Poetry is really not written on a desert island. It's a social art. Some of my favorite poets imagine poets as antennae of the race or social receptors. We catch a whole spectrum of different voices and make something out of it. I think that's where poets most usefully exist, in hearing the variety of the society's speech and responding to that variety.
Some people say that there is a renaissance in poetry going on across the country.
My own experience bears it out. In San Francisco there were many poets, many groups, readings, publications, and poets' theaters. At Penn, too, there seems to be an increasing interest in poetry. Of course there is still a significant number of students who are pretty phobic of poetry. They come out of high school distrusting the mysteriousness and unpredictability of poetry, having been taught it very badly.