[New-Poetry] Simic Q&A

[TheOldMole]

He's not wrong -- 740 is a lot of people, and I don't have a problem 
with the fact that mainstream poetry reaches a stream of readers which 
is more main. People are goiug to like what they're going to like, and 
if Ron Silliman or Geof Huth or Aram Saroyan or Rae Armantrout were 
named Poet Laureate tomorrow, they still wouldn't draw crowds like 
Donald Hall or Mazine Kumin. And that's not a criticism of the quality 
of either the School of Quietude or the School of Noisitude.

But it's still a copout. The post of Poet Laureate, since it doesn't 
involve writing poems for state occasions, has kinda come to mean doing 
something to increase the recognition of poetry. And the NBA draws more 
people than a poetry reading, but that doesn't mean David Stern isn't 
still working on ways to increase the popularity of basketball.

Maybe the aim isn't to top 740, but it should be something. How about 
encouraging poets like Hall and Kumin, instead of reading together, to 
read with a School of Noisitude poet, and expose the existing poetry 
audiences to a wider range of possibilities?

JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin>
> In-Verse Thinking
>  
> Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
> Published: February 3, 2008
> As the poet laureate of the United States, what are you doing to 
> increase the public’s interest in poetry at a time when cultural 
> alarmists insist that reading is on its way out? Poetry doesn’t need 
> much promotion. It is doing quite well in this country. I gave a 
> reading the other night in Concord, N.H., with two former poet 
> laureates — Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin —and 740 people came. That’s 
> a lot of people!
>  
> Your own work is unusually accessible and plainspoken, as the title of 
> a newly published survey of your career — “Sixty Poems” — suggests. I 
> also have another book coming out in a few weeks, “That Little Something.”
>  
> Isn’t the title overly cute?
>
>
>
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford