Writing Is An Incessant Process Of Discovery.

The Record Of Poetry In The 20th Century Isn't All That Great Anyway. Most Of The Poets Who Weren't Fascists Were Stalinists.

I Don't Know That I Had A Sense That There Was Such A Thing As "the Poetry World" In The 1960s And Early 70s. Maybe Poets Did, But For Me As An Onlooker And Reader Of Poetry, Poetry Felt Like It Was Part Of A Larger Literary World. I Mean, Even The Phrase "the Poetry World" Reflects A Sort Of Balkanization Of American Literary And Artistic Life That Has To Some Extent Happened Since Then.

Literature, The Study Of Literature In English In The 19th Century, Did Not Belong To Literary Studies, Which Had To Do With Greek, Latin, And Hebrew, But Instead With Elocution And Public Speaking. So When People Read Literature, It Was To Memorize And To Recite It.

You Only Had Widespread Literacy And Books That People Could Afford In The Middle Of The 19th Century. Did More People Read Poetry At The Turn Of The 20th Century When There Were About Fifty Million People?

I Think That Poets Can Say, "what We Want Is For Everybody On Earth To Wake Up Free From Fear And With Access To Medicine And Clean Water And Education." But I Don't Think Poets Have Any Special Insight On How To Get There. And The 20th Century Is A Pretty Good Record Of That Because So Many Of The Great Poets Were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, Etc. They Wrote Their Odes To Lenin And Stalin. They Glorified Some Of The Most Violent And Grotesque Dictatorships Of The 20th Century. And A Lot Of The Ones Who Were Not Stalinists Were Fascists Or Fascist Sympathizers.