Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.” But: “…. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more…” — Dana Gioia (The Atlantic (1991))