for distribution. Electronic mailing lists of people nationally who might want to hear about a book that you like, or that you've published, are enormously useful.
Poetry tends toward the least line of resistance.
The extent to which this book is a product of its time has to do with a willingness to accept a range of open-ended exploration and investigation of poetics that are much less rigidly determined than conventional literary criticism. And there's value in the desire for the exchange, certainly. So we re not talking about something new. Nonetheless, in critical and scholarly approaches to poetry, there had been an idea that the written text was the gold standard of the poem, and that performances were secondary. The idea that poetry should be read out loud to be understood has never entirely gone out of favor.