Once we'd both permitted the snark to subside, Eric Selinger comes back with some very reasonable ideas for fostering a larger audience for poetry. I think he's absolutely right about how the site that needs the most attention is K-12 education: if poetry were on the curriculum and if it were taught unsadistically (for how else can you describe the usual process by which poems are vivisected in search of "meaning," and by which students are made to feel that reading poetry is an unpleasant test to be circumvened whenever possible?), its audience would expand tremendously. (Though I'm still skeptical as to whether a mass audience could be so generated, at least not for the kind of social formalism I'm most engaged by.) The trouble with this conclusion is that its left me feeling like there's little that I can contribute toward solving the problem, since I doubt I have the temperament for teaching younger students. Eric's comments are useful because he points out the crying need for essays and texts on the teaching of poetry—because of course if the teachers of poetry are intimidated by it they're going to pass on that intimidation to their students. Perhaps we really do need a new Brooks & Warren devoted to contemporary small press work (sometimes I think Steve Burt is embarked upon such a project, albeit in piecemeal fashion: consider his Believer essay, "Close Calls With Nonsense," which carries the subtitle "How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry").

It's a tricky negotiation: the teacher and the poet don't necessarily share many concerns. The poet has to preserve his or her own freedom of aesthetic movement (which includes the freedom to associate or not), which means most poets are at least half-invested in poetry's marginality and the freedom that the margins afford. That, better than simple snobbery, I think explains the reluctance of many poets to focus on the task of audience building. It also goes some way toward explaining the confusion evident in the last several days' posts between poetry as a practice with a vexed relation to capitalism and the marketplace and poetry as its own semiautonomous political economy. The teacher's investment is necessarily in his or her students—in readers—and in ushering them into a safe space for trial and error, with the ultimate goal of empowering them to fly on their own critical wings. As I have often said, I'd like to see the gap between poets and readers erased, and I believe that poetry—particularly poetry that demands some degree of labor—has a vital role in fostering negative capability, which is the dialectic's next-door neighbor and as such the possible key to a mode of enlightenment that also has room for mysteries and doubts. A poet contributes toward this by writing; I think a teacher could contribute by helping students to read the way writers do, with an eye toward the emotional and intellectual effects of particular techniques. Which probably also necessarily means encouraging students to write their own poems—not that young people really need such encouragement. Maybe I've got it backwards: we all start as writers, but only a few of us become readers. If so, I'm not sure how to proceed. I know that reading for me was essential to imagining a community of thought and fellowship to which I might belong. Reading is a product of loneliness, but you have to feel lonely first. There are maybe too many distractions, too many alternative simulacra of fellowship, to foster that kind of passionate reading today. Am I of the last generation to have a real choice between literary nerddom and computer nerddom? Surely if I'd been born even five years later I'd be somebody's webmaster today. But then where did all these twentysomething poets come from? Not all of them have blogs.

On this, we should agree: readers are made, not born. Perhaps readers should be seen as the ultimate product of our poetry assembly line.