I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.

Everyone in their car needs love.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.