The January Poetry presents an extraordinarily moving collection of essays on the experience of poetry, solicited from people not professionally involved in poetry: a music critic, a musician, a teacher and writer of nonfiction, an art museum director, and a war correspondent. They were not asked to write about contemporary poetry, so it probably means nothing in particular that only the museum director mentioned living poets, but editor Christian Wiman, in his introduction to the essays, makes it clear that concern for the audience for contemporary poetry is at the center of what he promises to be a regular feature:
First, we would like the borders of the poetry world to be more permeable, so that poetry is not simply accessible to people outside of its institutions, but subject to their judgment. Second we hope to make poets more aware of and responsive to potential readers outside the confines of the poetry world. [emphasis added]
I wrote a few days ago that contemporary poetry suffers because too many poets no longer recognize that they're working for an audience that's very different from the poets themselves. I realize now I was wrong. Wiman paraphrases Louis Menand's definition in The Metaphysical Club, saying poets are now professionals, "no longer answerable to those outside of their field but only to their peers. … Poets determine what gets published. Poets review other poets. Poets give each other prizes."
Well, engineers give each other prizes, too. But engineers haven't forgotten that their customers are not likely to be engineers, and that they have grave responsibilities to those outside their profession. I had a thermodynamics teacher who used to say that the difference between a bad doctor and a bad engineer is that a bad doctor only kills one person at a time. No one's likely to die from bad poetry, but that just means that the rest of the world — including literate, mainstream magazines — is pretty safe ignoring poets who write mainly for each other.
BTW, another reason I left my English doctoral program was Samuel Florman's The Existential Pleasures Of Engineering. For a year, I sat in freshman calculus beside my freshman comp students.
7:47:13 PM 
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